We are in the middle of June, at the gates of a vacation that, as always, promises to take us to Nirvana. But let's be honest, no planes fly up there. Luckily, not everything is achieved with money or technology. Spirituality survives and sometimes gives us moments that are kept, wrapped in a delicate cellophane paper, in the most precious drawers of our memories.
Italy, that country that never ends, has made a perfect communion available to sensitive souls seeking that moment of liberation and greatness: landscape and humanism. Because breathing those mountains, those paths, those stones that stimulated writers takes us back to their works, to their world, but also to ours. Because there is nothing better than closing your eyes in inspiring places to get on that cloud that takes us on a journey inward. That is vacation.
Well, just over ten years ago, Italy started a network of literary parks that leads us to the creative universes of great pens, mainly Italian. A route runs through the places of Dante's exile. And the Petrarca park revisits the Euganean hills that captivated him so much. Shelley, Byron and Foscolo wanted to check the magnetism of the place, where they are also remembered.
But Dante or Petrarch are only the tip of the iceberg not only of Italian literature, but also of this project that currently has 25 cultural landscapes, such as the one dedicated to Carlo Levi in Matera (the scene of his exile narrated in Christ stopped in Éboli) or that of Pier Paolo Pasolini in Ostia (place of his tragic end). The network, which also organizes different activities related to the territory and the authors, begins to spread to other countries, with initial experiences in Norway, Greece or Albania.
If this symbiosis between nature and humanity is already to be celebrated, it is even more so if we take into account other objectives of the initiative, such as promoting that most depressed and forgotten Italy, recovering or preserving its environment, valuing local heritage and contributing to activate its economy and stop depopulation. The result: a cultural, sustainable, quality tourism that we need so much and that would do our emptied territory so well, filling it not only with empty words.
