Non amo che le rose che non colsi…

I try to translate these verses into the English language.

“My dream feeds on abandonment and regret.

I love only the roses that I didn’t reap, I love only the things that could have happened and they didn’t.

I see the house, here are the roses of the beautiful garden of twenty years ago!”

Guido Gozzano was an Italian poet leader of a poetic school known as crepuscolarismo, a poetic current of the early twentieth century, characterized by the use of a simple and confidential language and by the search for small things in common use and daily gestures that become imbued with melancholy in memory.

The excerpt from this poem (Cocotte) expresses regret and nostalgic memories and every time I look at this scene, with the protagonists who are so close and yet so distant, that although they love each other so much they have never even managed to call each other by name, this poem always comes to mind.