Just little over a week before the profanation of the beauty, I was on a small bus showing interesting spots to a group of visitors, who had very limited time, so I chose the two "Classics", the 99 Spouts and Collemaggio. They took shots of San Vito, opposite the Fountain, with its two sun-dials, one for the am and the other for the pm hours, and were amused at my story - I read it somewhere, I am not sure if there is truth in it - that the sun dials were placed on the façade of the church for the women washing linen in the fountains, so they would know, after rubbing soap on the stains and placing the laundry to the sun, when the time to wash again would come.
I told them of the legends about the Fountain, and showed them the face which I thought represented Frederick II, and the six mysterious white tiles, and the templar's cross high above in the 13th row, and explained how the beauty of the city was inextricably connected to its mystery, a foundation that was a flash of light in the darkness of the Middle Ages, a signal -or promise, or hope - of renovation and rebirth.
I told them of all the squares each with its houses around, church, and a fountain in the middle, and then led them to the church out of the walls in 1294, where hundreds of thousands of visitors from all over Europe came for the coronation of the new Pastor Angelicus, that would bring Christianity back to the true Gospel.
A Renovation is due in our times too. We have dirtied our planet with our waste, we grow fat with bad food, we award prizes to imbeciles, we exploit the poverty of third world labor, we are bored with news of refugees in African wars, we continue to burn and raise the temperature. Our localized example of the global warming, the small glacier in the Gran Sasso, gets smaller each year, some more years to the no-return point, and it will be only memory. The Destruction can become our chance for Renovation. We can change our destiny from that of victims, survivors and displaced into something totally new.
Rebuild what was beautiful, artistic and historical, but change people's homes, schools, offices, so that they will become, in the green heart of Italy, leading examples of a new relation with the Earth. The lazy city, which needed - as its inhabitants - long hours to get warmer each morning and start functioning - had not been able to keep pace with the frenzy rhythms of globalization, and was getting poorer every year. Yes, the people went to the theatre and concerts in great numbers every week, and were proud of their rugby spirit - so alien from the big spending of Italian soccer - and spent hours strolling up and down the Portici, since feet get warmer if you walk. A seeming laziness, typical of mountain people, that think much and work slowly, but what they do they do well; it's almost genetic, inherited by the shepherd who, watching his flock from under the shade of a tree, added now and then another line to his poem.
You can make mass-produced items faster and faster, but for works of art and uniqueness you need to pause and wait for your imagination to find its way, as a chef making his special sauce where everything is important and is to be added at the right moment. Astonishment, and pride of all these Aquilans, once happy with their silent, mocking spirit, today going out openly, telling their so many stories and speaking loudly, and showing their photos of every little spared corner taken with loving eyes, the chorus of my nation of Israel weeping for "the ruined Towers of Sion" - resonates in speeches and angry words and embraces and diffidence and emotions. We are waiting, because there is not much else that we can do at present, but we are thinking, and we are resting and training our muscles as imprisoned Rambos, unity is springing from the common destiny - "Oh my Land so beautiful and Lost" - and a common vision only is now necessary to launch with our most powerful shot the oval ball to its destiny, towards victory, when we will be saluting again the banks of our Jordan river flowing lazily, almost asleep below the rebuilt winding walls of our again beautiful City.