Understanding the beauty is totally different than understanding the beast. Once you have a preconception, it is very hard to remove the inoculated idea from the back of your mind. Most of the time, these preconceptions are born from jealousy, or just simply as a reason of personal denial. One should not have any preconception until one’s own eyes and heart are giving the whole picture to the brain to process the reality. And even then, we still have no guarantee the brain will process correctly the information, but we should hope for better.

Rumors that the canals in Venice are actually stinking came to me from different directions, but my refusal to believe or to think about this drove me to the idea that probably the smell was from some other time, season, or even space. And so it was. I was actually amazed to notice that even though most of the walls at the contact with water were slimy, with more or less green hanging weed, the surroundings were not smelly at all, even with the heavy heat I felt on my head from the sunny, and a little bit too hot Italian Sun. Continue reading →