It took two months of quarantine to understand the importance of a leaf shaken by the wind. Many Italians have spent the last few weeks locked in apartments without a garden, or perhaps even without a balcony. And from the depth of Italian identity the need for nature emerged. Of course, it is a human, universal need, it reminds us of where we come from. With the unconscious we always think of those forests from which our ancestors came. But our specific history of Italians has something more.
The Italic peoples were all farmers. Agricultural realities, civilizations permeated by the relationship with the earth, with animals, with the cycles of nature. Our whole being is in relation to nature.
And until a few generations ago this was so true that it was taken for granted. Today, with the cities that grow, the Italians who go to live in foreign metropolises, the call of the earth is felt.
Just think of literature. It is certainly not only German romanticism that has put nature at the center. It is enough to read Virgil’s bucolic to understand that the identity of the Romans was very clear two thousand years ago: the land, agriculture, nature. And if we consider that Virgil was a model for anyone who made literature in Italy up to modernity – from Dante to Tasso to name two that summarize everything – we understand well how once again art sees even beyond what the eyes allow.
And let’s dive into Pascoli’s reading, read D’Annunzio’s “The Rain in the Pinewood”, reread Leopardi …
Very often we have not given proper weight to our need for nature. If we had been aware of it, we would not have built the neighborhoods of the last decades as hives without space for trees. But now that we feel the need, let’s dive into our identity and go back to the trees, the parks, the meadows. Without making it an ideology.
Now we can enjoy this return to nature, to the earth, to greenery. Who, after having missed it, will be more aware, more experienced, more real.
