There is a lightness (leggerezza) in Rome that you don’t find in other parts of Italy. It’s about the city on the Tiber at the end of summer.
Dachshund and its owner in front of Fernando Botero’s cat sculpture in Piazza San Lorenzo Photo: Gregorio Borgia/ap
Returning to Rome after a summer that for many felt like it would never end, and which these days doesn’t end with a brutal return to reality but simply a slightly more dressed-up version of the city, the words superlatives are constantly flowing out of me. The summers of my acquaintances have been decidedly ‘epic’, ‘magical’, ‘amazing’ and, for some, even cathartic.
A friend told me from his terrace (now no longer gulls but parrots, because the coastal Fregene has too much dirt, so the seabirds no longer come to the city center). He and his wife were on the verge of divorce, but they got over it and are now starting a completely new chapter. He really said that. I asked: How was the summer? He said, “We actually wanted to divorce, but things changed.”
This “different” obviously has to do with potential migration from Rome, which has led to a list of reasons why Italians, Americans and South Americans should not live anywhere else, even if they have a comfortable choice.
Besides the obvious, the beauty of the city in the center and its… thing At the edge, there was a layer of history that was not only hard to define but also undeniable, a concept that could all be unified, that tingled underfoot with every step. It was often associated with summer, but it wasn’t necessarily associated with summer. It described something that was floating at the same time, but it didn’t push reality away, but simply arranged it in a way that the viewer perceived it in the best possible light, in the best possible way.
The word is: La Legerezza. Lightness. Lightness is not Roman, nor even Italian. There are grumpy people here and elsewhere. But this particular version of lightness, this ability, is probably a little more common on the dusty streets around the Tiber than usual.
Like Italo Calvino
It is not so easy to describe them clearly. That much Reggae Recha It is not Kundera’s lightness. It is not the lightness that implies some emptiness, so it can be unbearable, painful, and weigh heavily on the heart. It is not the case for those who have not found anything important and have decided to leave.
It is neither nihilism nor the pathologically enforced optimism of people who are always smiling, but perhaps something like mental flexibility. The Italian writer Italo Calvino said: Reggae Recha In a lecture in the 1980s, one of his “Lezioni americane” was named as a product that could become even more important in the next century, that is, in the current century.
Calvino talked about what literature must remain important in the face of literary, cultural and technological change. But what applies to books also applies to life in most cases. For him, lightness is not the ability to clumsily transform darkness into light, but the ability to find something more subtle in it: light, a bright sparkle beneath the black. It is the power to find humor and abstraction, melancholy instead of sadness, beauty everywhere.
Take it easy
There are quotes floating around the internet about Calvino and his teachings. Lightness is not about being superficial. Rather, it is about floating above things and not weighing them down unnecessarily.
Obviously he never actually said or wrote anything like that, but in this case we didn’t care. Thanks to that, by the end of the evening we came to a positive conclusion, free from all the harsh superlatives. If our friends actually leave the city, they will move somewhere else. Grande Belleza, So there’s something they can take with them and carry with them forever. La Legerezza.
