Although the act of seeing depends on our eyes, we often do not see. We just don't pay attention to it. Sometimes it seems like we are using a sort of automatic translator so we never give a sense of what we see, it passes us by, it doesn't stop. Everything becomes automatic, almost taken for granted.
This is what happened to me when I saw the Marche countryside, the region where I was born and raised. Once upon a time, several years ago, traveling along a road that climbed between the hills was something to avoid for me, I preferred motorways and expressways: fast, practical and without frills, they took me straight to where I needed to go, alone or in company. , I heard the music without really listening, I laughed and talked without really giving meaning to the things I said, the youth with which I was cloaked made me impervious to the environment, I could be anywhere but I wasn't really anywhere. Concepts such as belonging, the origin of places, were certainly not foreign to me but they were so internalized that I was not really aware of them and, later on, they even began to feel too tight on me, like clothes that are no longer suitable for a restless soul that wants to travel other directions.
Then one day, which I will never be able to forget, I was gifted with sight. At first it was almost a shock and I didn't think I would survive it: the Adriatic became not only the sea where I had joyfully dived for years during the summer without interruption, but a state of being: its breadth and colour, his changing placidity made him appear to me to be a living being, with whom I could converse and hear what he had to say to me and so did the countryside: an enormous green sea, wavering and changing depending on the hours of the day.
It was a foreigner who performed the miracle. I was like many others and I still am now but she managed to remove from me that veil of banality that we have been cloaked in since we were children, if we are not cultivated with love for perception, the only one that can illuminate everything around us.
– Lorenza – she often exclaimed energetically – these are the Marche! A paradise, look! - we were towards Arcevia, where she had bought a house in the middle of nowhere, I must say. After years of work traveling all over the world, she ran a modeling agency, she stopped here, determined to spend half the year of what remained of her life, the best because there is no rush anymore, there is no rushing, there's no anxiety and you really start to enjoy things. She owned a Rhodesian Ridgeback, a dog suitable for lion hunting, her daughter who lived in South Africa had picked him up on the street - there are many over there - and she had given him as a gift. – Very good idea! Dog chases away wild boars – she said, also because her garden had no fence.
This was how I really began to see my region: through his eyes. The distribution of colours, the lines and surfaces, the chiaroscuro of the fields and woods, the horizon. We were in the car and her eyes were shining – Lorenza, Lorenza! – Her shrill voice still rings in my head – look! – while he pointed out the creation all around me: a mid-mountain valley, a plateau surrounded by forests, while the road was straight, solitary and bright. The soft summer light of the sunset seemed to caress everything. It was just me, her and the dog behind her, intent on reaching a small village in the hinterland that I had never dreamed of knowing. Maybe I preferred Tuscany, Provence, London or Paris but I was completely unaware of my Marche, we wanted to attend a concert of I don't know what, recommended by I don't know who.
When we reached the destination I asked – Who's ringing? – intrigued by the image that appeared before me: a large black grand piano under still-off spotlights, resting near a large centuries-old oak tree in an immense field of freshly mown wheat. - I don't know! - She replied promptly in her patched-up Italian, we spoke to each other mostly in English, English now has this ability to shorten distances and we're fine with that - But he's a very good guy! – And he makes the gesture of kissing his fingers, as if he were tasting a delicacy – do you see that man over there? – indicating a tanned gentleman in his seventies who was sitting with other people, presumably foreigners – He says he is a very good musician… he was from the Berliner Philarmoniker. If he says to come everything is ok!-
In fact it really was like that: extraordinary. The pianist was Ludovico Einaudi still in the making, not as famous as he later became. It was a wonderful, exciting and evocative concert, I was literally enchanted.
In short; some Germans knew an exceptional Italian pianist better than me, they had come to the Marche to live and enjoy the beauty of this region that I myself was unaware of.
And in the fullness of those moments I truly began to hear and see my land in another dimension. Which I still do now.
