Best Wishes from Cittaslow,"to regain the lost balance"

A flight of remote-controlled seagulls
And a beach of dead shells
A steel star at night
Puzzles the sailor

White streaks in the blue sky
To enchant the children and make them dream
The moon is full of windless flags
It's so hard to be human

It will sail, the ship will sail
Where it will arrive, we don't know
It will be like Noah's Ark
The dog, the cat, you and I

A bull is lying on the sand
And his heart is leaking paraffin
At every turn a tin horse
Destroys the horseman

Land and sea, white dust
A city is lost in the desert
The house is empty, it waits for no one 
It's so hard to be human 

It will sail, the ship will sail
Where it will arrive, we don't know
It will be like Noah's Ark
The dog, the cat, you and I

It will sail, the ship will sail
Where it will arrive, we don't know
It will be like Noah's Ark
The dog, the cat, you and I 

In the verses of an Italian poet-songwriter, Sergio Endrigo, we find traces of the contemporary anguish already felt by Blaise Pascal in the face of the advent of mechanistic phenomenon and the destruction of the environment, both natural and social: the "ship that goes" echoes other boats with exiles and migrants everywhere in the world they have to leave their homes empty. The singer-songwriter wrote the song in 1970 but many poets and writers, including Jaufré Rudel and Garcia Lorca, were already sounding the alarm about the environmental, economic, social crisis, before the Club of Rome and MIT on the limits to development... The so-called "climate changes" are just the latest consequence of that epochal process of rapid self-destruction that Cittaslow communities around the world are trying to reverse with concrete steps and daily commitment.

The abandoned bull on the sand recalls poet Eugenio Montale's exhausted horse and the transformation of blood into kerosene is yet another confirmation of the deterioration that has taken place to the detriment of living beings...: the pandemic has taught us this. The Noah's Ark we are looking for is also called Cittaslow...: let us therefore climb onto the ark, promote and "acting" more and more Cittaslow: this is the Wish for 2023. In the text there is on the horizon a hope of salvation, as in the songs of the Provençal troubadours of the European High Middle Ages, as in the palingenetic sagas of the Indian Subcontinent or in the myths of the Far East, in Korea, China, Japan, as in the profound traditions of communion with nature typical of the cultures of the Africa, Australia and Native Americans at all latitudines.

Fortunately Cittaslow is not just a hope but a reality, to be cultivated every day as citizens and as public administrators: only in this way can we build a future of good living and peace.