We are in the middle of June, at the gates of a holiday that, as always, promises to take us to Nirvana. But let’s face it, no plane flies that far. Fortunately, not everything is achieved with money or technology. Spirituality lives on and sometimes gives us moments that are kept, wrapped in delicate cellophane paper, in the most precious drawers of our memory.
Italy, that country that never ends, has made available to sensitive souls who are looking for that moment of liberation and greatness a perfect communion: landscape and humanism. Because breathing those mountains, those paths, those stones that stimulated writers takes us to their works, to their world, but also to ours. Because there is nothing better than closing your eyes in inspiring places to climb the cloud that takes us on a journey to our interior. Yes, it is a holiday.
Well, just over ten years ago Italy started a network of literary parks that lead us to the creative universes of great writers, mainly Italian. A route goes through the places of Dante’s exile. And Petrarca Park revisits the Euganean Mountains 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 which currently has 25 cultural landscapes, such as the one dedicated to Carlo Levi in ??Matera (scenario of his banishment narrated to Christ he stopped in Òboli ) 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, is starting to spread to other countries, with some first 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 that of promoting that most depressed and forgotten Italy, recovering or preserving its environment, highlighting local heritage and contributing to activate its economy and slow down depopulation. The result: cultural, sustainable, quality adventure tourism that we need so much and that would do so much good to our dying territory by filling it not only with empty words.
