Ancona. The scent of a border city – Ancona. El perfume de una ciudad fronteriza – Ancona. Der Duft einer Grenzstadt - 边境城市的气息安科纳

A silent threshold A silent threshold to a silent region. Made of rock and shell, wild fields and orchards and vegetable gardens under the water, marine cemeteries and treasures within the earth. City of water and desert, erratic and fluctuating, a vagabond and rough as stone, Homeric and cherub-like, lost and a city to forget. A city of pirates and buccaneers, a vessel city, where every path leads through stairs and ropes to the highest mast of the ancient galleon and the sea unexpectedly looks out from every crack with the single glance of a celestial animal. A city that has torn away from its moorings and has sunk into the sea, silently, and there on the water’s edge of an unknown border between water and land, lingers in the calm, like an old sailor who invokes the stars and planets, to flush out darkness and fear. City of the Theatre and wonders, the Solitary Mountain with its steep cliff face, where demons, elves, fairies and nymphs shout their songs of the nights from the rocks. City of the sea and the waterfront, of water, and stone cliffs, of rocky cliff, island and border, offshoot and mainland, the Mediterranean and Adriatic lake, and at the same time ocean. An oxymoronic and two-faced city, Dionysian and Apollonian, polyphonic and multi-ethnic, with its hilly junctures and sharp edges which sink into the sea: hinterland and coastline, town and country, Acropolis and suburbs, cities and suburbs, province and centre. City of tragedy and rubble, crossed by rainstorms and storms, cataclysms, landslides and floods, bombings and ruins. An apocalyptic and heavenly city, sleepy and breathless, torn between resignation and hope for the future, between the darkness of deprivation and the half-light of a new beginning. Listen, the city is up there, hanging from a ridge of the earth. It looks like a bud asleep in the scales of a branch. It looks like a spear thrown against the vehemence of thunder, a silent voice in your astounded throat, a word written in the blanket of nothingness. A land city, a water city, a sky city, a city forged by fire. Listen. The city oscilates, rises, sings, becomes silent, vibrates in its grassy ribs, and crumbles, clinging to its bones of rock, it murmurs and whistles the notes of its wound, it smells of life and death, broken down and alone in the dust of its roots. A tree city, a lawn city, a diary of destinies, an almanac of nourishment, the book of the living. Listen, there is the breath of the beast inside the blackened vault. The squares, portals, windy loggias, bricks and tufa, the woods, the veins of the alleyways, the slate of the roofs, the turrets, districts, the cellars that protect a breath, the throbbing blood, a heartbeat, the master blood vessel that beats the time of the world. Listen, there under hidden porches, there under the foundations, where the roots of the city are interwoven with the confetti of the elder tree and the Aleppo pine, below the silt of daffodils and hyacinths, under the bulbs of peony and tulip, under the carpet of crocuses and snowdrops, the millennial communities that sleep in the oak bark,under the mint and eucalyptus and monkey puzzle trees, under the milky resin that tastes of honey and lavender, jasmine and ginger and licorice, the wild communities walk in the verandas of sludge. A feather city, a wind city, a fin city, a breast city. Observe the beginnings of lineages made of rock, do you see the beginnings of the heart of luminous ancestors that splits the shoots of earth. Observe the breath of those who have drowned that churns and shatters the waves. Lost beauty The beauty of Ancona is tough as nails, as angular as rock, as changeable as the substance of water, unstable as the shape of the clouds, as sharp as a blade of light, as dark as a fleck of shade. The beauty of Ancona is shy, it does not give itself easily, one must unearth it under an indifferent surface, it is reluctant to appear, avaricious, filled with discretion, frugality, hesitancy and secrecy. It is a measured beauty of discretions, giving of itself in tiny morsels, in discrete gestures, it is a beauty of small dimensions, of the jealously guarded harvest, disguised, as though hidden under a veil, of something that must be understood, discovered, revealed with scrupulous respect, of what we must imagine and guess, like when we guess the features of a swan beneath the feathers of a duckling. It is a beauty without great, absolute, monumental, striking and dazzling beauty. The pearl that shines only for those who know how to look with wonder and awareness. It is a beauty made of deprivation, absence, denial, sacrifice, acceptance, rooted foundations and loss. It is a beauty that points straight to the heart of things, to their bare and rough essential nature, without seduction, without surprising or excessive astonishment, without captivating and unobtrusively. Everything is in a narrower and confused perspective, except the sea, with its gigantic and portentous presence. It is an alienating, segregated, disoriented, uprooted and lost beauty. Listen Listen to this city as it fills with wind, as it sets sail from the lookout of the earth, crossing the sea like a whale, fleeing like a green buffalo to the bulge of the mountain, cutting through the antiquity of breath like a ship, there far below is the heartbeat of the sea creature that drives the female body of the earth, there where the city is born held tightly and enclosed in a wail, in the corolla of eastern light, in the ancient tremor of existence. There in that dust, in the dumb proscenium of the sea, under the loose stones, in the porphyry cobbles of the streets, in the paving, in the ashlar of the churches, was the secret heart of the city, the new heartbeat of everything. In Ancona the sea In Ancona the sea suddenly became earth, there at the water’s edge of the last stones that the silver glow drags, the sea is a tongue that penetrates the throat of the earth, capturing and shaping it in the male vigour of its essence, turning it into an embrace almost like a creature, an inlet, a port, a hole-riddled wall of the cliff, a crust of rock, a grotto, a cordillera of rocks, an small and ancient sheltered harbour with a five-sided fortress, a liquid link, a bridge, a sandy shore, a beach, a beach resort, a lantern. The Adriatic brought to Ancona, as though to an estuary, a river of sad and shrill dialects and accents, the thousand idioms and the sound of the languages of Split and Sibenik, Kotor, Dubronovik and Durres, Cadiz and Malaga, Istanbul and Izmir, Algiers and Alexandria of Egypt. In Ancona the sea had a gaze and stamens of light and eyelashes, with circular tremors and luminescence, it had had corals and madrepore and the iridescence of pearls and halfshells, there in the inlet of the promontory, in the stretched arch of the coastline, in the roundness of the curve that changes direction, there where the hill kneels and falls headlong, bends and shapes a rock, it hesitates and collapses, and crouches into water, there where it gathered its millennial heartbeat, its immortal breath, was the sea of Alcinous, Nausicaa, Circe and Calypso, the shimmering sea of Homer. The water champs at the bit, murmurs and trembles The Adriatic scurries, pauses, travels and slumbers in front of Ancona, that small fugitive and wild sea with its loose feather-light spaces, as narrow as a moat, and as long as a sword. From the gateway of the East, from the small sheltered harbour to the docks, from the piers to the Vittorio Emanuele seaport, the sea courts the city, seizes and kidnaps her, it creeps into the hollow of Republic Square, overflowing into the arches of the Theatre and enters the proscenium, drenching the tunic of the Muses, it bends and continues to where the riverlet of Pennocchiara flowed weakly, and filled the Santa Maria swamp with reeds, it pervades the maze of alleyways where the foundtains opened their silvery eye, it drowns the vaults of Via Sottomare and the mouldy storerooms and shacks against the walls of the port, flooding Papa square, lapping and crashing against the centuries-old gates, and washes the stone robes of Clement, to sail like a boat over the buildings and halls, entering the veins of water and then into the valley of the Vegetable Gardens, enclosing, encircling and embracing it along the princely Avenue, to the mouth of the Passetto, up to the estuary of the rocky cliff, the two seas of the East and West, where the sun rises and sets, rises up and falls, and hurtles into the waves, sliding into the vestibules of the earth, to emerge from the water, ripping the shadows.