C’è un momento in ciascuna alba in cui la luce è come sospesa, un istante magico dove tutto può succedere. La creazione trattiene il suo respiro.
‘There is a moment in every dawn when light floats, there is the possibility of magic. Creation holds its breath’.
Douglas Adams. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
In a ‘shadowy land, that knows neither sin or redemption from sin’:
At Grassano there was a young workman, about twenty years old, Carmelo Coiro, a husky fellow with a square sun-burned face, who came often in the evening to drink a glass of wine at Frisco’s inn. He was a day labourer in the fields or on the roads, but his dream was to be a bicycle racer…at this time Carmelo was one of a group of road-menders who were repairing the road to Irsina along the Bilioso, a malaria-ridden stream that flows past Grottole into the Basento River. During the hottest hours of the day, when work was impossible, the road-menders used to go to sleep in a natural cave, one of many dotting the whole of the valley, and formerly a brigand hideout.
The ballroom was all golden; smoothed on cornices, stippled on door-frames, damascened pale, almost silvery, over darker gold on door panels and on the shutters which covered and annulled the windows, conferring on the room the look of some superb jewel-case shut off from an unworthy world.
It was not the flashy gilding which decorators slap on nowadays, but a faded gold, pale as the hair of certain Nordic children, determinedly hiding its value under a muted use of precious material intended to let beauty be seen and cost forgotten. Here and there on the panels were knots of rococo flowers in a colour so faint as to seem just an ephemeral pink reflected from the chandeliers.
When Kepler was mathematician to the Emperor Rudolph II of Germany, his primary task was to deliver good horoscopes.
J. D. Bernal
History of Physics
When I was six years old, there was the earthquake. I was an only child, and fled barefoot to a doorframe to stand between my parents.
“This is the load-bearing beam,” my father said with the air of an architect. “It’s safe here.”
We were in the dark. The next day we discovered that the only truly deep crack in the house was in that beam.
Three months later a famous psychic from the neighborhood announced to the residents the day and hour of the next tremor. People began sleeping with a suitcase under their beds—the psychic not being one to make mistakes—and when the appointed day arrived everyone headed down to the street. They lit bonfires.
Broken Columns 