Strangers in One’s Own Home
There is a form of disorientation that knows no forests or fog, that needs no crossroads or starless nights. It is the disorientation of those who inhabit a place without truly dwelling in it, who walk the same streets every day and cannot make them their own, as if the ground beneath their feet always belonged to someone else. The modern city welcomes us, but on the condition that we not touch it. It allows us to pass through it, to consume it, to fund it with our presence, but not to leave a trace there. A flower planted in a public flowerbed is a violation. A handwritten sign on a pole is vandalism. A person sleeping on a bench is a problem to be solved. Public space has become, over time, a space without a public: perfectly regulated, perfectly foreign. And so contemporary man lives in an environment he cannot shape, one that bears no mark of his hands, that does not answer to his gaze. He is granted, at most, sovereignty over the four walls of his home, which he can repaint, furnish, transform — but it is there, within those walls, that he spends the smallest part of his day. The rest of his time belongs to offices designed by someone else and streets planned by someone else. He lives, in essence, as a guest. As a stranger in a place that bears his own address. This is not merely a problem of urban aesthetics or poorly conceived public policy. It concerns the very structure of human experience. When we cannot leave an imprint on a place, when the space carries no memory of us, we cannot orient ourselves within it — not in the geographic sense, but in the older and more essential one: the sense of knowing where we are, who we are, what we belong to. Contemporary urban space has been conceived as a grid: neutral, measurable, interchangeable. But man does not orient himself by grids; he orients himself by signs, by thresholds, by stories carved into walls, by habits that settle into corners. One lives in a place without belonging to it. One passes through, consumes, forgets. And the place, bearing no trace of us, forgets in turn. Perhaps this is the sharpest paradox of urban modernity: that the environment in which man has invested the most — in concrete, in planning, in regulation — has become the one in which he feels least at home. And yet there are those who have not lost themselves. Those who have never stopped treating the land as an interlocutor, not as a backdrop. The winemaker — and with him, anyone who works the land with intention — still knows the ancient gesture of shaping a place according to his own vision and judgment. He chooses the cultivar he believes right for that soil, that light, that history. He decides the orientation of the rows, the shape of the bush vine or the trellis, the variety of roses to plant at the row’s end. Every stake, every tie, every graft is a signature. It is a continuous dialogue between the one who dwells and that which is dwelt in. In the vineyard, space answers back. It allows itself to be changed, transforms, carries the memory of the choices made by those who tend it and those who tended it before. An old vineyard is a stratification of human decisions, of seasons interpreted, of mistakes corrected and instincts confirmed. It is, in the fullest sense, an inhabited environment: not passed through, not consumed, but understood and shaped with care. This is the lifeboat in a sea of concrete. Not a rural nostalgia, not a romantic escape from the city, but the reminder that man still knows, when allowed, how to build belonging. That the sense of place is not a lost inheritance but a dormant capacity, ready to awaken wherever hands can still leave a trace and the earth is willing to receive it. Whoever makes wine, whoever tends a vineyard with respect and intention, is not merely a producer. He is, perhaps without knowing it, the custodian of something larger: the proof that man and his environment can still recognize one another, speak to one another, belong to one another. And that from that recognition something good can be born in a glass — yes, but even before that, in the soul of the one who has not lost his way. Tutte le notizie weblog Strangers in One’s Own Home There is a form of disorientation that knows no forests or fog, that needs no crossroads or starless nights. It is the disorientation of those who inhabit a place without truly dwe weblog Three territory, bound by a single thread One way to know a wine is through its technical sheet — the grape variety, the alcohol, the serving temperature, the food pairings. But there is another way, slower and truer, th weblog The power of roots in a changing market There is a moment, in the life of any sector, when the numbers stop offering reassurance and begin asking questions. Italian wine has been living through this phase for several yea weblog The Summer White Wines There is a precise moment when summer stops being a promise and becomes a certainty. It is when the light changes — slows, turns golden — and the only possible answer is a cool weblog The Earth speaks A healthy bunch of grapes already contains everything needed to make a great wine.No corrections, no additives, no alchemy. Just respect. Organic farming is, above all, a matter of weblog Mediterranean Identity There is a word that comes up often when people talk about Sicilian wine: identity. It is used a great deal, sometimes carelessly, as a label to stick on any bottle with a dialect weblog A territory, three stories There is one grape variety that tells the story of Sicily better than any other: Catarratto.Deep roots in tradition,