Sigh. In 2005 I was living alone in a small apartment in a rustically gracious Adriatic town. Mornings I would plop downstairs, turn left into the alleyway ('ruva' in the local dialect. French influence. The alley's mane was Labyrinth, Labirinto in Italian. Too ironic given the personal circumstances then,) which led directly into a small piazza, head towards a bar-pastry shop to devour a 'bomba' - the Abruzzo version of a stuffed doughnut - freshly pumped to a burst with cream. Each one contained enough calories to feed the sum of all living things in sub-Saharan Africa for a week, humans included. I was an athlete then, before.... all the whips, scorns and injuries of age. So I would eat two.
After, I would hop onto my lovely blue Honda motorino and descend to the sea - the central Adriatic, which smells entirely of home to me. The hilltop view from that town affords a full panorama, the coastal air sweet&sour and as you near the waves the language, words, change - getting ever closer to 'proper' Italian as opposed to dialect. (update: one imagines as the years pass, less and less dialect is spoken. If anything, today I imagine 'Italish' is increrasingly spoken closer to Pescara, the main city.) In the little town, people use rythms and cadences that reflect their 'borgo', burg. It sounds, that dialect, a bit like... smelling a plate of square spaghetti 'alla chitarra' with a lamb ragu flavored in turn by French erbs. Until you get to the sea itself, which has its own language.
I suppose birthplace - where you grow- has a strong impact on the language animals, humans included, use. Not only spoken or given via mouth or gesture but in everything you are, where you place yourself internally and how you have to express what you are. And by 'grow' in the sense of development, that is until the last of the three most evident chronological windows in which genes find the space necessary to seek and change you, to have an important influence on external context - you dialogues. Panorama. Scents. Forms. Geometries. People. Animals. Green things. The sea....
...has its own tempo, different than mountain time. In that later place in some way you're embraced by forms larger than yourself while visual distances change. You're smaller, more contained and less alone. Acceptance is ingrained, a little like a fisherman once upon a time on a skiff, of whatever the elements - those enormous forms - offer. From solid land watching the sea is like always having someone with you. It enters into every relation yet remains distant in its somehow direct impact. You don't have to accept it and it doesn't make you per force smaller.
You're often outside when on the sea or in the mountains, in a context so much bigger than your self but in which you have the space to define that self freely. In the city or in a lecture hall or office space or suburban house - or skyscraper, with your driver parked curbside in the Mercedes sedan waiting to take you to another enclosed, straight-lined, insulated, protected place - you're not. Not even when strolling along that outside-inside of once real-cum-money Disneyland places, seaside resorts where they bring you elaborate drinks or massage, or today's downtowns, shopping and buying socioeconomically dimonstrative goo-goo.
La Montanara:
Mountain people often aren't so frivolous, let's say. But are nearly always of an honesty and modesty now become quite rare. They don't screw you and they will not sell themselves. How could they? They are part of the mountain they come from: immense, solid. And use the most practical words.... (practical: of or concerned with the actual doing or use of something rather than with theory and ideas.)
...not so much for city people, those who glance at the sea from the shoreline or who live and work in tall, square buildings. They don't belong to any mountain or sea and tend to use words that correspond to nothing, no thing, only abstractions of abstrations: 'fiscal drag', 'clause 28' 'quality time'. The cities below and the oceans beyond them are mere possessions - for those who live and work from penthouse views on solid land. Hence it's the sea that must submit to their time - an eternal present without memory - and the mountains that must accept their affect, their impostitions. Madness. The mountains will remain long after those shallow people and their ugly penthouses have crumbled to dust. Unless the mountain iteslf is destroyed, which would leave nothing at all to posses or anything else.
But not the sea. You, they, can poison it, alter it - but cannot destroy it. It has its own justice, its own language. That understands and includes any and all of ours. And is...inevitable.