"A Precious Dream" of Michele Scognamiglio

Marisa e Michele

Marisa and Michele Scognamiglio
I observed the ladies in Capri, Cala di Volpe, Porto Cervo, Via dei Condotti, Via Montenapoleone, Via dei Mille, Posillipo, Marechiaro, Tokyo, Beverly Hills, New York. I looked with much interest at the jewels with diamonds adorning their “decolletes”. Those precious stones dazzled me and I felt like a planet enlightened by sun rays. They were wearing silk and linen dresses, they sat at VIP coffee lounges. They crossed small “piazzette” and narrow streets walking with elegance. They seemed to me as Goddesses of the Olympus come down on the earth to show their divine beauty. All was perfect, but my sensible soul felt that something was missing. Something warm, unique, of an inimitable colour. Gosh! I have been touching it with my hands for decades: The Coral. I have had it fished in the best marine pastures of the Mediterranean sea revealed to me by my father Giovanni, undoubtedly one of the most competent in the world. In the years of my adolescence, I was his factory boy. He sent me for outside duties and even when I graduated as Doctor in Economy I threw away my University degree and various literature prizes to continue to assist him and travel all over the world to show his products to the customers. I saw myself to the coral fishing when it was done by trawl nets. My father crewed a “Coral boat” on which I (at sixteen years old) embarked, eating ship’s biscuits together with the sailors and shouting with them: < HEIVE! HEIVE!> to pull up the big iron cross said “ingegno” with the nets entangled with coral. We worked in the pale light of the early morning and it seemed to me to be immerged into an aurora borealis from which those red branches came out. I imagined the Venere of Botticelli emerging from the water to unite herself with the earth as well as the coral emerged out of the sea to “marry” the ladies of the world and unite them to the jewels ripped from the rocks. So to transmit to their fingers its warmness and making them feel, by touching it, shivers, passions and unknown emotions.

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"THE REAWAKENING"