Un po’ di mare e tutto passa.

4:13

He had been coming all summer, not every night, but enough that the bar slowly started to feel like it belonged to him too.

Mario. Tall, late sixties.

White linen shirt, always a little wrinkled — like he had slept in it, or like he simply didn’t care enough to iron it.

Italian. Naples , he told me that the first night, a few years ago.

And then again many nights after, like it mattered.

“I live in Naples,” he would say, lifting his glass.

As if Naples were not a place, but a credential.

By this summer he didn’t need to say it anymore, I already knew.

Maria once asked me about him while we were setting up the bar.

“How long have you known each other?”

“Three summers,” I said.

She laughed.

“That’s not time.”

Island time counts differently.

Three summers means three different versions of yourself.

Three cycles of arrivals and departures, three times the same sun burns the same beach — different stories every year.

I like the island. Actually, I like the people who come to the island.

People on vacation are different. They arrive lighter.

Problems stay somewhere behind — in cities, offices, airports.

They sit more slowly.They talk more, and they remember things they forgot about themselves.

Mario is a bit different. He does not come to escape something. He comes to return.Every time he exhales, a semi-hidden, cracked smile appears, almost by accident. He celebrates oxygen, like every breath is a small confirmation that being here is enough.

One afternoon I noticed his hat.

Nothing special. Faded from the sun.

On the front it said: Tutto Passa.

I asked him what it meant.

He rolled the Negroni glass slowly on the bar and looked at the beach before answering.

“It means everything passes,” he said.

Not like a warning, just like a fact.

“The good things pass, the bad things pass, summers pass.”

He pointed a little with his glass toward the beach.

“Even the version of you that is sitting here today… that passes too.”

People were walking barefoot in the sand.

Kids playing with a ball. Someone laughing from another table.

“Everything is temporary,” he said.

Then he took a sip.

“But that’s not a bad thing.“

A small smile appeared again when he exhaled.

“That’s why you enjoy it and celebrate it while it’s here”

The quiet confidence of someone who had already learned what most people spend their lives trying to understand.

Un po’ di mare e tutto passa.