My daughter asked me the other day why I have such a Passion for Italy and I responded “I have loved it from the moment I first set foot in Roma over twenty years ago.” How can you explain why you love. You just do. You love when things and people make you feel good about yourself or when they set your spirit free. My spirit is set free in Italy for some reason. In Italy it soars.
But I am no different there. Italy has attracted all the major artists in the world for thousands of years for the same reason. It is no accident that some of the worlds true genius originated from Italy. Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Bernini to mention a few and it is no accident that the great Romantic poets, Keats, Shelley, Mary Shelly, Byron and Browning ran away to Italy so their spirits could run free without the constraints of English culture….
I was reading the other day where a public scultpure installed in the center of Sydney, called ‘Pyramid Tower’, by the great sculptor Bert Flugelman, was removed under the cover of darkness because the Mayor at that time did not like it. This type of desecration of art would never happen in Italy which is why the whole country is a national museum of monuments. Imagine if the Mayor of Rome decided to remove the Roman forum because they no longer liked the marble scultpures…..!!
This is what I love about Italy! – even the yobos have some sort of respect for the ancient art and archaeology. In Italy road works take a long time because every time they dig in the earth some new artifact from 3000 years of human life is found. It is a very expensive business.
Italy is slow to change in a world where everything is changing so fast. Where msm now take the place of a phone call, where people communicate by email rather than face to face. One can guarantee that the same bar will still be open in Roma from year to year, from one visit to the other even with years in between, with the same barrister and the same waiters in the same cafe with the same decor that it has had for the last one hundred years, because for them it is a job for life not a stepping stone to another career.