Easter time.
And the bittersweet feeling it brings, year after year.
There is what comes naturally with it. Endless meals, familiar conversations that repeat themselves, and, in the background, the marvelous and almost disarming mystery of resurrection.
And then, every year, something else returns.
In the night between the 5th and the 6th of April 2009, the city where I was born, L’Aquila, was devastated by an earthquake. More than 300 people died, and the entire city was shattered. What made it different was its uniqueness. The epicenter was not in a field, but in the heart of a medieval city. If that happens, the damage moves far beyond buildings. The entire economic, social, and family ecosystem is affected. And when the center collapses, everything connected to it follows.
Since 2009, Easter in L’Aquila has also meant remembrance. Candles in front of houses. Names spoken out loud at 3.32 in the morning, the exact moment everything changed. A shared sense of gratitude and sorrow that live side by side without ever really merging. In the city, and in my family, there is a clear before and after.
All my grandparents lived there. Plus my uncles, my relatives, my friends. In L’Aquila there was the library where I prepared my exams, the music stores where I bought my CDs, the pubs where I met some of my first loves. It was simply the place we returned to on a regular basis. Every summer, every winter, every Easter, and sometimes in between. Until that night.
What stays with you after an experience like that is a simple awareness. Everything can be lost in a moment. Once you have seen it, your relationship with time changes. The way you look at things changes. You carry a different kind of attention, one that is not always easy to explain.
There is a small detail that, over time, has come to hold all of this together for me.
In my father’s grandparents’ house, a place I have barely entered again after the earthquake except to recover a few belongings, there was a framed poem on the wall. “If” by Rudyard Kipling. A poem about growing up, about becoming a virtous man. My grandmother had two sons, my father and his brother, and she had made two copies of that poem. My uncle took his. The other one stayed in the house.
For reasons I still cannot fully explain, in those days that poem became central. Maybe because that moment felt like a sudden exit from adolescence. Maybe because I needed something that stayed still while everything else was moving. Out of all the things we could have taken, that was the only one I cared about.
So I took it. I reframed it and brought it to my parents’ house in Bologna, and later to mine. It is still there.
Over time, it has become more than a piece of poetry. A quiet reminder of fragility. Of how easily we take things for granted. Of how quickly everything can shift. Easter speaks about resurrection, about the possibility of starting again, and that dimension is real. Yet every beginning carries with it a fracture that comes before. A moment where something ends.
That night in April did not only transform a city. It reshaped the way many of us, including me, look at life, at time, at presence, and at what really matters.
It is not a lesson anyone would choose. But once it becomes part of you, it stays. Like that poem on my wall. Quiet, constant, and there every day, reminding us that everything can be lost, and that what is still here deserves to be seen.
.
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master,
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same,
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss,
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
(R. Kipling)
