The Legend of Moon Eyes

Sguardo di Luna was born and grew up in the village where everything revolved around power predominantly held by grown men and where differences in social class drew the great true difference.

The father returned an invalid from the First World War and thus became a cheap miner, while the mother, on the other hand, lived perpetually in the typical drudgery of having to manage little money with the many children who came into the world

The little girl lived where the lights of the stars mingled with those of fireplaces and carbide lamps. All around, the adults navigated between the weight of the affairs of home, the darkness of the tunnels and the waves of a sea made of red wine, which diffused fumes capable of confusing the painful bites of life with the caresses of the tepid wind that sometimes blows over the plateau.

Between those dwellings with their wooden and reed roofs and mud and stone walls, everything flowed like a stream, sometimes swollen and fast, sometimes dry and slow, until his eyes met those of a young man who had just arrived, and thus the feeling was kindled, their only capital.

He called her Moon Eyes, so beautiful and sweet was she, the only one with eyes that could penetrate his soul. They met at a party organised in the little square near the small church, a celebration organised in honour of the Saint, one of the few Righteous to notice miners. That evening a beautiful game was born, made up of glances, discreet, long, intense as it was hidden, but it was enough to promise each other love, the kind you swear one day and forever. And then they danced in a circle and for a long time, in front of the fire burning with wood and passion, as if nothing and no one else existed around them.

He came from who knows where, he too a miner, he too cheap because he was still a teenager, with the courage of someone working in the dark and mining muscles yet to grow.

But still these were times when, especially young women, did not possess the right to decide freely, one could not choose freely, not even one's life partner, especially if they were cared for by those in power in the community. In the case and as in this case, one was simply regarded as the property of the stronger, who considered himself free to grab it and take it away at will.

And so it happened. Such was her beauty, that one of the sons of the king of that small empire noticed her and decided to take her. In the event that he failed to do so, it was all too easy to imagine the disgrace he would suffer and that, for this reason, he could take revenge by filling his life with obstacles and problems, including striking at his nearest and dearest.

She was well aware of this and conscious that she could not escape a fate now sealed, she made the decision to disappear without a trace.

True love prevailed and in disappearing she sacrificed herself to save the existence of those closest to her, those closest to her heart.

No one knew her destination or her end, she simply disappeared into thin air. It is said that for a long time a young man would light a candle in the window at night, as if to show that the memory was always illuminated, just as it is said that one sometimes happens to see her, at night, dancing through the narrow streets of the village, especially near the two majestic centuries-old trees that still stand between those houses.

She moves sinuously, where everything is still magic, like the stories that hover and endure on those rooftops, including her own, that of Sguardo di Luna (Moon Eyes), for then none so beautiful was born.

Innocent Satta