Writing the City

I have been a blogger for almost four years.

As my life changed, and I moved country, I have been writing not only the city, but anything that happened to me and I felt it was worth any kind of attention.

I come from one of the most beautiful islands of the world, Sardinia, where the colours of the sea and the earth create a unique mixture of cultures and traditions. I spent two years of my life in a much smaller island, the Isle of Wight, where the wind gets to your brain, and the smell of the sea cures the painful silence.

And here I am, London. Not a city, the city.

Now that I'm here I feel naive thinking that in Sardinia we used to call Cagliari "the city". Only because it was bigger than the village...only because on the train you would pass by the country fields and the few houses just outside the nearby villages, it felt like a long journey. Those thirty minutes of yellow wheat and green artichokes, and green and white cauliflowers, it was just the time to have a laugh with your friends before starting a new day at school. Still it felt every day like the biggest escape from the known faces, the family restrictions, rules that every one of us somehow had to live under.

Looking around in the city, you find everything and anything; the colourful fashion of girls' clothes is the first clue for us Italians. It is that shocking haircut and the flowery Dr Marten's that gives you the first hint of what's going on. It's the mixing of jewellery and scarves and colourful socks, sticking out the boots. 

Just like a girl, London is dressed up to show off all the beauty she has.

And if you're not sure, you can just walk up the stairs of St Paul's cathedral and have a look yourself. Like a book, London opens itself telling you its history, and the glory of the men and women who lived it, who made it, who loved it and fought for it. 

The city is written in time like a daily journal of vicissitudes, love stories and war stories, all caught in the urban space, where artists, sculptors, writers, architects, poets and graffiti artists are taken by the same fever. Crazy how to our eyes it almost looks as if it all happened in the same moment, as if the marvellous reflections in our eyes are created in the exact moment when we are looking at them. 

Instead they are the mysterious creations of a moment, one of many that assemble the history of immortality.