Everything is ready.
The suitcases are still in the wardrobe, the beach umbrella is in the basement behind the Christmas tree and there is no reservation in our name.
A journey is about to start, and yet we don’t take a step forward.
This year there will be no queues on the motorway, no animal games and not even a rustichella sandwich at the motorway café.
Just a bit of imagination. We pretend we enter our bedroom for the first time, after we have seen it only once in a blurred picture on a website. We let the shops and streets of the small town emerge from the haze of the routine. We try to explore, as if for the first time, the places we live in everyday. We discover that an empty Milan gives itself easily in the heat of August.
So we will travel to India as we eat samosa in Porta Venezia, and to Istanbul as we pay a visit to our friends cooking kebabs in Vimercate.
We will feel like Parisian artists as we walk through the Monumental Cemetery and 1950s bathers as we take a trip along the river.
We will cheat time and geography as we walk through Beijing in Paolo Sarpi and photograph a mime that takes off his make-up behind the Cathedral.
No planes, no passports nor departures in the night-time.
This summer we are going to travel without moving.