Rimini, August 15, 2026 – It was August. A heat that melted the asphalt. And my mother, suddenly, decided something that had nothing to do with our summers: to take me for a tour in Rimini of Art History. I spent almost half the year in Rimini (from June to September, every year, since I was a small child), but that city, the real one, I had never seen. For me it was just sand, umbrellas, ice cream.
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That day my mother took me to see two monuments. The first was the Malatesta Temple, that is the Cathedral. White, the sun overhead, hot. That work of art almost intimidated me. And there she explained something I never forgot: the apse had been demolished during the Second World War. Rebuilt afterwards, simpler, but rebuilt with that ability to get back on its feet that the Romagna people have in their blood. Then we walked to Borgo San Giuliano, above the Tiberius bridge. It was 1977. My mother told me it had been built by the Romans. Two thousand years before. Two thousand years, do you understand? A bridge, still there, still standing, after two thousand years of water, wars, everything. It shocked me. I asked her: but to make such beautiful things, to design a temple or a bridge that lasts two thousand years, what do you study? I, mind you, wanted to be a veterinarian. I loved animals very much and I still do today. My mother looked at me and said: “If you want to build bridges, if you want to make churches, there is only one path: architecture”.
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She said architecture, not engineering (she knew me well, she knew I was a humanist, not a technician) and I, there, was struck by lightning. The veterinarian immediately went into the trash, without too many compliments. After finishing high school I enrolled in Architecture and I really became an architect, including the State exam. In every respect. Then life does what it wants, not what you decide at fourteen in front of a Roman bridge. And so here I am, many years later, doing a completely different job: a journalist. But that August afternoon in Rimini no, that never went away. The asphalt burning under my feet, the bridge, my mother showing me the way. Certain conversations made by chance at fourteen, stick to you forever. Even when life then takes you somewhere completely different.
