Fireflies in flight –
the wind shows the way
on a journey through the fields.
Haiku attributed to Bashō
June and the fireflies, yes. I wish I could tell you that the fireflies are here, and that if you can resist the weariness of the day and the pull of sleep, you’ll see them. Today is June 24, 2025, and the war that history books will call “the war of twelve days” has just ended. The sky is full of stars tonight, and maybe it is silent even there, where the heart was racing just days ago. But people are still dying, you know – like flies. In some places, war seems to never end.
Meanwhile, a priest – the parish priest of Sorrento, Don Rito Maresca – is celebrating Mass wearing a robe in the colors of Palestine. The Swiss fencing team turns their backs during Israel’s national anthem at the European championships, and students at Harvard hold up signs of solidarity during graduation. Hearts that beat faster. Hearts that never stay indifferent.
No one will be able to write in the history books that it all happened in a haze of indifference. Perhaps they will only write that, at a certain point, humanity learned that some powers are hard to challenge – maybe not impossible, but very, very hard.
Now, imagine a world filled with peace: it’s June, and it’s the magical night of San Giovanni – a mysterious doorway between light and shadow. The fireflies are here, and so are a million stars. You walk through the meadows in silence, right where the woods begin. Maybe you’re that poet from the Edo period, from the seventeenth century. Or maybe you’re one of those people who still go out walking today to meet the fireflies at the Hotaru Matsuri (蛍祭り), the firefly festivals of June in Japan, across the ocean. Along the Hokura River, in Niigata Prefecture, someone tonight is walking into the night to be astonished by the fireflies.
Hotaru (蛍): fireflies, in Japanese. Wandering souls, symbols of beauty that is always fleeting – and precisely because it is fleeting, it becomes transformation. It carries within it a kind of eternity that never fades.
And this isn’t just poetic – it’s scientific. Today we know that there are memories that stay with us for a lifetime, whether they’re painful or beautiful. This is emotional memory, the memory of the heart.
Like fireflies in June, dancing among distant stars, feeding our moments of beauty means creating a star-filled sky of dreams, memories, smiles, and comfort – a small, vibrant world of light, where we can return to breathe whenever we need to.
I’m Maddalena De Bernardi, an Italian freelance journalist and mom living in a small village of the Apennines mountains. Many of my stories begin with a coffee and a question, talking with my son in our day. What was the world like once? What was the world like once? Why do we do things this way? As our grandparents and great-grandparents lived their everyday lives, their stories became intertwined with the great events and figures of world history.
Where will the road take us today? We follow tales through geography and historytravel, writing about culture, slow living and quality of life.
Find The Route is my collection of moments, questions and discoveries: a place to travel through geography, history and imagination, one route at a time.
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