HESPERUS

I woke up very early this morning and, looking at my wife sleeping peacefully next to me, it occurred to me that soon, on June 10th, we will celebrate our anniversary, 50 years of marriage; I think back to how it all began, how destiny made our paths cross and lead us to live many happy years together.

After finishing my military service in October 1968 and returning home, I found a friend and former schoolmate who proposed that I go out with the group of friends who met every Sunday afternoon in Piazza San Marco. After a few months the company began to thin out because some went off on their own with their respective girlfriends and so the few remaining joined us with a company that met not far away, in Via della Dogana. With this company we went to dance in various clubs, especially some that were on the Monte Morello road. We were a company of around 60 people, boys and girls, and when we arrived at a venue the room was practically all ours.

Attending this company I made friends with a shy and reserved girl, her name was Fiorenza, she almost always stayed apart and I had never noticed her much until, during a group dance, the music was that of the song i Watussi, she was dragged to dance by the other girls; due to the rather lively dance her Venetian style necklace broke, I, who was next to her, picked it up and, while we sat at the table at the end of the dance, I started to repair it and gave it back to her intact; she looked at me and smiled and from that day when we went out on Sundays I often danced with her; then I don't know how it happened, but from that day on I parked my motorbike there in Piazza San Marco and went to dances in the car with Fiorenza, on the way back she left me in the square and I picked up the motorbike and went home.

In that period I had had a disappointment, a girl, my sister's schoolmate, with whom I had fallen in love, responded to my advances kindly with a refusal, I was very down in the dumps so much so that I became attached to a girl I met in a party, her name was Donatella who was always close to me, so when the company decided to spend New Year's Eve, it was 1969, in a club in Fiesole, the Blu Bar, I went with her. During the handkerchief dance, it had been decided that it was the girls who would choose the knight from time to time, I realized that every time I danced with Donatella it was Fiorenza who put the handkerchief on my shoulder and danced with me; that evening I didn't pay much attention to it and so at the end of the evening I accompanied Donatella home and gave her a gift, a Modugno record, with a note from me in which I proposed that we get together, she didn't give me an answer immediately.

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The complete story on the book DREAMS OF SUMMER NIGHTS