“Di tutti i cambiamenti di lingua che deve affrontare il viaggiatore in terre lontane, nessuno eguaglia quello che lo attende nella città di Ipazia, perchè non riguarda le parole ma le cose. [..] Certo anche a Ipazia verrà il giorno in cui il solo mio desiderio sarà partire. So che non dovrò scendere al porto ma salire sul pinnacolo più alto della rocca ed aspettare che una nave passi lassù. Ma passerà mai? Non c’è linguaggio senza inganno.”
“Of all language changes a traveller has to face in foreign lands none equals what he will find in the city of Ipazia, since it does not refer to words but to things. [..] Certainly, in Ipazia as well the day will come when my only desire will be to leave. I know I won’t have to go down to the port but to climb the highest peak of the mountain and wait for a ship passing over there. Would it ever come? There is no language without deceit.”
Italo Calvino – Le città invisibili –
p. 48, Oscar Mondadori, 1993
The path that leads to the core (I want to avoid): framing things, shapes, feelings, phenomena, reflections, emotions, streets, cobblestones and asphalt, rubbish, beauty, concrete, green trees, people, animals, noise, silence and everything which can be found within different, parallel, imaginary, unreal, changing, still and moving urban contexts. Reading them each time through very personal lenses.
It is dealing with what happens in these specific sites, Raeume, spazi. And inside oneself when approaching the so-called “urban issues”, meant with this specific name because of their physical aspect as taking place in a room, in a building, in a square, in a street with a name, a number and a postal code, which can be (un)easily found via GPS or Google maps. It is an attempt to understand or at least to grasp a part of them, to feel myself as part of the landscape.
Cities and languages, as means of/to identities and cultures, summarizing this is what is all about.
It is a tribute, a tired, passive sometimes even lazy and then out of a sudden more attentive look at the place where I live, I belonged to, I will move to or I will be about to leave: a city. I breathe on a daily basis urban air, I can imagine myself only living in such a milieu, better a big one (or maybe aging I will change my mind), I can describe the contemporary world referring to this category and opposing to it the country/village as antithesis. But the way I see and think about a city is influenced by the language I use to depict the realities I live in and my relations with them. The language I want or have to speak, to listen to, to read, to reject in part or as a whole, to be as mine and only. My mother tongue, my second or third language, my working and amusement one, my unfamiliar expressing system, my ignorance of what is necessarily excluded from my floating mental categories.
The idea behind this blog existed maybe already several years ago, but it was still an unborn outcome of my thoughts until today, till this very moment when you are reading these few introductory lines. If I succeeded in catching your attention you may even dare to have a look at the rest. Mobility, change, flexibility are the key concepts of our contemporary societies. The most recent habit is sharing thoughts, photos and anything else on a real-time basis. I am also living according to this rules and this blog is a child of this tribe, a need to make public what creeps and hides inside but it addresses slow thinkers or probably those like me who “refuses” to join the social media community by posting every single happening in their lives.
Ipazia is a borrowed/stolen name from a fundamental book, “Le città invisibili” by the Italian writer Italo Calvino. This masterpiece of prose – full of poetry – I often refer to as a source of inspiration, relief and escape. I saw in it a story of an unbearable love, which makes human beings run away from what deeply belongs to them because of a need to appease their thirst for knowledge and experience. But in every new discovery we always find a part of what we left behind or believe got lost on the way. With every new discovery we remember and mourn somehow an idealized past and future. And when searching for words to talk about such topics and feelings one often lacks the right expressions simply because “once shaped into words images blank out”.
This is an experiment to describe what takes place around me, as private person, as citizen, as traveller-tourist, as questioner and never bearing the final answer-person. A city is simply the place where the majority of the world population currently lives. And where cultures and languages inevitably meet, clash, blend, are created and allow us to understand each other. Or at least try to.
Ipazia 