Editor’s Note
What the eye chooses to see. What the mind chooses to memorise. What the body chooses to repeat. All of it is often a mystery, left as much to the whims of the weather as to the restlessness of the human spirit.
Having journeyed through Italy for years, becoming intimately familiar with its town piazzas and exquisite Roman splendour and languorous lunches and everyday philosophy of “la dolce far niente”, Esperança de Souza discovers something strange—that her mind and her gaze have shifted from the majesty and epic narratives of the land, to something far more discreet, intimate—Italy’s vast parade of arches.
Whether gracing a mansion, announcing a shopping district, adding an accent to an old trattoria, framing love by hovering above those old balconies, or adding grace to a centuries-old cathedral, arches are the ubiquitous yet criminally overlooked, often invisible feature that guide and enhance both Italian architecture and the Italian way of life.
What does it say about Esperança that she notices, and beyond that, celebrates? And what does it reveal about us that we too are easily drawn into the folds of this journey, where our eyes can move away from the oversaturation of large things and loud dramas, towards the understated, the romantic, the persuasively gentle, the quietly moving…
‘In the Glory of Gentle Things’, more than anything, is a meditation on the act of observation. To see, to really see, in a world of fifteen-second reels and swipe-left-level attention spans. Which, in and of itself, feels like a discreet victory.
—Siddharth Dasgupta
The Bombay Literary Magazine
Author Note
I can’t quite put my finger on when, on my frequent trips to Italy, I sensed a shift in what commanded my attention. The sweeping vistas and grand monuments were still wonderful and intact but they didn’t hold the same sway as they once did. It could be repetition had faded the impact, or the presence of too many garrulous tourists had altered my terms of looking. While I continue to explore, I now feel the pull of an overlooked feature of a structure: the humble arch, in its myriad variations.
At first this was incidental. But it soon became a deliberate and cherished ritual, my mind alert to curvature rather than scale. Italy’s inexhaustible array of beautiful ruins makes finding arches fairly effortless. Gothic doorways, Venetian windows, painted vaults, a sun-kissed loggia; those in plain sight or those tucked into inconspicuous streets. Whether elaborately carved or simply stuccoed, pristine or eroded, each arch bears centuries of cultural memory.
On my travels, I tend to favour quiet spaces like a basilica, ornate or otherwise. There, under domed ceilings, ribs of stone fall towards each other, meeting in a union of perfect mathematics. The logic of an arch asserts itself. I eventually realised how arches have rearranged my attention. Following the contours of a curve has trained my eye to slow down and focus on details I might otherwise miss—a gesture in marble or a faint fragment of a fresco.
Walking beneath the endlessly elegant porticoes of Bologna or Turin is where I love to linger the most. Each arch is an echo of the one before, each framing a tableau of city life. A figure disappearing into a panetteria. A cluster of chairs displaced around tables. Pigeons patiently waiting for crumbs. Occasionally, I have to navigate around a lively gathering of nonne. The cities may be different but the snippets of life are similar, becoming a recurring motif. Even to move under an arch is to briefly suspend time. For a few fleeting seconds, I am no longer entirely where I was, and not yet where I am going.
I keep coming back to why I find arches compelling. It’s more than their refined shape that mellows the harshness of any space. Perhaps I lived a former lush life among arches. Or maybe this craving for structural softness stems from a lifetime of living in rooms defined by severe angles and insistent corners. The more I think about it, the more I find an arch’s curves deeply strategic. An arch finds its balance in harmony and not resistance.
These lines from a poem by John Ciardi come to mind, “Most like an arch—two weaknesses that lean into a strength. Two fallings become firm.” There’s something about that strength that feels akin to sustained longing. An arch makes me consider another possibility: that longing might itself be a place to live. A longing named hope.
—Esperança de Souza
Acknowledgements
Cover Photograph: Jose Luis Lobera/ Banner Design & Photo + Narrative Editing: Siddharth Dasgupta
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Author | Esperança de Souza
Based in London, Esperança de Souza is a copywriter and UX designer working at the crossroads of language, design, and human experience. Trained to think in both systems and sentences, she brings a dual fluency to her work. Her practice is rooted in attention: how words, micro-interactions, and small gestures quietly shape the way we feel, decide, and act. An ardent traveller, she is perpetually attuned to the magic embedded in the mundane and the quotidian rituals that hold entire worlds. She collects observations and is drawn to stories that surface in chance encounters, and to the emotional charge layered within spaces, objects, and routines we rarely stop to consider.
