Resorts Magazine

Page after page, the book reveals what it truly is: not a collection of texts, but a life settling onto paper. The author writes from a threshold—that of age and awareness: “now I am old… and I travel very little,” but precisely for this reason he can say: “in this book there is my entire life, not just my travels.” Places thus become emotional repositories, catalysts for thought. In Paestum, “matter has a soul,” and time seems to stop: “the same stones, the same light as so many centuries ago.” In Positano, facing the sea, death is accepted with disarming calm: “yes, we will all die… be calm, Time, we will obey,” yet immediately afterward life reclaims its fragile, luminous space: “I watch the sea at sunset and think of something else.” The Italy crossed by Tondini is carnal, contradictory, alive. Naples is “a monument totheartof gettingby,”Palermo“thenavel of theworld…themost absurd place on the planet, and precisely for that reason themost alive.”Every city is a lesson, every encounter a revelation, every detail a fragment of truth. The writing alternates between notes, aphorisms, poetry, and civic invective. Yet beneath the geographical journey there always runs an inner one, quieter and more radical. Everywhere a minimal and uncompromising philosophy returns: “I don’t want things, I want moments,” a statement that becomes a true ethical and aesthetic manifesto of the entire book. It is a simple phrase, yet definitive, turning into a declaration of poetics and of life. In a world that accumulates, he subtracts; in a time that rushes, he lingers; in a society that displays itself, he chooses the essential. Even technological modernity is viewed with suspicion: “the cellphone gives you the illusion of a power that is not in you,” while freedom passes through minimal and stubborn gestures: “I write everything by hand… I am still a free man, who thinks.” This is not sterile nostalgia, but conscious resistance. Perhaps the most heartrending part of the book is the one devoted to love, to loves, to what remains when desire mingles with memory. This is the most intimate section, where the journey becomes amorous and memorial. Love is lived as a fragile yet absolute alliance: “few love us: those who feed on freedom,” up to the final definition, disarming and powerful: “it’s not little. On the contrary, I say it is love.” Old age too — and the body that ages and betrays — enters the book without masks. Not as lament, but as lucid reckoning: “if you have more memories than regrets, then it’s all right.” The body grows tired, time tightens, but the ability to look with gratitude remains: “happiness costs little, often nothing.” And yet there is always, subtly, the melancholy of one who knows that “then, suddenly, it has become late.” The book closes without truly closing, like every real journey. What remains is a feeling of gratitude and loss together, because time, relentless, “makes you pay, year after year, for its gifts from so long ago.” Poesia in viaggio is a secular testament, an emotional atlas, a declaration of spiritual independence. A book that does not ask for consent, but for attention; that does not promise consolation, but truth. Ultimately, a book-testament and at the same time a book-opening. It does not close, it does not console, it does not soften. It walks. It walks through places and seasons, through desire and disenchantment, through eros and thought, leaving behind light yet indelible traces. It is the voice of a man who has lived intensely and who, having reached the threshold, can say without emphasis but with truth: I have looked, I have loved, I have chosen. And I have written in order not to lose. Angelo Tondini Quarenghi is one of Italy’s leading photographers and among the best known internationally. He is the author of essays, novels, and poetry collections. He is amember of the Travel Academy – Club Grandi Viaggiatori and has visited more than 170 countries. AvailableonAmazon. 121 RESORTS MAGAZINE