I would so much love, from time to time, to come and go through Perugia for a few days:
In winter because I like its wind;
At springtime, because of its mysterious green;
In summer for its serene and translucid atmosphere,
In the autumn for the smell of warm bread that its stones and bricks bring up.
Perugia is the only town which I have really fallen in love with.
She is my mistress, my first mistress.
Every time I go back to Perugia, I go up to "Porta Sole".
(The sun enters Perugia from one door as if it entered its own house),
at Porta S. Angelo, at Monte Ripido, I walk down towards the sunset, until S. Marco,
then I go back, because the night is already there, I sit on the steps of the "Fontana Maggiore", or on S. Pietro,
or on a door-threshold under the "Maestà delle Volte" in front of the Etruscan Arch at the entrance of Garibaldi street, and I stay there for hours
listening to perugians talking to each other.
When I left for the war at the age of seventeen, I never had known a woman yet.
Perugia was my first woman, my first mistress.
This is why, every time I come back to Perugia, each one of my thoughts is one of love.
And if, far from her, I happen to think about death,
I feel like coming back here, to die, in this town, like in the arms of the woman you love.
Curzio Malaparte
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