ETNALONGA

That day I found myself, as often happens, stuck in traffic on the ring roads of Florence, tired and impatient to get home, after a long day of rain.
I had my camera with me. During one of the long stops that punctuated the short restarts, I took the camera and took some photos leaning out of the window, at the bright and multicolored glares of the traffic, which reverberated on the wet asphalt, on the dripping and flashing bodies of the cars in the queue. There were the flashing of the direction indicators, the illuminated shop windows, the curtain of thin and thick rain that from close up manifested itself in the beams of the headlights and in the distance created halos around the tall street lamps.
I was about to pass under the railway bridge on which for years the advertisement of a well-known chain of grocery supermarkets had stood out.
Later, looking at the printed photo, I had the idea of filling the dark and nocturnal background beyond the railway not with what should have been there during the day and which could not be seen in the photo taken in the evening, that is, the Fortezza da Basso surmounted in the distance by the Fiesole hill, but with something different: in fact, I painted a train arriving at the station, with dim neon lights in the compartments and, in place of that absent and ancient Fiesole hill hidden in the damp darkness of the night, I wanted to make the cone of a volcano appear, illuminated by the light of one of its spectacular eruptions: Etna!!
It was then necessary to change the title of the billboard to "ETNALONGA" …… an explosion of freshness! (The pun is between the name of the supermarket "ESSELUNGA", which means long S, and Etna-longa).
S.B.