As I sat for the first time in Castrabecco at my desk, and looked through the window the peacefull and timeless landscape, I felt that this was MY place. My trees, my grasses, my hills. Their undisputed beauty was enhanced above all, by the knowledge that so many other writers and poets had been here before me, in front of this same window, with their words and dreams and rage and  fears. The novel I was writing, about  the complications of love, started to flow in a way that I had never expected, with urgency and confidence, until I finished it. Because the power and beauty in Civitella is not just given by this heavenly place (full of history, amazing people who make it happen with such grace and care) but as well by all the words, images, sounds, conversations, laughts and sorrows which have taken place over the years within its walls, and which little by little are making our planet a less lonely, cruel and soulless place to live.