[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_38

Appointment in Positano, Goliarda Sapienza

“Positano cures everything, opens your mind to past pain, and enlightens you about present ones, often saving you from falling into error. It's curious, but sometimes I have the impression that this basin protected from behind by the ramparts of the mountains forces you like a 'mirror of truth' to look at yourself in the face, with this great sea in front of you, almost always clear and calm, which also pushes us to review ourselves. This is why twenty-year-old couples arrive here believing they are happy, and within a few weeks, they separate - they lived a lie - or, on the contrary, single people find a partner here".

From the words of Goliarda Sapienza, a myriad of Italian places take shape: lands of memory and magic. Places that perhaps have never existed in the mythical guise they are presented in, except as romantic ideas, continue to populate the collective imagination, wearing the same mask of enchantment and beauty. Even Positano, whom Goliarda Sapienza inhabited, never existed like a place suspended “between antiquity and infinity” except as a dream in her refined pen. Hordes of intellectuals, travelers, and dreamers have praised Italy not for what it was but for what it represented to their loving gaze: the legacy of the Romans, the “golden age” of the Renaissance, the bohemian charm of the "dolce vita," the exotic facade of the Mediterranean. Literary chimeras have transformed many Italian cities from "topos" to "topics": going to Italy, for many, is nothing more than modeling their imaginary landscape, which, however, is created by the eyes of others. Few ask themselves what their natural place is within these stereotyped pictures.

Goliarda Sapienza writes: “I could never describe Giacomino's voice: a sinuous thread of smoke mixed with the whiteness of his jasmine and the scent of orange blossoms at sunset? A sound never heard before, incorporeal but precise, perhaps it is nothing other than the timbre that the angels must have had before the advent of the Christian era, at the time of Ulysses, and perhaps even before". For her, even people's voices are the echoes of an ancient song that reaches the present; accents and dialects become living witnesses of the history of a language that has nothing to do with Italian. But as fascinating as this great bridge that unites the Ancients with the Contemporary may be, the voice of History travels on another frequency. Thosewho populate these "ancient lands that inspire truth" do not care about the truth, much less about History. Just as Italy doesn't even care, and perhaps this is what Goliarda Sapienza thought about, between one line and another, when her melancholy was lost in the wine, as if in the waves. “Who knows why I felt like crying? Those childhood tears had been an unconscious prophecy of the Cassandra within me. Every woman has within herself, together with Circe, Juno, Judith, Athena, a Cassandra that sometimes makes her sigh, cry, tremble incomprehensibly to herself and foolishly to men".