Today, I’ll tell you a story inside an abandoned villa. I got sick while attending secondary school, on the benches and among the maddening hormones, while wizenedsnout professors spurred dusty civic algebra lessons and imponderable sciences, not understanding that soulless culture is rotating. In the afternoons of winter, with the rain throwing stones to the windows and the boredom making drunk the master and the student, giggling them with sleeping sticks, I enjoyed watching the maps of the world and dreaming of far-off countries. The germ germs in me, fast the dream of the journey was born. Sofia, Geneva, Rome, Bucharest, Essaouira, Jakarta, the ruins of Nemrut Dagi, Petra, Agra and the Taj Mahal, Calcutta, Phnom Penh, Bangkok, Kathmandu, Jerusalem, Addis Abeba, the Nile Azure, the Red Desert, the black sea and the yellow river. The Atlas and Kashmir peaks, the mountains the valleys, the ice pole and the desert fire.
Horizons of sand, water, glass and cement. Freedom is running for meadows fast like the wind, having your skin like home and being aware that even with the water in the eyes you will see all the things that in a dry room you will never see. Freedom is the trip, the road, the dust in the eyes sprinkled by truck crossing the Panamerican road.
I leaved my father’s house, I kissed my mother and I did not turn back. Suddenly I lost myself in a city with thousand of lights. I become the Gitano, with the wind’s feet and the horizon in the eyes, that runs by chasing the sun in the day and the moon at night; since the journey is life and for every minute that eyes are closed, sixty seconds of light are lost. I let myself be carried by rivers and streams, following the currents of the soul and the motions of the heart. I saw screaming Brazilian dancers shake their booty in the Tivoli Trails, huge elephants obscuring the sun, I saw people praying with a rifle on the shoulder and a Chinese smoking opium in a Marrakech bar. I wept at sunset in front of Mumtaz’s tomb and laughed at dawn behind a temple in Angkor, I whitened the house of a nero, I chased a Korean in Varanasi and slept in China with a Russian who luckily did not snore. In a Shanghai port I tasted French cuisine with an American boy. Many dawns and many sunsets, thousand miles on foot, one thousand in the airplane and two thousand by ship, another ten thousand to be done by the year I dream for years, because life ends but the road no. I have to go, I need to leave, it does not matter where, it only counts the journey.
There are many languages I heard, I did not know any of them, but I talked them all because the grammar of the heart has a universal alphabet that does not change latitude. I do not know who taught me love, certainly not the Thai whores in the shadow of the Istanbul minarets, or even the Russian adventurer in the Scottish shower at Hyderabad. I know that Love entered into me and her laws bothered the restlessness of going. Thus the distant horizons have faded and narrowed, the sea has faded away, the cross of the south is no longer seen because of the jealousy of the whimper’s Lorenzo who illuminates the north sky.
The guitar was removed to the musician, Augusto was struck and left the stage to Antonet the white. Can you understand the pain? Can you make sense of deprivation? I dream of rain, I dream of gardens in the desert sand. A thousand times I woke up at the song of the Muezzin, infinite times I will wake up by the neighbors to the trumpet. Dreams are precluded to me, I have no hope nor desire or lust. It is the love that has immobilized me, kicking my feet and taking my journey away. Love that dont forgive but possess you. I am prisoner of myself. I’m the broken dreamer, the cricket in front of the fireplace, the picture that does not want to be right and the dirty conscience approaching. I AM THE MOTIONLESS BARON, which by the great traveler was transformed into a marble statue. Farewell to the East and to the West, goodbye to the wind as a guide, to the sky as cover over a stone mattress rolled by the sea. I will miss the sky otherwise, the waiting for the sunsets, to sweat in the jungle and taste the salt on the black skin on a white beach. Farewell to travel companions, touching for a day, for a month or for a smile time. There will no longer be multiethnic linguistic lunches in the most remote hostels of the planet, I will hardly be able to drink hot beer on the Golan Heights with a Nigerian albino and an Albanian black like the pitch. It remains the immobile stasis of marble, and the thirst that does not shut down, remains the opium, which I smoke in my pipe while dreaming of gallows. Remain the void and the silence of the void, from which they come short whispers of African children, the scent of incense, the red earth of Africa, the blue sea, the monsoon rains and the painful songs of Ofra Haza, or of that blind singer met at the foot of temple in Gujarat. I miss the path like the air, I miss the uncertainty of tomorrow and the thrill of sleeping every night under a new sky, Missing everything, I miss the chance to loose myself. I am the motionless baron, and this is my story. I thank you for having visited me, please come back, come back and bring a scent of the east and one of the west, come back to hear the story of when I tracked rainbows and hunted treasure.
One day I will benefit from a migration of wild birds and flee away.
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Born in ’80. He is an eclectic and multifaceted man. He is interested in travel, art, psychology, history of religions, philosophy, occultism. Passionate in 15 years about photography and, for 5 years, about urbex.
