A few weeks ago I had this dream that took me back to some very old times... I was in fact dreaming of a movie I had watched not long after we had bought our first colour TV - so, it must have been around 1987-88. The movie was about a kid and a red balloon, and it is one of the few things I remember clearly from that age... Despite the nostalgia and melancholia when i woke up, I didn't bother searching the internet for it. Somehow, though, "le ballon rouge" found its way to me a couple of days later...
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Someone asked yesterday: "but don't you feel lonely..?"
Today, as I was going through my archives trying to locate some old papers, proposals and unfinished ideas about articles, I came across a folder i didn't recognise at all. In it, I found some notes from a trip I made to Venice in March 2001. Then, I remembered I took all those notes because I didn't have a camera.
In those notes, I found the words of a graffiti I came across in one of the city's walls:
"Solitudine non è essere solo ma amare gli altri inutilmente" - Loneliness doesn't mean to be alone, but to love others unreciprocally.
11 years later, and thanks to the internet, I now know that this was one of the tributes paid by unknown Venetians to another, well known Venetian: Mario Stefani - an influential poet who coined the phrase, and who, in March 4, 2001, committed suicide.
