Narrative voice: Salvo Genovesi
I’ve already been here in 1898, however, at that time I wasn’t as handsome, young and dandy.
What you are looking at, is what I see when I’m not looking in the mirror.
I have been judged, for who I am, for the freedom of being this and I’ve been sentenced to two years of penal labour which has changed my spirit and my body.
After serving my sentence, I lost everything: my wife, my children, prestige and money. Forced to flee from Victorian and bigot England, I chose to travel undercover. So many humiliations, such as being asked to leave a restaurant, because I was “undesired”.
However, here, in Taormina, I was welcomed in a rediscovered Arcadia, in this magic place where I appreciated and enjoyed the beauty of the landscapes and the genuineness of the people, attending painter Otto Geleng‘s atelier, Wilhelm von Gloeden‘s photo studio, who insisted so much for my return.
From this place, I wrote to my “love” that, down here, I found the lovers’ paradise where we will live together, one day…
I had to leave Taormina on the 13th of February 1898, but now I’m here again!
I came back thanks to the “madness” of who wanted to portray me, because thanks to the madness we can create, and love… poets and artists must be inspired, but to do so someone has to blow into them.
A god… maybe?
Plato said: «the greatest gifts originate from madness, and naturally are granted by divine gift»
Is it perhaps because of Plato’s words that he imagined me like this?
Young, with a green carnation in the pocket, and blue butterflies around…
Why?
The green carnation, to celebrate the book by Robert Hitchens, that tells my love story.
Instead, Hermann Hesse can speak like no one else about the flight of butterflies.
He says that the butterfly is an insect like no other, referring only to the final, most elevated and important phase of its existence.
It is the joyful nuptial form of an insect that was a slumbering chrysalis and, before that, a voracious caterpillar.
A butterfly does not live to eat and grow old, its sole purpose is to make love and reproduce itself and for this, it’s clad in magnificent finery.
It is the emblem of both, the ephemeral and something that lasts forever.
«It is possible to exist without art, but it is not possible to live without it»
