As you stroll through the portico that leads into the Tettuccio, you can’t help but indulge your imagination as it conjures up a postcard image of the Belle Époque, those dreamy years between the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth when thermal tourism was flourishing in Europe, reaching a level of popularity never seen before or since.
“What we need to do is not to avoid living but learning to recover after the adversities. Collect the fragments, Sokei, the moment has come to repair your illusions. What is broken can be reassembled, and when you will do that, do not try to hide its fragility as it is now become a revealed strength” – from ‘The Dream of Sokei’ in ‘Kintsugi’ by Tomas Navarro
Fixing what is broken is not considered a valuable mastery, especially in the western society and especially in the younger generations. The perspective to appreciate what has been fixed and to discover its beauty is even less popular.
“A place is never only ‘that place’. We are a little bit that place. Somehow, without knowing it, we brought it inside us…and one day, by chance, we got there” – Antonio Tabucchi
The coastlines on the mainland are like borders along the journey by boat to the Aeolian islands, like they tried to remind us that from that point onwards we need to change our rhythm. As the change of rhythm is key to deeply understand the authenticity and the true essence of this bunch of islands hanging in the Tyrrhenian Sea out of the coasts of Milazzo, a bubble of space outside of time where being is still prevailing on doing.
“A beautiful photograph tells a story, reveals a place, an event, a state of mind, is more powerful than pages and pages written” – Isabel Allende
The attention of the team focused in a meticulous mise en place, the care of the housekeeper watering the flowers on the balcony, the sharing of the staff during the daily morning briefing in the meeting room, the relaxing music of the water sounds in a spa, the precision of the chef’s hands preparing one of the courses on the menu, the silence of soft lights in the hall late at night … they are just some of the situations and atmospheres that describe the life of the hotel and that tells its story.
“The nature’s complexity and intelligence show us the guidelines to manage companies and to assign the role to each player within them, with the awareness that the profit does not create value, but the creation of value does generate profit” – Massimo Mercati, MD of Aboca
More and more often, aspects like the impact on the environment and the social responsibility, together with the economic figures, are key in the evaluation of the success of a company.
“A better planet is a dream that begins to unfold when each of us decides to improve himself” – Mahatma Ghandi
Sustainable is “the development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” states the Brundtland Report, as the report entitled «Our common future» and published in 1987 has been named after the World Commission on Environment and Development’s chairwoman, Gro Harlem Brundtland.
“To each one of us the duty of transforming our wounds into insertion points for the wings” – J.W.N. Sullivan
Forced to stay at home, to rethink our daily activities, to restructure our working modalities, fun and relax time. Unable to go out, the life suggests us another direction, closer and more intimate with ourselves. And right in the moment when restrictions confine us in isolation and social distancing, the spread of the virus unifies us globally in the emotional and spiritual dimension.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution” – Albert Einstein
Plants can live without us, they have done it for billions of years before the Homo Sapiens appeared on the earth. Without plants, human beings are sentenced to extinction on a short time. The vegetal world itself covers more that 99,5% (estimates vary from 99,5% to 99,9%) of the biomass of the entire planet, reducing the animal kingdom, including human beings, to a miserable percentage.
“Less is more”: it is a concept often promoted as a precious key to improve the quality of life, and at the same time is often very difficult to be applied in the daily routine when the abundance of inputs – on the professional, personal, educational level … – can be oppressive.
“We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop” – Mother Teresa
We turn to the left, leaving the grey asphalt road that cuts in two side the savannah for the uneven dirt one where the red light spoil flies in the air after the passage of the jeep’s wheels: one second that seems a time jump, leads us in a new dimension. The gaze sweeps with no boundaries to chase colours and new spaces, and looking at the landscapes becomes a kind of meditative moment of connection with the surrounding nature.