La vita è bella

Three days in Italy and the same sense of déjà vu as thirty years in India. There is more than an ‘I’ in common between Italy & India.
Celebrated as a gazetted holiday, 4th October in Bologna marks the day of Saint Petronio, the patron saint of Bologna. Infact, every city in Italy have had a patron saint. So I thought, it was going to be a long lazy afternoon. But the warm Italians had something more in store for me. So when a ‘joie de vivre’ elderly couple invited me to lunch, I could not resist, but to consent.
Walking through the historical boulevards, neatly carved narrow meandering lanes of Bologna, I finally reached the home of my hosts. It was more then just a lunch. A cozily set-up traditional home, a peep into the conventional habitat was far more enriching then spending an afternoon. It was an ethnic encounter. Where else could I expect a perfectly alien couple to give me all their afternoon, prepare a special ‘vegetarian’ lunch for a stranger, someone they had never seen, never known before. Serving me the pasta, they told, it was not a simple, any other italian cuisine. It was a purgatoire. Enjoying my stay in the land of Dante, the creator of Divine Comedy, I could sense the food eaten somewhere between hell and heaven.
Cracking endless jokes on cultural encounters or (mis)encounters, I could sense a thread of similarity that runs between the two cultures. Specially our love for English and the brazen abuse of the dialect. Be it the ‘Italian man who went to Malta’ or the ‘Indian who goes to England’, our English encounters are devastatingly humorous.
Emotionally speaking particularly moving, was the passion with which they gave me a virtual tour through the historical lanes of Bologna. Armed with an old book, containing very old maps of the city, the world’s oldest running university, my hosts took me through the constricted city in time and in space. And in one afternoon, I traveled through the lifetime of this historic place. I left the home with a feeling that I had seen all that was to be seen in Bologna. And I saw from the eyes of a couple who lived the city and loved it. I felt connected. I was touched. I saw more then I could ever see as a tourist, more then I could ever experience as an artist. It brought back a sense of déjà vu. A feeling long lost since I left home. The pleasant & kind couple reminded me of my parents back home. Just the way they would invite every stranger to eat with them, stay with them. There, it seemed, was a place somewhere else, under the sun, where they believed in athithi devobhav, that is the guests are symbolic representations of the Divine.
There was more warmth to the culture then just the shinning sun. Perhaps the affection emanating from the heart, that creates an ambiance of nostalgia & pleasantness in this sunny country.