Dante’s Beach, Ravenna
In an attempt to avoid the infernal heat and the rhythmic maracas-style racket of the cicadas in the trees, I have become nocturnal. I go to bed at 7 a.m. and get up at 4 p.m.
This may seem wrong, a sign of moral failure or mental breakdown, but let me remind you that the wise men bearing gifts did the same. As Longfellow writes: ‘And they travelled by night and they slept by day,/ For their guide was a beautiful, wonderful star.’
It is that moment in the night before the cock-crow hour, and the silence is more or less total, apart from the stirrings of the sea a mile or so across the fields. I sit at my work station looking out from the wide-open window of my so-called study at the star-spangled sky above me and the lights of the gas rig known as Angiolina on the horizon.
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