For some time now I have been considering the Macerata area, I don't know why. And so, after passing the sacred site of Forano, which I wrote about a few weeks ago, I would have liked to turn towards Fiastra but chance, or the houses, they are always the ones to inspire me, diverted me towards Urbisaglia.
– Urbisaglia is beautiful – a friend of mine warns me. And yet I have passed through those parts many times: the provincial road is bordered by a large, very well-kept archaeological area, with green lawns and ruins covered by wooden roofs to protect them from the ravages of time.
All of this has always inspired me but I held back, who knows why, from dwelling on it.
The fact is that my father had given me a book of archaeology when I was still a child. Already used to losing myself in places steeped in history, in his life that was not mine, full of work and little attention towards me, he had suddenly stumbled upon my feelings, in that dreamy mood of mine back in time. The title of the book was: Masada.
I don't know if I was happier for the unusual gesture or for the subject of the books given, themes that varied from the Etruscans to the Egyptians and the Greeks and more, the fact is that I began to leaf through one of these which was the largest and so full of photographs that I had already flown off on a tangent without ever looking at the clock: I stayed there all night reading it. The author, by the way, was called Yigael Yaedin, an Israeli archaeologist, and this too had a sense of exoticism.
I lay down on the bed and let myself be absorbed by the images: people digging, under a scorching sun, men and women in bathing suits cleaning shards and tiles half-covered with arid desert earth and I liked the idea of it, that universality and that sense of belonging to the past, suddenly I was thrown into the land that had belonged to Christ, with all that light and those people wearing tunics like I saw in American movies and now I understand that it was the elsewhere that attracted me, that specific non-present that acted as a sounding board for me.
Then, while searching and studying, in short, by trying to find out more as I usually did, I had accidentally discovered that Masada, located near the Dead Sea in Israel, was connected in some way with my own lands, because the general who had defeated it in the greatest battle of the first Jewish war was none other than from Urbs Salvia, that Lucius Flavius Silva Nonius Bassus in command of the Legio X Fretensis – an army of five thousand soldiers – and who had ended up in those parts by order of the emperor Vespasian, who had subsequently promoted him to governor of Judea as Pontius Pilate had been.
This idea that the Romans were everywhere, that they were so capable of absorbing cultures and mixing them, to the point of making them their own, had always attracted me immensely. My curiosity had ended there, however, in the sense that life had then diverted me towards other interests, taken by the immanent I no longer immersed myself in places that did not belong to me, even if I studied languages I had practiced and history had become only a subject to bring as a course of study at university, slavishly following the professors' texts with zero curiosity and no intention of making it my own. At a certain point, in short, I could not understand in what way History in general could really still concern me, given that I had to think of something else, immerse myself in a future full of unknowns, for example, and no longer used to delving into the meanders of a me that was a bit up in the air. And so, with force and maybe even with violence, but ultimately without drama or taking sides, I managed to grasp what was given to me without asking or demanding more, simply because I didn't believe that an alternative was possible, no one had told me that curiosity is the antechamber of talent, and I'm probably wrong even now as I write about this, what determines a talent: when did Flavio Silva realize that in life he could only have been a general and who knows whether he didn't regret it given how it ended?
For some time now, I have reopened that book. Yigael Yadin has passed away, as has the great Peter O'Toole who played the Roman general in an American TV series in the 1980s, and I have immersed myself, once again, in the images that portrayed him in his muddy blue eyes that had belonged to Lawrence of Arabia as he stared at the desert while riding his camel. I eagerly search for those photos of him as a Roman soldier, with his leather armor embellished with bronze inlays, and I imagine the scene as they frame him, highlighting his gaunt and worn face, perfect for impersonating a general who has to face fanatical Zealots barricaded with women and children on a fortress considered impregnable by none other than Herod.
I then observe the tranquil expanse of the Urbisaglia meadow with its light and dark shades of the hills and the warm, eros-free greens of the treetops and I superimpose them on the rocks set ablaze by the Judean sun, I think that that unleashing energy has repercussions on the souls of its inhabitants in perpetual conflict, today as then. Yourcenar and her “Memoirs” come to mind when she makes Hadrian say that the climate of those parts is simply intolerable and not only because of the heat: of course, there were some Jews free from the Zealot contagion but ultimately I forgot that in those lands, between fanaticism and common sense, it is rare for the latter to prevail.
Flavio Silva met a strange end, apparently he died in mysterious circumstances, at only 41 years of age. With the victory of Masada he had made enemies, first of all the new emperor Domitian who decreed his death. damnatio memoriae, a sort of condemnation to oblivion that effectively cancelled out his prestigious career.
We from the Marche, who do not forget it, can go and visit the splendid amphitheatre located in the archaeological area downstream that he had built for the city that gave him birth, then while we are there we can go for a walk around the historic centre of Urbisaglia because they say it is really worth it, finally as a third possibility stop at the nearby Fiastra Abbey and its splendid estate, lying down on a lawn while eating an ice cream.
In short, to put it in the language of our ancestors: let his every desire be : let everyone be attracted by what they like most.
