(Eng) 2022 - ongoing

Close to my house there’s a huge cave. It is located in a little valley inside the mountains, more than a valley it looks like a slot between two enormous rocky walls. Following an old river, now dry, you get to the feet of the west wall. Here, a little bit further, the vertical rock side interrupts in a deep rift: this is the entrance of the cave. It looks like a giant dome of a ruined cathedral, in fact here it stood an ancient building, a fortress maybe. Only a few traces of pillars could be found nowadays, collapsed or covered with ferns. Nature always reclaims its territory.

This cave was inhabited since ages: prehistoric animals before, and our first ancestors then, in looking for Flint, a kind of stone very useful to build rudimentary tools, a rock plentous here, but very rare in these mountains.
In the middle ages barbaric invasions, and the more dangerous plague raids, pushed the people of the villages nearby to seek shelter inside the cave. Then abandoned and slowly forgotten, and after several centuries still unhabitated.

I came here one May morning in looking for the last inhabitants of the cave: a couple of Peregrines. They came here every spring to nidificate under the cover of the vault. Here they are! I glimpsed a figure silhouetted against the sky emerged from the clouds, that typical arrow shape, so different from the other birds of prey of this valley, they are made for dive in the wind clawing the ground, plunged over their prey, lead a hunter’s life. Just an instant, and they disappered inside the cave.

It felt like eyes upon me, a strange irrational feeling, I was disturbing the peregrines or the moltitude of creatures that inhabitated this place? Sometimes the silence of the dark is interrupted by the call of the birds, or are the whispers of all the people that tried to take cover in the womb of the cave? It could be, here time and space lose their meaning, this is a place of imaginary, is an enchanted world.