From the moment we are born, we race to collect that which we believe are the most precious things we need, not least of which is money. However, at what we call the end of our existence, time becomes our most important possession. Of course, only our known time expires: the universe keeps going.

Welcome! My name is Roberto and today I will be your guide. I hope your teleportation here was comfortable. Today we will visit an archaeological site that many centuries ago was called "Italy." The inhabitants of this place, once a peninsula, were part of a larger population called "Europeans."

Being a guide, I am also curious about the idea of rebirth in history. Almost everyone in the Western World studies the Italian cultural and artistic Renaissance, which of course has at its root the word for rebirth. Historians, though, do not tend to love the term, because although there is a clear cultural movement during that period, no cultural idea “dies”—nothing is reborn.

The high level of economic wellbeing in Etruscan society meant that, already in the Archaic period (from the 6th century BC), women began to "leave" the home to participate more actively in public life…Unlike a Grecian Penelope and Andromache, Etruscan women were not satisfied with waiting patiently at home for their spouse to return but rather legitimately took part in all the pleasures of life.

I was born in the land of the Etruscans, Giotto, Michelangelo, Galileo, Leonardo, Meucci, Machiavelli and hundreds more. All men who, animated by curiosity and spirituality, understood what the key to intellectual progress was - like the philosophers, we must doubt everything, we must be open to new ideas, we must ask questions and explore.

The word “celebration” has its origin in the latin Celebrò. We can translate that as “gathering together” or “an assembly,” both of which are precisely the type of activities that Covid-19 is preventing us from doing! This prohibition inspired me to reconsider the subject of celebrating from an alternative point of view—religious celebrations.

The American Myth was still alive in my mind until, married to an American, I finally visited the States and slowly, by living there, came to realize how much that myth—like all myths—existed more as a vehicle for escapism from the pains of daily life. And despite its power and influence over popular culture, it didn’t necessarily correspond to reality. 

If we read the newspaper headlines, and watch the TV news it certainly seems like there isn't much to be cheerful about; all we seem to hear about are wars, terrorism, the exodus of populations, hunger and now the Covid-19 pandemic. But are we able to see what is right in front of us from an objective perspective?

For him, a democracy is relevant only if the rules that the people have created are respected by them, it is not enough just to write them in a constitution. A constitution must be alive in the hearts of the citizens who live under it.

In Italian the word for “bread” is pane, the etymological root for which is pà meaning “nourishment.” We find the same root in the translation of “meal”, pasto. I personally love our idiom for describing a very good, honest, humble and true man: “buono come il pane” (“as good as bread').