Roccaraso in the darkness seems to be about it. There's that air of the villages in the wrong season, empty streets and closed stores by the childish names. I walk in the desert of vacant spaces and abandoned activities, dark before six PM Here the air is clean and cold and the heavens are filled with layers and layers of stars.

The perfumery called "love potion" disguises itself in the void of a prestigious lane disappearing where the lights are off. There's smell of burning wood in the air all around the town, and the fragrance of damp leaves coming down from the forests.
In front of bar del corso few idle and talk against the yellow light of the tall lamps. All the faces in the conic glare appear to be friendly, warm, lonely. All the voices here have the musical sweet sound of Campania and I adore this dialect, especially coming from the throats of women, resounding with sensual consonants and motherly vocals.

I walk up to the first woods where a trail goes deep into the mystery of Abruzzo but my sight is too bad. I'm unlike my cousin who sees perfectly in the dark like a bat.
I get back and slope down to a restaurant on the other side of the town, where I am the sole customer.
Certain of doing me a favor, as I sit at the table the lady in charge raises the volume of the music above my ears. It's the usual southern pop Italian music going, and once again I marvel at how much certain Italian pop songs seem to be really singing the stupidity of love. Without figuring it out though.
At the other occupied table the owner's family is dining too. I must be early. There's a little girl, 5 years old, drawing in her book instead of eating. She asks to her very attractive teenager sister what color should the sea be filled with. She proposes purple, but the attractive teenager replays, "the sea is blue".
Yeah, I remember. That's how it begins, the mortification of imagination imposed by scholarship.

On the walls of the restaurant I watch myself in the mirror. My hair are long to my shoulder, my beard is thick. My shoulders come down like my father's. I make an effort of eating upright, and slowly, because I feel observed. It's always so when I eat alone at the restaurant and suddenly my looks aren't in the local norm.

The moaning pop songs go on above my head protesting love and nothing else. Boy it's so sad to think that it is impossible to find a single restaurant in the whole peninsula where you are allowed to have your meal without any music in the background, and nobody even noticing.
The radio says it will be a lucky year for my sign, and I feel the benevolent ray of Jupiter making people smile in my direction, as I smile back. But it's an illusion. I am old enough and years are short enough and I envision already the day when Jupiter will leave, and all the lost occasions will run after him like happy little dogs left behind.

I try to draw in the notebook the face of the attractive teenager. Luckily I'm no good in rendering the resemblances because she notices.

I think of all those who know me and don't know that I am sitting here, in the village of Abruzzo where none of us ever came. Italy keeps falling and sometimes it seems it cannot be used up, consumed or spent. And I love and hate her just the same.