Dear Ceccano Castle,
Waiting to come back to your door soon, dear King of Stone, know that I am visiting you many times, even if only virtually.
For weeks, I have been creating posts with your best photos on the page that represents you and that I have been working on for seven years now.
I thought of putting photos of your most beautiful corners, shots from photographers who came from all over to immortalize you, in order to create virtual visits to your rooms and courtyards, remembering happy moments with those who have already come.
It is to stimulate the imagination of those who have not yet come, and who we hope will come when all this ends.
More than a month has passed and, after the virtual visit, I have now gone on to tell your medieval story. To talk about those men and women who made your story with their deeds, whose names still echo in your courtyards today.
And then, I began to virtually retrace the streets and views of those villages scattered between the Amaseno Valley and the Lepini Mountains, whose fate was decided from your rooms.
Seven years is nothing compared to the thousand years carved in your stones.
But if I scroll down the page, it is seven years full of photos, memories and people who have come, even from far away, to visit you. And to know your story by going through it in your courtyards and reading it in your medieval frescoes and in the graffiti of your prisoners.
There are many people who have crossed your stone portal with me since 2011 to admire your vestiges. We have increased from five hundred visits to more than two thousand in the past few years.
Since that fateful 2011, I have grown up in your millennial stone embrace.
I learned to communicate and share better and better the numerous stories that you have kept for centuries with those who finally, after decades in the dust of abandonment, have come to listen to them.
In my history albeit you have always been a fixed presence.
High up there, like a stone giant watching over us, the inhabitants of the village, you are silent and above everything and everyone.
I still remember what it was like today that electrifying day in May 2000, when they took me to visit you with the school of Ceccano (if you can say so, since you were a ruin) and finally I managed to discover even your most hidden corners that I had only been able to imagine for years.
It is an honour and a pleasure to be an active part of your relaunch and be personally involved in promoting you.
If I go back in time, I would still prefer a hundred times to spend my time cleaning your yard from cigarette butts that were left by some rude people, or even weeding, rather than sitting still on a bench or in front of a bar to complain that everything goes wrong and that this town is shabby, smelly, polluted, backward.
I don't find myself in that description and I know that in my own small way I can do something and I do it to see the change that I wanted.
We haven't seen each other for almost two months.
Two months that I don't come to listen to the silence of your courtyard, while the butterflies chase each other among the flowers and the sun's rays caress your millenial rocks.
While waiting to return, enjoy your silence because, as soon as possible, I will continue to tell you about many, many other people who will come to meet you from afar, because #ilfuturopartedalleradici (#Thefuturestratsfromourroots)
Your Andrea
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