September 2020, dawn. Piazza Duomo, Pietrasanta.
Everything was still, motionless, as if suspended. That eerie silence, that desert before dawn, had become habitual in that strange year. A year that had forced us into an extraordinary calm, empty cities, and restrained steps.
In the summer, however, that quiet had returned to being exclusive to the morning, before the light.
Not a soul. Not a sound of footsteps. The bells waiting.
Only a discreet prelude, a few thin, timid trills that broke the still air.
The moon hung in mid-air, bright.
In the center of the square, a huge, white, tattooed head rests on the pavement like a relic of contemporary beauty.
I called Meeting of irises My favorite shot. All it took was a slight shift of the tripod to capture the alignment between the Collegiate Church's rose window and the eye of Fabio Viale's David.
A perfect fit: the giant's eye, hollowed out and open to the sky, welcomes that of the church, which captures the light like an iris.
Two glances that touch.
One looks beyond.
The other holds back.
In the middle, my gaze. Seeking meaning in that encounter.
Then I walked among the other sculptures.
White marble, smooth as leather.
Classical figures marked by tattoos.
The sinuous Venus.
The Laocoon with the snakes carved into his flesh.
And the moon, rising above and between the bodies.
It wasn't the marble that came to life.
It was the silent combination of light, form and emptiness.
The empty square had become a stage.
And precisely in that absence, everything appeared with a precise pattern: the geometries, the details, the correspondences.
A rare moment, when even the inanimate seemed to breathe.
