melancholia

"The Tisci family story goes something like this: In gritty, war-ravaged Taranto, Puglia, in the heel of Italy, a seventeen-year-old girl from a relatively well-to-do latifundis (land-owning) family met a nineteen-year-old boy from the wrong side of the tracks. They met once, on the street, and fell in love. Her parents forbade them to meet again, but they would communicate furtively through a window at the back of her house, and he told her that he would give her a train ticket to Milan, a city he knew, where she was to find a hotel and a job. He would join her when the next train for Milan left Taranto, a week or so later. She knotted up her rosary and her Bible and her few precious things in a handkerchief and dutifully did as instructed. But it was six weeks before he tracked her down; he had the money for only one ticket, which he had given to the girl he loved but did not know, and thus he had to walk more than 600 miles to a city he had, in truth, never been to before."