Buon Natale da Reggio Emilia.
I’m back in Reggio Emilia, my Italian home away from home, visiting good friends and looking forward to welcoming in a new year. We arrived the day after Christmas but all of the decorations are still up. In addition to the regular Christmas lights in the historic center of town (centro storico), most of the piazzas have light shows playing at night during the month of December. Each piazza has a different display.
Piazzas are one of the many things I miss about Italy. La piazza. The town square. The closest American equivalent is the shopping mall, but it’s just not the same. The piazza is the heart of the city. It’s the place where everyone comes, where the market is held. Everyone passes through here. We haven’t lived here in 3 years, but the first night we walked through the square we ran into someone we knew. Benvenuti! Welcome home.
(In summer all of the cafes set out tables in the center of the square and friends gather for drinks (apperitivi) before dinner and then again afterwards, late into the night, out under the stars in the sultry air. Concerts, rallies, parades, giant chocolate Easter eggs, everything takes place in the piazzas.)
Piazza Prampolini, the largest and most central piazza, currently features a dazzling display of black-and-white patterned and colored lights gliding across the cobblestones of the huge square and up the faces of the buildings.
It was fun seeing the main clock tower building, which houses a bank, covered in colored dots. Not even the Duomo (Cathedral) was spared. In fact, the Duomo looks even better this way, an improvement on the unfinished facade (apparently the money ran out a few centuries ago when the building was being finished so only the base is covered in marble).
My kids love running around this piazza and tonight was no exception. Though the night air was cold, the lights added warmth to this place. It was like being in the center of a circus stage, music blaring out of the speakers, lights sweeping over us, and my kids chasing each other around the square, running in and out of the shadows, bathed in green, red, yellow and purple light.
Magic.
That feeling you get when you are so immersed in the moment that you lose all sense of time, when you look up at the sky again with a sense of wonder, that even the cold air numbing your face feels right and good and you remember what it feels like to be happy.
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