Many things had to happen. I had to suffer. You had to suffer so much. I existed because you existed. Now that I am at peace, tied to my roots, I feel I no longer exist. A Sunday in April, 1962. Just before Easter in Parma. And yet I came to you, the Church. Pascal and the Greek Cantos I held tightly in my hand. "With new dreams the Resistance brushed away the dream of the regions federated in Christ and its burning sweet nightingale. Damn those who do not know that this Christian faith is bourgeois, in its every privilege, every surrender, every subjugation. That sin is nothing more than the crime of disturbing daily certainties, hated for fear and aridity. That the Church is the ruthless heart of the State." As if in a dream I find myself before the city's gates, the bastions, the toll gates, the bell towers like minarets, domes like hills of stone, the grey roofs, the open terraces, and below the streets, neighborhoods, the squares, the Square, and through the middle the river, Parma, which divides the two cities, the rich from the poor. And again the Square, so much in the city's center, and yet so close to the fields, that on some nights you can smell the hay. The square, which feels like a walled arena when you're inside. There, I move amid figures who are out of step, remote. Figures for whom only the Church existed before, in whom Catholicism has suffocated all desire for freedom. These are my equals, the bourgeois of Parma, those of the midday Mass. I wonder if they were ever born, if the present echoes inside them, as it does in me and cannot be consumed. Clelia. We had always gone steady, we were meant for each other. But, Clelia is the city. Clelia is that part of the city which I have rejected. Clelia is that sweetness of life which I do not want to accept. That's why, for a desperate and final act of love... I searched all the churches, looking for Clelia. I found her and I wanted to look at her one more time. (Francesco Barilli as Fabrizio in Prima della rivoluzione (dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, 1964)