IL CICLOPE

An island hooked to the sky by its plutonic rocks, a tough place to tie up, off the beaten touristic track, where a beacon still essential to the routes that link East and West pierces the sky. Paolo Rumiz, unquiet wanderer, comes here to share the space with the keeper of the lighthouse and his domestic animals.

He abides by the customs and traditions of all that assiduous solitude, peers out at the horizon, gives himself up to the instability of the elements, reads the celestial vault. He happens to hear news from the world and it is news that strips the hermitage of its privileges and turns the sea – even that sea, so apparently felicitous – into a frontier, a trench. The lighthouse seems to fuse with the mythological past, an austere Cyclops rising up with its single eye, keeping watch during the night, agitating the intimacy of memory (how not to see in it the looming presence of the Lantern of Trieste, his hometown), recalling – by embodying in itself the common “mission” of lighthouses all over the world, which have forever shown the way – the dynasties of light keepers and their wives (the governance of the seas is bound up with the corsair spirit of women), but above all, opening the doors of perception. On the lighthouse island, one learns to decipher the onset of a storm, to listen to the wind, to cohabit with the birds, to ruminate on abysses, to recognize the memory-dulling maps of cruise-ship tourism and the alarming signs of the new waves of migrants, to savor the quiet fraternity of a frugal repast. Rumiz takes us with him before the Cyclops, inside the Cyclops, to tell us of the discovery of solitude, of living with little, of being in confidence with the sky, with the rhythm of light, with one’s own inner self and the disquieting wonder of the world. A “standstill journey” turned spiritual adventure. Paolo Rumiz was born in Trieste in 1947 and is an Italian writer. He is a correspondent for the “Il Piccolo” newspaper in Trieste and for the “La Repubblica” newspaper. He is one of the major experts on the topic of Heimats and identities in Italy and Europe. He has followed events in the Balkan and Danube areas since 1986. During the break-up of Yugoslavia he followed the conflict at the front, firstly in Croatia, then in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In 1993, he received the Hemingway Prize for his reports on Bosnia. In November 2001, he was sent to Islamabad and Kabul to report upon the United States attack in Afghanistan. Following in the footsteps of Chatwin and Kapuscinski he pursues the tradition of travel experienced, though, in terms of a discovery. His journeys are geographical explorations that talk of History – pilgrimages into people’s physical and existential solitude