LA CELVIA BEACH AND THE THOUSAND COLOURS OF THE SEA

Today I was watching Lorenzo flipping quickly through photos on the IPad. Alas… I am becoming like those mothers who start every sentence with “When I was young….”
I hold my tongue, I watch him “one, two, three…” but he carries on swiping through, absent-mindedly. Finally…. “When I was young, leafing through a photo album was a whole other story!”
I remember when my cousins and I used to sit on my uncle Lello’s knees to look at his precious photo album. At that time, a photograph was a walk down memory lane. Something intimate. Occasional and thought of. And it was from him that I heard for the first time talking about the Celvia beach as the beach of the thousand colours. He used to tell us how every photo was different according to how light caressed the surface.
 
There are pink rocks, darker ones, the green of the scrub; and the sea is crystalline until sunset, when the sun conveys grey-green shades and the Celvia turns into a little paradise, he used to say. A half-moon of golden sand at dawn, almost white at midday and grey at sunset. Such sweet memories led me there today; this is the reign of wild solitude, of deep silence, where the hands of the clock run one after the other without ever meeting. I feel like running with them and playing with time. On the horizon, my eyes get lost in the sparkling of the sea and its transparent water.
La Celvia beach is so popular and crowded that it is difficult to get a spot on the sand in the height of summer. This is why I love to be here out of season, when everything seems to be hanging out of time. In Porto Cervo everybody knows it and everybody comes here at least for one season, but only few people have the chance of plunging into its pristine silence in May.
Today, suspended between the sky and the sea, we fly over La Celvia admiring the contrasts between the colour of the sand, the scrub, the pink granites, the sky and the amazing stretch of water devouring the horizon.
 
The thousand colours of the sea …. I think that uncle Lello had right this in his mind when he published his most famous photo collection with his Balzano Publishing House.
I like to think that he, too, is still painting the sea from up there.
Because everyone imagines paradise as he pleases, and I imagine it just like this!