Lucca, to fall in love

I cried without even understanding the language, while my ears were bursting with the high decibels of tenor and soprano. I smiled when I tasted the salt of my tears, because I was happy, with the same sweet and complacent disposition of falling in love. I believed furiously in love again, I felt it vibrating in a couple of human voices. Love exists in itself, I thought, only sometimes we borrow it.

I was in the first cathedral of Lucca with one of my great friends. The walls of sandstone and covered with marble almost two thousand years old, shuddered along with the small public, before the representation of an opera by Puccini.

The tenor was small in stature, perhaps in his 60s, chubby with tousled hair and a beard. In my friend’s eyes I recognized that she had fallen as madly in love as I had. In love with the tenor? Or love? Or the magical coincidences of life that had made us meet in Tuscany, on a day with a perfect full moon?

For my friend this was the confirmation of her membership. After living wandering around various cities around the world, he chose Lucca, in Italy, to build his new destination. As always, I was passing through.

Lucca does not possess the fame or flocks of tourists of Florence, but it shines with its own light, with its dozens of rock and brick towers, which rival in height; the great families of the Renaissance competed to show themselves more powerful than others in direct proportion to the size of their towers.

Four kilometers of a massive wall separate the old area from the rest of the city, isolating it from any reality or time. Thus, old Lucca can be explored on foot or by bicycle, alternating with stops at its many ice cream parlors.

The wall is also a pedestrian walkway, covered in trees and picnic areas, with views of the old city as well as the Apuan Alps to the north and west. On the wall we had a lunch picnic, before the concert, admiring the facades of its hundred churches. Most gleam in white marble, some alternate with horizontal stripes of green Carrara marble. This is the city where Giacomo Puccini was born, that is why, every day of the year, soloists from all over Italy sign up to perform one or another passage from his operas in the church of San Giovanni and Santa Reparata.

Here we are, my friend and I, in love with the tenor, or with Lucca or with life. While the spaces are filled with music I travel the ship with my gaze, to travel to its past. Behind the piano and the artists there is an excavation to the foundation of the building, which reveals an Etruscan settlement. The Romans would arrive in 180 BC and build a temple on its ruins. What gods would they worship, I wonder? Investigations discover that from the fourth century on, this same monument was adapted to become a basilica dedicated to Santa Reparata, which later became a cathedral, and today is a temple of music.

This is where my friend confirms her decision to live in Lucca, where she feels she belongs. I will continue looking, and one of these days I will build or invent a place to belong, perhaps the year that begins. Happy Holidays! (THE)