It’s the late XVII century when the Carradori family instructs the architect Pietro Augustoni to renovate the old palace, done on purpose of Cardenal Venieri. Venieri Palace is today the seat of the Liceo Giacomo Leopardi of Recanati and thanks to its unique position it has been the recorded, first by Risi and later by Martone, in one of the most famous films dedicated to Giacomo Leopardi: “Idillio” and “Il Giovane Favoloso”.
Augustoni wanted to give a title to that view on the Adriatic coast, the place where the endless line of the sea ends up merging with the sky: “volat irreparabile tempus”, that is “the irreplaceable time escapes”. Even Virgil talked about time that flies in his Georgics in line 384: “sed fugit interea, fugit irreparabile tempus”, that is “it escapes, irretrievable time. The violent “fugit” is here replaced by a softer “volat”, more appropriate for a noble palace. But still time has taken back its revenge by violently tearing the hands from that clock and it is even so cruel as to take away the possibility of seeing it while escaping and leaves us alienated in front of a flow that we cannot distinguish.
A few years ago, after the renovation works of the 2016 earthquake, those clock hands were put back in place, breaking the spell created by that 'theft' of history: the show goes on, the eye gets lost into the hills up to the sea, but whoever has the memory of that lack cannot but look sadly at those metallic hands that are now out of place.
Diletta Diomedi
