Category: Trips
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Traveling as a form of attention
For me, traveling has never been just about moving around. It has always been a way of learning to see. To see with time, with curiosity, and above all, with the openness to allow places to transform us. This section stems from that simple idea: writing about travel not as a guide, but as an experience. Cities, landscapes, roads, hotels, tables, and silences that remain behind…
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Kruger | I Know I'm Going That Way
“"The universal is the local without walls. It is the authentic that can be seen from all sides, and on all sides it is right, like the truth." Miguel Torga. A small dog can survive hunger, a colonial empire, a rough road, and more than a tumultuous century, as long as someone…
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Johannesburg | A Long Walk
“There’s nothing like returning to a place that remains the same to discover how much we’ve changed.” Nelson Mandela. It was to the sound of a national anthem that Johannesburg ceased to fit into what I’m about to tell you. At the Steyn City Clubhouse, amidst a lavish meal, a Springboks game, a fine South African Sauvignon Blanc…
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Douro Oxheart Tomato Festival | From the intimate causes of things
“Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.” Georgics, Book II, v. 490 “Happy is he who could know the causes of things.” Few poems have exerted such a silent influence on Western civilization as Virgil's Georgics. They do not narrate battles, celebrate heroes, or recount the adventures of capricious gods. They speak of the earth. Of the seed sown…
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Sicily Part III | Love and Discord or How Many Times Does Memory
“If we want everything to remain as it is, everything must change.” Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa @Temple of Concord, Agrigento There is a rare, almost imperceptible moment when the journey stops “moving forward.” It is not a visible instant, a palpable emotion, nor an event that can be pointed out. It is rather a silent inflection, as if…
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Sicily Part II | Soul, or What Time Wrote on Things
“Nothing arises in isolation, but always as a result of forces that intersect and leave their mark. Thus, each thing becomes what it is according to the mixture that prevails within it.” Empedocles of Agrigento @Mount Etna There is a moment when what until then was only hinted at changes its nature. It ceases to be a diffuse presence and becomes…
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Sicily Part I | The Voice Before the Fire
“Sylphs and mermaids dance at your feet. Sages and giants tremble within you, as you silently cover your vast surface with woods, fruits, and red sand.” Mario Rapisardi @Lagoa de Marinello, Tindari According to Greek mythology, there is a place where the world never truly stabilized. It is called Mount Etna, but for centuries it was believed…
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Oslo, Bergen and Hvitsten | The Voice Before the Sound
“I was walking with two friends along a road. The sun was setting, I felt a breath of melancholy, suddenly the sky turned blood red. I stopped, leaned against the fence, dead tired. I looked at the clouds in flames that hung like blood and swords over the dark blue fjord and the city, my friends continued on, but…”
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Japan | The thread that stitches together a legacy
“The things that impress us most are not those that shout. They are those that murmur slowly, as if they were always waiting for us to listen.” Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book @Rainbow Bridge and Tokyo Bay There is a Japanese legend that speaks of an invisible thread, tied to the little finger, that irrevocably binds two people…
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Prague | The present called future
“From a certain point, there is no turning back. That is the point that must be reached. But how do we know when we have arrived? Time gives us no warnings, it only pushes us forward, like a river that flows without ever returning to its source. We look back and see only footprints erased by the current…”