Oh Italy, what are you doing to me? What started out as a brief flirtation is turning into a
full-blown love affair, and I am powerless to resist the charms of this
incredible country. This year has brought me to wonderful northern Italy twice,
and while I promise to write about my adventures in Venice and its surrounds in
April, I am entirely overcome by the need to write about this most beautiful
place in which I find myself.
As I write this, I am in the heart of the Dolomites north of Venice, en route to Sesto/Sexten near the Austrian border where
I will spend the next week. The roads are winding, and banked with steep rocks on
either side, one side climbing up into the heavens, the other descending to the
bottom of the world.
The Dolomites rise out of the earth, immense and imposing
shards of rock, a prehistoric testament to the internal tensions and struggles
of the earth. They loom, grey and impossibly tall – so that I have to arch my
neck way back to catch a glimpse of their sunlit tips. I marvel at their sheer
cliffs, sharp and unwelcoming yet oh-so-inviting. I’m in awe as I contemplate
all the nooks and crannies, the shiny peaks and the dark crevices, and wonder
how few of them have actually felt the touch of a human hand. They’re so close,
yet so unreachable.
I want to explore every crease of every rock face, to see
what they see as the look down on the earth from their giddy heights. And suddenly
I’m a child again, lying in the soft grass of our backyard staring up at the
stars in wonder, desperate to explore, to see, to know. Hearing the call of the
unknown, and daring to dream that I might, one day, accept its invitation to
explore its hidden depths.
This passion, this need to explore, to see the unseen and to
know the unknown: this is why we become scientists, explorers, adventurers.
This is what takes us to the moon, to Mars, what drives us to go where no one
has been before, to go there because no one has gone there before. To
discover, to see what is there to be seen. This is what motivates us to
constantly probe the boundaries of what is possible, of what is within our
reach, and to push them further and further back.
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| Pictures do not, by any stretch of imagination, do justice to this spectacle |
