Rome is the wide-open mouth of eternal words, the hard stone where everything has remained — ruins, fragments —where nothing is lost. - Gabriele Tinti

Orpheus, the divining poet of stone, has always made me feel a profound nostalgia for a mythical ancient age of art and poetry. Nostalgia for an age when poets could really sing; an age when youths, bards—destined to decline into rhapsodes and finally into the scribblers we writers have become—used the living word with a divine voice. After this age there was no more psalmonising, no more presentiment, no more divination. No song, no poem, no art of today can truly shine once it has been compared to this first, great season of poetry.

The intense melancholy of Herakles by Skopas, the sunken eyes beneath the arched eyebrows, those pathetic eyes turned toward the sky, led me to imagine Hercules in the crucial moment when he found himself faced with death. It is in that moment that he takes onto his shoulders all the suffering of the world, freeing it.

Before writing “Boxer” I could do nothing but sing of his fragility and solitude; of the weight of his dramatic life and the tragic sense of death, of banality, that belongs even to ancient masterpieces we would wish to be eternal. The uncertainty that has often surrounded their attribution, the mutilated and fragmentary condition in which they have almost always come down to us from antiquity, gave me the cue to speak of the transience of life, of every one of man’s works, of the meaning of time.