American life wizardry.
On my way to Washington D.C. on 16th October I took some photos of Baltimore skyline from the bus window and I uploaded one of them to Instagram with the title “Never more, never more… Baltimore” as a citationistic tribute to Edgar Allan Poe, one of the main writers (Lovecraft and Le Fanu being the others) who inspired me to start writing tales during my childhood. The next morning I happened to visit the Capitol, right on the first day after the end of government shutdown, and while I was entering the rotunda, a photographer took some pics of my visitors group. The same day I spotted out by chance Alec Baldwin posing for a photo session behind the Smithsonian Castle just after I've been interviewed by a tv news crew along the National Mall. Eager to complete my American tour of Vermeer’s paintings started by visiting The Metropolitan Art Museum and the Frick Collection in New York, in the early morning of the 18th I reached out the National Gallery. While I was waiting for the museum to open, I glanced at the dozens of newspaper front pages displayed outside the Newseum on the opposite side of the road. On the The Sun of Baltimore an iconic photo of people entering the Capitol Rotunda illustrated the main article “Back to work and on to next deadline”. When I realized that the man in brownie jacket and hat portrayed in that photo was not my doppelganger, I instinctively asked to a person near me if there was a way to buy a copy of that newspaper in Washington. He enthusiastically answered that he was from Baltimore and that he could easily send me a copy. Yet this has been just one of the many numinous chains of coincidences I experienced during my USA adventure.
