The smoke finally exhales from the cabin when we halt at the checkpoint. The guard emerges from the white and black shed, unarmed, exchanging salutes with the driver in the mute night, and we pull away, with the bright lights steady on. Our driver seems unresponsive to the pleading flashes of the few cars coming the other way. He passes trucks without hesitation, in bends and straight stretches alike. Unemotional elongated face on a seriosuly long body, very stern and bony, menacing to the superficial observer. Chatting with our boss in the front seats, as always it is difficult to say whether they’ve ever met before, and they probably haven’t.

We cast our rushing light to the backdrop of the night, illuminating instants of pines and acacias, the amorphous red iron rocks of Jebel al-Akdhar, the so called green mountains. We left behind the few still open diners when we left the larger road from Bengazi, eating houses without window panes, gaping onto the road in pools of light and moths and offering a colorful collection of countless scraps hanging from their walls.
I imagined music in those diners, similar to the moaning and beautiful arabic music filling the car cabin as we go. I imagined sitting and smoking the shisha again, which so perfectly slows down the flow of time. Talking in our unpolished english about religion and politics and women and our biographies.

Judging from the dark void punctuated by these few signs, we could be headed everywhere, Chiapas maybe, or Athens, or Sassari.
But we are going to al-Beyda, "the white": the only place in Libya where it snows in winter. My book says that the legend wants al-Beyda to be where the garden of the Hesperides was, and I indulge on this useless thought, that we are going to visit a garden and a farm with apple trees where possibly the most legendary garden, with its golden apples, was.

The book also mysteriously refers to a very sweet kind of berry that grows only here, the shmari; we’ll later discover this to be nothing but our corbezzolo, or Arbustus unedo. The shmari is then an old friend, whose presence is not surprising, but familiar, like so many things can be familiar to us people of the Mediterranean, well, rethorically speaking. To be continued.

Until there will be fragments of beauty, something there will always be to gather from the world. As they disappear, the mind loses the ability to grasp and to master. This big adrift flotsam with the old name of Italy is still, for its residual beauty, a not pale help to the thinkablity of the world¹.

This is a quote from the powerful book of journey notes "Un Viaggio in Italia" (A Journey to Italy), written by the italian poet, playwright, novelist Guido Ceronetti (sorry nothing on wikipedia nor elsewhere) between 1981 and 1983 during his endless budging across Italy.

I wonder if he would repeat this words today.

_{1. Translation by Italy is Falling as always. Here's the original: "Finché esisteranno frantumi di bellezza, qualcosa si potrà ancora capire del mondo. Via via che spariscono, la mente perde capacità di afferrare e di dominare. Questo grande rottame naufrago col vecchio nome di Italia è ancora, per la sua bellezza residua, un non pallido aiuto alla pensabilità del mondo." Einaudi 1983, page 39.}