For a period of time, I lived in the San Giovanni neighborhood, just a short walk from Piazza Re di Roma. I was in an apartment that looked beautiful at first sight, with spacious rooms and high ceilings, but it faced north and had no balconies. Every window opened onto a school and a noisy street, where the traffic never seemed to stop. The light never fully entered, leaving the rooms in a constant half-shadow that grew heavy over time.
Whenever I could, I escaped to the building’s rooftop. It became my refuge, a suspended place above the neighborhood where I could breathe and find a moment of silence. I went up there to meditate, exercise, or simply watch. Sometimes I followed the movement of people below, or caught fleeting glimpses through nearby windows when, at dusk, families prepared their dinners. Those distant lives, half-seen, felt like small everyday plays performed just for me.
The rooftop had all the qualities of a liminal space. Cracked plaster, rusted doors, railings that seemed unsafe. Its apocalyptic, decaying atmosphere fascinated me. It looked like a parallel dimension, a backroom holding past and possible stories, waiting for someone to notice them.
During that time, the rooftop became a kind of elsewhere for me. A personal landing place where I could pause the noise of the city and the noise inside myself. There, in shadows and silence, I learned to look more closely: the sky shifting colors, overlooked details on the buildings, ordinary gestures repeating night after night.
I’ve never stopped linking that rooftop to a sense of melancholic freedom. It was imperfect, uncomfortable, weathered, yet it gave me back a fragment of breath, a fragile but necessary feeling of belonging. Maybe that’s why, even years later, I still remember it as a landing: one of those places that mark time and stay within you, even when you never return.
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