THE IMMENSITY OF A JOURNEY.

Travelling can mean going off on an adventure with your friends or embarking on a voyage of discovery of new worlds and new cultures; whatever the case may be, travel allows you to broaden your knowledge and expand your linguistic horizons. Pietro Citati writes “…The boy learns that, when we travel, we always undertake two journeys: the fantastic one and the real one, that of the guides and that of the world, now they agree, now they fight”. A journey, in fact, is not planned, it is lived. Travelling means immersing oneself in the eyes of nature, history, the past and the present, to experience and, above all, to grow. The journey represents the path of every individual from birth to death. “Travel coincides with life, no more and no less: is life anything other than a passage from birth to death? Travel in space is the first sign… Travel in space symbolises the passage of time, physical displacement and inner change; everything is travel. ‘Travelling” is one of the most common actions of the day, if not physically, we travel mentally…. Even with a simple song we embark on extraordinary journeys, even talking about an emotion we have already experienced takes us on a journey into the past, leading us to memories that have become important throughout our lives. Equally exciting is travelling through a book, a deep immersion that takes us to fantastic or real places virtually, free to fly and fantasise. The American writer John Steinbeck wrote: “People don’t make journeys, it is journeys that make people”; in fact, travel is just a pretext to get to know a part of ourselves better. It is no coincidence that when we return from a trip, we feel that something has changed, we look at things from a different perspective and our attitude is sometimes affected.