Bellezza è destino

"Of course, none of this made any sense to me at the time. I didn’t pay attention to the meaning of things, but rather to their vivid expressiveness, and in my grandmother’s stories this was so powerful that the whole of Rome seemed to me like a gigantic stage where, to this day, centuries and millennia play the leading roles. After all, there were still beautiful backdrops everywhere; one couldn’t help but feel that actors might emerge from every street corner, that they were hiding in every cloud of dust; sometimes everything became so vivid that the buildings no longer seemed like stage sets at all, but rather like enormous vessels containing entire eras, and that every tiny step transports us in reality from one millennium to the next. In such moments, a peculiar fear always gripped me: I felt as if my spiritual balance were being shaken; I felt carried away by something or someone, slipping beyond the control of my consciousness; an uncanny uncertainty about the existence of my very self would overwhelm me."