I have travelled extensively (I was about to write “too much”, but you never travel too much, don’t you think?), across the world. I started when I was 19 and I have not stopped. I have done it for passion, out of curiosity, to expand my knowledge. But also because I needed it, I had to, for work as well. I have always wanted to do it.
One way trip, stays, return journeys. Yes. I have stayed for short or long periods of time in some beautiful place, but I have always decided to take a return ticket. There has always been something (external and internal factors) which have made me come back. Home. My base has always been Ragusa and the Hyblaean country. Ragusa and its baroque churches.
Ragusa and its architectural and naturalist magnificence. Ragusa and its piazzas (gathering place for my community), its countryside (place of wise and hard work, by the local people). Ragusa and gramma’s laundry, spreading a delicate and persistent smell of clean. It fills my nose still now.
Delicato e persistente
Profumo
Pulito
I enjoy leaving some space between these words, so you can read them one at the time. With some breaks in between, in order to feel their sense, meaning and substance.
I don’t know what these words mean to you. They do really mean a lot to me, they may be everything to me.
They remind me of some past dawns, my youth, moments I enjoyed from my window. The local baker would be so delicate in folding the dough of his “scacce” in the local piazza (especially the “anturciniate”, multi-layered focacce), filled with ragusano cheese, home-made tomato sauce and eggplant from his garden. I remember the delicate work by the vine growers taking care of their vine rows.
And those words carry the enduring persistence of my constant movement, my being active anywhere or in any situation I was, (such as working in a Louis Vuitton store in Montenapoleone street in Milan or in a farm in Ayr, a small farming village in Queensland, Northeast of Australia, with more fields than inhabitants). Or remembering some farmers bending their back under the sun, everyday as a bow to it.
Those words represent also the smell of the land, my hands on the field, vines, blueberries, freshly-made cheese, freshly-picked carobs, or cut wheat, wild sage, the sea of Southeastern Sicily.
And finally, cleanliness. A stroll on the seashore, or nature, freely overwhelming in the canyons and valleys of the Hyblean region. But also the neatly-done things. Genuine emotions and feelings. Dignity of work and fatigue people feel, independently from their outcome. The real truth that only the land holds, along with the gestures by the people who take care of it. Lines tracing the border between who you are and who you become: by growing, with time and across time, rooted in a tiny and precious rural village, to give everything.
And my outcome, the one that I have dreamed, cherished and nurtured, is all described in these pages.
I have discovered and tried itineraries, paths, experiences across the years, and now I have collected them, fostered and organised for you. A series of seasonal packages, chances where you can test your body and your soul, senses and feelings, skin and emotions.
Because Be Rural starts from here. My project stems (also) from this wish not to stop breathing, and smell this delicate and persistent scent of clean. Yes, this is what it is. Through itineraries, paths, experiences, sentimental journeys, I made my Be-Rural dream concrete, this is my willingness, to host you in my house, in my land. In order to let you feel welcomed by the same hugs of landscapes which make the roots of my heart.
From the same network of gestures, bodies, gazes, works, steps which have marked my growing. Across the minutes of the after meal – soon after lunch, with the blazing sun – when I used to leave the house and walk to Piazza Cappuccini, in Ragusa, and I smelled that delicate and persistent scent of clean.
