"Boa Viagem: Lisboa espera para ti"

Ah, my loving Lisbon.

My adventure as Sve volunteer in Spin ended, and my head is full of memories, feelings and thoughts. Eight months of vida portuguesa, a life-changing experience full of new friends, self-development, a better knowledge of myself, my good points and my limits. What I bring back in Florence?

A minha Lisboa, a city that I’ve learnt to love: a stranger at the beginning, a deep love at the end. It’s impossibile to count all the precious moments, alone and with other people, that made these eights months unforgettable. While I am thinking to that, memories just come to my mind, one after the other: mi casa portuguesa in Anjos, the Superbocks with my friends on some miradourous, wild nights in Barrio Alto, and then together with Marcella on some beach in the weekend. So many new friends and persons, Stefano, Eva, Stefania, all the other people from Anjos. And then the volunteering work at Spin, the work lunch with Ines, Agata, and all the other people, our visits at churrasquino in the Barrio Padre Cruz, the crazy month of Sant’Antonio. A life in balance between lonineless and friendships, like Lisboa, made of saudade and alegria. What all this means to me now? It’s really possibile to split the good things and the bad memories? I don’t think so: everythings flows together, like a river, and it would be wrong to take just the good times and forget the bad ones. Tudos os momentos made it as it was, and it’s right like this. Could it be better? Could I have make it more of it? Could I have enjoyed it more? I don’t know. What is sure is that Lisboa has changed myself, my life and my inner personality. I am more weaker and stronger at the same time, younger and older in the same moment.

What I am feeling now? Well, Lisboa is like a old relationship ended too soon, too quick: I haven’t enjoyed the time in a proper way to count all the blessings and beautiful things that this city has gave to me. Lisboa is now under my skin, it won’t go away that easily. Maybe a new flame in the future? Who can say what the destiny has planned for us. I just finish this love letter with the beautiful sentence I’ve read on Miradouro de Nossa Senhora do Monte, above our loving Anjos house: “Boa Viagem: Lisboa espera para ti”

Volto sempre, minha querida.

Maurizio