Thursday, July 24, 2014

I catch up to the past


Coming back to Florence this year I felt very much at home; almost as though I had never left, except for the obvious fact that my life, and those of friends and family, have gone through twenty years of change. Florence itself has changed in clearly measurable ways. So I spent my time there in a kind of paradoxical, euphoric bubble: knowing very well that it is no longer my home, yet feeling happily at home; feeling that some things have not changed at all, while knowing that change and time have left their inexorable effects on everything and everyone. I also felt for certain that this would not be a final visit, and also that I would almost certainly live there again. These certainties still have a dream-like quality in that I have no idea of the time frame or the how of these future occurrences; the fact is, though, that the certainty removed any wistfulness from our departure and return to Florida.

One of the most wonderful parts of the trip came as soon as I arrived. My long time friend and mentor, Raimonda Ugolini, came to meet me at the airport in Bologna. We got off the autostrada and took a back route to Florence. Our first stop, strangely enough, was a cemetery for German soldiers, at which Raimonda had attended a performance of The Trojans. It is in the heart of the Tuscan hills, on a quiet peaceful slope, and represents, to me, the impermanence of the emniities that inflame our heats and cause the mindless, ineradicable destruction that we call war.  At first, I felt strange being in a place that housed so many Nazi souls, but looking at the youth of many of the soldiers, I realized that they could just as easily have been young Americans in Iraq, fighting for an illusory ideology that had the power to convince them to lose their lives. It's not for nothing that I consider Raimonda one of my great life teachers.







The stone reads,"Two unknown German soldiers"


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