Today is the second day of this new 2023.

This morning I woke up happier than usual – I’ve been waking up happier than usual in these last days 🙂 and I felt like going for a walk outdoors.

The climate today is gloomy, just the way I like it, when the gray of the clouds seems to bring out all the shades of color, in that corner of the world where my feet took me at that moment.

And maybe that’s exactly why Belluno looks so different to me today. So different and so beautiful.

I wanted to go downtown, so wanting to avoid taking the car, I used the escalator, a very comfortable system that allows you, in just a few minutes, to get to the historic center of the city, overcoming a height difference of almost 50 meters.

Ohhhhh I love that escalator! There are 3 ramps that take you up in a very few minutes but, believe me, those few minutes on that moving staircase seem like an infinity; while she climbs, and you with it, it’s like experiencing a sort of mystical ascent: thoughts wander, get lost, you turn around and you are entranced by the beauty of the landscape you’re leaving behind, then you find yourself thinking of a million things , from the most futile to the deepest and most stratified ones, darting from the future to the past like a wild bolt of lightning. Until you realize you’ve reached the last ramp and understand that you better go back to the present, if you don’t want to take a nice tumble!!!

At that point she, the city, welcomes you with its buildings that exude history and beauty, welcomes you with its colours, its smells and its noises.

In all of this, of course, the music never stops accompanying me, making everything even more magical and evocative.

I took a walk downtown, walking slowly, very slowly, observing every detail, every little movement, trying to synchronize my overall vision with my step, as if the images were flowing in slow motion in my eyes.

There were few people around, probably because today is a working day for many, for this very reason my eyes were able to capture much clearer details: a cheerful and carefree boy skating makes me think of how I feel exactly like him, in this moment of my life: carefree, light, I don’t walk but “skate”, without any form of friction flowing under my feet.

Many dogs… One stops right in front of me and fulfills his physiological needs, his mistress promptly removes everything, making me love the civic sense of these people in this city, which unfortunately, in my beautiful Sicily, is completely different, I would say almost opposite.

My Sicily, so beautiful and so mistreated.

Many people, many gestures, many steps at different paces…

At one point my eyes are drawn to a scene: a man, manager of a stall here in the square, was fiddling with an improbable wooden object, quite voluminous, I think it was the reproduction of a scarecrow.

An absolutely anonymous gesture, a gesture that perhaps should have left me indifferent. But this did not happen. Not for my eyes. Something in that scene touched and vibrated a string, played a note; a note that started a beautiful melody.

Why?

Why did seeing that man so intent on his work thrill me so much? I don’t know… It must have been the care he took in taking that puppet and laying it on the ground, the same care Geppetto would have taken with his Pinocchio; I could almost perceive what he was thinking as he made that gesture, and they were beautiful, sweet, tender emotions, emotions of love.

I felt grateful for having been able to capture that so intimate, so personal moment. I treasured it.

And in that moment, after taking the photo you see on this page, I thought, I “felt” that I’m falling in love with this city, I’m falling in love with Belluno; this city that welcomed me in the darkest moment I’ve ever experienced since I moved here in Veneto, the city that welcomed me and spurred me to do, to improve myself, to grow, and every time a new day arrives and I look out the window of my home to greet him, I look at Belluno, I look at its churches and its mountains.

And I fall in love more every day.

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