Travel notes. In the fall, the soul of the Big Apple.

The heart.

This time, with more time available, I chose the horizontal dimension of the metropolis. I walked the campus of America's largest public university north of Harlem – home to students from all over who speak over a hundred languages; I walked along the endless West Side seafront that starts from Battery Park - where cyclists, skaters, acrobats, runners and dancers stop only when the light goes down - to the end of the High Line which crosses old buildings and meat warehouses in mid-air, converted into restaurants, shops and spaces for young designers and artists that form a singular melting pot; I ran on a Saturday morning in Central Park together with thousands of Americans who crowd every corner of the park - a colorful multitude who train their bodies with dedication and joy; I attended the Sunday ceremony in the black cathedral of Harlem – with young women crying so intensely from the joy of baptism that they drowned out the loud sound of the drums and electric bass that accompany the rite; I attended the celebration of a baseball game that takes place almost every day at Yenkee Stadium in the Bronx – among children, men and women who eat, drink and smile for hours; I visited Lincoln Center with its theatres, schools of music, dance and acting, savoring its respect for art and culture.

In the centrifugal force, in the outskirts of the urban space, in the corners less frequented by tourists and on the margins of business time, I found the beating heart of New York, but without perceiving its soul.

The soul.

I didn't want to go to Ground Zero, due to the old memory of the towers and some senseless prejudice. But it's impossible not to be attracted to it because you see the Freedom Tower everywhere you go. Yet, once I arrived at the World Trade Center Memorial, I experienced the impressive experience of the permanent generation of the Void. The vivid mental images of 2001, the endless names of the over three thousand victims reproduced on bronze plaques and the sound of the water falling endlessly in the footprints of the demolished towers open a passage in the heart. The memorial is not a funeral mausoleum, not a monument to the fallen, but the architecture of a pain and a wound eternally open as in a Dante's circle. Your eyes still look towards the tallest buildings, but you can't help but hear the sound of the abyss on which the foundations of Manhattan's new business center rest. Around this shrine America coagulates its spirit in a surprising way. The architecture of this part of the World Trade Center Memorial is as unique as the democratic path that wanted it by first gathering the economic resources and then choosing the project from over 5000 proposals.

Twenty years later, the soul of the Big Apple revealed itself to me in the fall. In addition to the steel muscles and the beating heart, in addition to unscrupulous finance and fun at all costs, there is a secret spirit that can manifest itself extraordinarily when all the people are called to choose together. Reflecting Absence is the project created by an American and an Israeli architect, but it is also the project of a community marked by persistent pain.