As you stroll through the portico that leads into the Tettuccio, you can’t help but indulge your imagination as it conjures up a postcard image of the Belle Époque, those dreamy years between the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth when thermal tourism was flourishing in Europe, reaching a level of popularity never seen before or since.
“What we need to do is not to avoid living but learning to recover after the adversities. Collect the fragments, Sokei, the moment has come to repair your illusions. What is broken can be reassembled, and when you will do that, do not try to hide its fragility as it is now become a revealed strength” – from ‘The Dream of Sokei’ in ‘Kintsugi’ by Tomas Navarro
Fixing what is broken is not considered a valuable mastery, especially in the western society and especially in the younger generations. The perspective to appreciate what has been fixed and to discover its beauty is even less popular.
I met him the first time in Lipari, in the Aeolian Islands, a bunch of volcanic islands in the Mediterranean Sea, to the north east of Sicily. He already visited and lived in different islands at that time and among all of them the Aeolian archipelago was the one driving the strongest attraction and becoming a second home for long time.