Xenia Kravchenko

“Is it by some natural instinct or through some delusion that when we see the very spots where famous men have lived  we are far more touched than when we hear of the things that they have done, or read something that they have written? It is thus that I am affected at this moment.”  Cicero quotes his friend Piso when they walk in the Academy of Athens in the 1st century BC.

It was thus that I was affected when I first walked up the Janiculum hill along Rampa della Quercia  and stumbled on the remains of a tree dramatically supported by a rusty metal structure. “In the shade of this oak, Torquato Tasso, nearing both his longed-for laurels and death, silently thought over all his miseries and Filippo Neri amid happy cries became, wisely, a child among children”, reads the plaque on the tree supporting monument erected in 1898.