Pistoletto’s Venus of the Rags in Piazza Municipio in Naples

Here she is. Monumental. Always enigmatic. Always thoughtful. Venus and her rags. Naples, Town Hall square. She is here. Dreamy muse, sharp warning, somersault of reasoning. She is here and a silent dialogue begins all around. The city breathes. He quivers from street to street. Vital as it is. Radiant as it is. Melancholic as it is. The sun, sometimes ruthless, focuses. In an instant all the light spreads. From the hill to the sea. Fiery throb that falls and fades in the light wind. The one that suddenly dishevels you, caress of the myth. Look. You walk and look. Walk and listen. Find that ancient language, the times. Spontaneously the pace changes. It’s Naples. Nowhere in the world can you have this sensation of walking and building something of yourself by walking. To get closer to revealing yourself to yourself. You listen and also understand something about yourself. Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Venus knows it. She contemplates her own mystery mirrored in the mountain of used clothes. She never separates from it. That pile of past lives reveals, she explains, informs her “always and anyway” in an infinite series of “here and now”, of limited existences that come, go, come back, look back. They stop for a second over the abyss and then disappear into the great void, into the night of stars.

“Oh. This is how it is to be mortal», says the Venus of the Rags. It has never been so clear to her. You have never appeared so legible and unequivocal to her. In Naples she feels it and understands it better. It’s as if the whole city confirms it for him. At every window. At every flight of stairs. To every flower. Each glass filled with ice and lemon juice. Pass. Leaving footprints that the sea erases going up. Pass. Go beyond. And then? Venus marvels at eternity becoming time. That she lays down and restricts her inexhaustible flow in infinite defined forms. Each, a single existence. Only one existence. That. Nobody else. Only one among billions of hypotheses. The role in the world. She, intact, uncorrupted, watches and is silent. You have a lot to think about. If she could move she would look for a notebook and a pencil to take notes by choosing some of those scattered ideas, the ones that if you don’t stop them immediately you’ll lose them forever. “If only I could write,” she says to herself. And a veil of sadness passes in her eyes: «You die, it is true, but you can write».

Naples, meanwhile, surrounds it. She while she collects the «spasi cloths» with the simplicity of the daily ritual. She while she raises an eye to the remote clouds. On the sea horizon. She remembers for a moment on the threshold of a house, in the narrow curve of a landing, on a small balcony. Many years ago. Right here. Many years ago. And it’s a resemblance, a faint echo like a fairy tale. Once upon a time… A child who ran down. The door closing behind him. But then immediately the vision disappears. Between the glittering shop windows, everything is once again engulfed in the throng. From the tourist euphoria. And Naples, indulgent, smiles a little, sighs squeezed by the summer crowd, and fans itself with the postcards that portray it as it was in the past. Naples that goes away. Naples that has gone away. Hand. No. A few hours are enough to realize that she is only hiding. She waits to come back when no one sees her. On the first beat of the day. At the first call. At the first shutters that open. In the suspended interregnum of dawn, Naples does what it does best: it invites us to philosophy. Is there anyone around? No. Everyone’s still sleeping. Then we go. Let’s walk, will you? We walk. I come with you. Let’s talk.