Finding beauty

by Ottavia Mapelli (Italy)

I didn't expect to find Italy

As I was laying on the grass, the rich notes of a saxophone filling the warm August air, it suddenly struck me how full of beauty that moment was. Fellow listeners were looking at the stage with nothing but bewitched expressions and delighted smiles, the night sky was full of stars, the singer’s voice so powerful and melodious that I could feel it vibrating inside of me, releasing the tension of my sore muscles. It was the perfect place to be. And yet beyond those trees, a few metres away, a whole city laid in ruins. The year was 2014, five years after the earthquake that hit the city of L’Aquila, killing 310 people and hurting 1800. By the time I reached L’Aquila, I had been cycling through Italy for three weeks as part of a social project and personal rite of passage after graduation. It was my first long-distance bicycle trip, something I had agreed to with great enthusiasm and a good dose of recklessness. Not that I had any idea of how I would face the hazards of trafficked roads and steep forest paths or orient myself in the - as an only child with divorced parents - obscure territory of communal living. But suddenly there I was, furiously pedaling behind an increasingly distant group of people, fighting tears and struggling with a sense of impending doom (later that day, someone noticed how miserable I was and proceeded to explain me how to use bike gears properly, and from then on things went better and better). L’Aquila was a crucial, long-awaited stage in our journey, which we were all eager to reach without any idea of what to expect. I screamed with joy at the first glimpse of the city - rarely had I been so happy to reach our destination for the day, as if a city in the aftermath of a natural catastrophe could be the most exciting place in the world. I was expecting hope, families walking happily along the shiny, brand new roads of the reconstructed city, no debris in sight. I wondered if we’d see any sign of the tragedy or if it all had been respectfully buried, like a distant relative you once loved but the horrible death of whom you did not want to recall. But nothing turned out to be brand new. Everything was old and reminiscing, as if time had stopped five years before. Torn apart buildings - clothes on the floor and posters on the wall, a clock forever reading the time in which everything started and ended at the same time - roads blocked with debris and the palaces about to collapse, red zones everywhere. Local associations had created tent camps in which citizens could decide to stay, instead of moving to the new houses the Berlusconi government had built or fleeting to other cities. Their goal was to work on the reconstruction and keep the local community close and alive by offering social support and organising cultural events. “There is a concert in the park tonight, you are welcome to join” said a local girl, as cheerful as one can be, after guiding us in a hazardous tour of her half-destroyed hometown. I almost ended not going, having spent the hours before the concert throwing up for the stress in the courtyard of a mental hospital - this being the location where we were invited to plant our tents in, an appropriate and fertile soil for the anxiety and claustrophobia I was already surrounding to. And yet, a few hours later, I felt so overwhelmingly blissed that any discomfort had disappeared. If beauty can really save the world, I thought as the whole park exploded in a joyful celebration of the singer's talent, this is probably how it works. One moment you witness tragedy and loss, the next one you're clapping and cheering in the middle of a sea of ruins. It then occurred to me that I had been chasing that athletic group of people throughout Italy in the unknowing pursuit of beauty in its purest, unexpected, paradoxical and yet soothing form: something I really did not expect to find.