Look over there at the Euganean Hills, Foscarina. If the wind rises, they will go wandering through the air like veils, they will pass over our heads. I have never seen them so transparent...One day I would like to go with you to Arquà. The villages are as rosy over there as the shells that lie in the earth in myriads. When we arrive, the first drops of a sudden drizzle will remove a few petals from the peach blossoms. We will stop under a Palladian arch, so as not to get wet. Then we will look for Petrarch's fountain, without asking anyone the way. We will take the Rhymes with us in Missirini's little print, that little book you keep by the bedside and which cannot be closed now because it has swelled with herbs like a doll's herbarium... Do you want us to go, one spring day, to Arquà? She did not answer but looked at him at the lepers who said those kind things; and, hopelessly, she liked the sound and the act and nothing else, fleetingly. In those images of spring and in a sestina of Petrarch was for her the same distant enchantment. [...] And he took the woman by the hands, shook her a little, looked deep into her eyes, tried to smile; then drew her toward the sun, on the grass of the meadow. "What a warmth! Do you feel? How good the grass is!" He squinted his eyes to receive the rays on his eyelids, instantly taken back by the voluptuousness of life. She imitated him, seduced by her friend's pleasure; and from between her eyelashes she looked at his fresh and sensual mouth. They remained thus for a few moments under the caress of the sun, with their feet in the grass, their hands in each other's, feeling in the silence their veins throb like streams that quicken when the frost thaws in spring. She thought again of the Euganean Hills, the villages rosy as fossil shells, the first drops of rain on new leaves, Petrarch's fountain, all the kind things.
From The Fire, 1900
From The Fire, 1900
Gabriele D'Annunzio
Birth: March 12, 1863, Pescara
Death: March 1, 1938, Gardone Riviera
APPROFONDIMENTO
Death: March 1, 1938, Gardone Riviera