Italy is striking. It confronts your world view with beauty but it doesn’t love you back. It prefers to be destroyed from the outside as it devours itself from within. It knows its beauty but it has cataracts in its eyes. Italy is above all the place where you must learn not to get the things you want, only what you need. Strange facets of history converging on the present without love, only irony. But reach out your hand and you are grasping at air. Only an overwrought antique image, nothing more.
Many of us love this place, aesthetically, soulfully, but Italy does not love itself. Its soul-capturing beauty betrays an underside that is the essence of brutality. Above all, it leaves us sad, for ourselves and for the fairy tale that we were all taught existed – if not here then no, all we have been told is a lie and it is actually those in which the poison and deceit resides that emanate the beauty like an antidote to all our silly little hopes and dreams. A voice within tells me to keep up the fight – ‘if you, Hope, don’t fight for all the lovers and bearers of positive energy, who will?’ But what are we fighting for?
Italy is the place where struggle consumes you (‘la lotta continua!’) even though you know it will devour all your energy, all your days, and will ultimately be fruitless. Sad, sad dreams where a low voice murmurs (calling for help perhaps?) but the words drift off in the wind and the sound of rushing water, never to be found again.
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