The solstice in summer and the sky over Rome

Even tomorrow the sky will be clear. Forecasts say the temperature will reach a maximum of 32 degrees. The sun will rise at 5.36 and set at 20.47. Fifteen hours of light. It’s the summer solstice. It’s the day in which the northern hemisphere of the earth shows all its face to the sun. Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish reporter and writer that brought his feet to the more disparate places of the world, said that he had never seen a city as bright as Rome.

If someone searches for the character of a city, it’s probable they will find it-as well as in the buildings, in the roads, in the persons and in the odors-even in the precarious space that swirls above us. In that refraction of blue that is born from the meeting between the rays of the sun and the atmosphere.

In the mornings, that expance seems a flat plate or a slender sheet of light blue colored paper. Very slowly then, as the hours pass, while the earth is busy completing its daily rotation, the sky seems to grow thick of things and thoughts of life and many other things. In the meantime you remain as an ancestor of yourself, watching with amazement that space which becomes uncertain, still more populated than the minute world from where we observe it. From the cirruses we go on to the cumulus and then to the dark rain clouds. It seems a flurry of reflections and colors. At twlight, the world up there seems to disclose, only for an instant, a fragment of the secret that the universe holds closed up in some inaccessible space.