Caro luogo, by Umberto Saba

Today we read Caro luogo, by Umberto Saba. Two young lovers are looking for a place where they can “make one life out of two.” All the afternoon they wander around under the sun, surrounded by the noise and the comings and goings of adult, everyday life. But then the night comes, the moon rises, and they find a quiet spot, where the only noise if that of crickets. And here the poem stops and the poet falls silent, presumably intent in better things than writing poetry. Saba was an admirer of Tasso, and this poem might remind us of this sonnet of his. The original: Vagammo tutto il pomeriggio in cerca
d’un luogo a fare di due vite una.

Rumorosa la vita, adulta, ostile,
minacciava la nostra giovinezza.

Ma qui giunti ove ancor cantano i grilli,
quanto silenzio sotto questa luna.\ The music in this episode is Tomaso Antonio Vitali’s Chaconne in G Minor for Violin and Piano played by Angelo Xiang Yu and Dina Vainshtein (in the creative commons music collection of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum).