Vincenzo Girasoli
Italy – Let’s fly on your history…
Spying on her from the top of a mountain peak, Italy seems to be a small plastic created by the most learned and spontaneous hand.
The city appears as gray spots that blend with the shades of green and brown of a still predominant nature.
From there, Italy is free from the noise of cars and the annoying chatter of television talk shows in which the politics is treated like gossip and vice versa.
But it is at the bottom, among the people, on the streets of the country or on the streets of big cities, where human souls and hearts throb, create and destroy, that Italy is manifested.
This little girl, who next March will turn her 155 years of age, now seems to be very unconscious of what was in the past and the value contained in the churches, squares and museums that enrich her.
A teenager in the middle age crisis, unable to appreciate her own past and no less incapable of looking to the future.
Coming back to the top of that mountain, and looking at the horizon of Italy that lose itself to the infinite, you start to feel in the heart a special feeling, a feeling that has the breath of immortality. Today, as in the past, millions of years ago, with the same effort on the legs, you can feel the emotion that those men had looking out from the Alpine peaks on the Italian peninsula. The wonder of the tangle of colors that gave evidence of a fertile and generous nature, the harshness of rocky slopes that gradually fade into gentle plains that run down until the sea.
And this is how a young concept like the one of “Italia” takes an extremely larger and rooted breath in the time.
That primordial man who settled himself in the peninsula had the capacity to plant a seed that has blossomed creating one of the most complex and multifaceted civilization of Europe.
Greek culture on the Italian peninsula, Latin, Jewish and Christian merged into a common strain giving rise to many historical and artistic expressions that still dot the country.
In Italy you can easily find and recognize the matrix of the whole Western world, a young nation that is at the same time the guardian of more than three thousand years of culture, experience, inventions, thought and action.
In Italy you can find without much difficulty and Recognize the matrix of all the Western world, a young nation That is at once the guardian of more than three thousand years of culture, experience, inventions, thought and action.
An intricate and full of variables story: Italy’s one. Stories passed down and celebrated in schools where only the eminent figures of generals, politicians, heroes and criminals find space and depth.
Yet those exquisite monuments of bronze and marble that enrich the city extolling the deeds of individuals, are nothing more than a summary of the sacrifice and contribution of every Italian surname.
From Castelfidardo al Piave, from Lepanto to the Russian steppe, there is no Italian family that has not seen its own ascending take part in those crucial moments of the history of the country.
So we’ll try, starting this journey, to observe from the top of the mountain the different moments in our history and the genius that actioned the hands of sculptors, painters and writers.
To do it, in attics and archives, we will search for documents and traces of life that history, for misconduct or discomfort, wanted to ignore.
We will exalt the essence of the great forgotten figures, we will search for those noble ideals that formed the glue of a people so faceted to the detriment of the ideologies that have (in the past and still today) destroyed it
In all of this, Italy will be the undisputed main character, the capricious little girl that step by step discovers glorious, simple and dramatic moments of her past.
So let’s start from that top and, with the same heart of the first men, be enchanted in front of the wonder that, every day, we breathe, we walk and live.
Carlo Fedeli
