My Eyes Often Rest Upon One Of Them; It Is
Grottaglie, Distant A Few Miles From Taranto On The Brindisi Line.
I
must visit Grottaglie, for it was here that the flying monk received his
education.
The flying monk!
The theme is not inappropriate at this moment, when the newspapers are
ringing with the Paris-Rome aviation contest and the achievements of
Beaumont, Garros and their colleagues. I have purposely brought his
biography with me, to re-peruse on the spot. But let me first explain
how I became acquainted with this seventeenth-century pioneer of aviation.
It was an odd coincidence.
I had arrived in Naples, and was anxious to have news of the proceedings
at a certain aviation meeting in the north, where a rather inexperienced
friend of mine had insisted upon taking a part; the newspaper reports of
these entertainments are enough to disturb anybody. While admiring the
great achievements of modern science in this direction, I wished
devoutly, at that particular moment, that flying had never been
invented; and it was something of a coincidence, I say, that stumbling
in this frame of mind down one of the unspeakable little side-streets in
the neighbourhood of the University, my glance should have fallen upon
an eighteenth-century engraving in a bookseller's window which depicted
a man raised above the ground without any visible means of
support - flying, in short. He was a monk, floating before an altar. A
companion, near at hand, was portrayed as gazing in rapturous wonder at
this feat of levitation.
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