“I was dead, and in the meantime it was April, and the glycine was here, to flourish.” This verse of Pier Paolo Pasolini seems more current today than ever in the Monteverde Vecchio district, where the famous wisteria sung by the poet has returned to thrive after years of absence.
In via Giacinto Carini 45, where Pasolini lived with his mother Susanna, nature has once again shown its extraordinary capacity for rebirth. That climbing plant, Symbol of the neighborhood and immortalized in the collection “The religion of my time” of 1961, it seemed lost after a series of too aggressive pruning.
In the 1960s, the glycine prosperous luxuriantly on the corner of the arches of Villa Sciarra and via delle Mura Gianicolensi, characterizing the urban landscape of this corner of Rome with its bunches violates. Unfortunately, due to municipal interventions in 1975 and subsequent private works in the early 2000s, the neighborhood that had hosted personalities such as Giorgio Caproni, Massimiliano Fuksas and Gianni Rodari had to say goodbye to his beloved glycine.
But nature has its times and its secrets, silently, under the distracted gaze of passers -by, the plant has begun to recover space, to grow again, as if it wanted to remind everyone that no pruning, however drastic, can really erase what is destined to re -emerge.
Already two years ago, during the celebrations for the centenary of Pasolini’s birth, the first signs of the rebirth were visible. This year, flowering has reached dimensions that recall the ancient splendors, attracting the attention of the residents and the goal of tourists, amazed in finding this unexpected wonder.
The “miserable flowering glycine at the corners of Monteverde”, as Pasolini called it, is today a perfect example of how the tenacity of nature can triumph on human neglect, giving the neighborhood a piece of its cultural identity that seemed lost forever.
A story that reminds us how, sometimes, it is enough only a little time and patience to see what we believed irreparably lost, just like in the words of the great poet who in those places lived and created in those places.
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