Come li stornei

At sunrise every morning during this cold spell, there is an insistent cheeping sound from the street. I hadn't paid it any attention, thinking that it was the odd bird gorging itself drunkenly on the semi-ripe (never ripening), partially fermenting dates of the palm trees.

A closer look yesterday morning revealed, however, that the noisy avian chorus came from the plane trees next to the curtain wall of the town, right outside our window. It was the sound of hundreds of starlings warming up before setting off in whirling, dense clouds, to their daily gleaning of food.

Sometimes it takes a banal occurrence to fully appreciate a poetic reference. Take Dante's description of the run of the mill 'peccator carnali' in Inferno V:

E come li stornei ne portan l’ali
nel freddo tempo, a schiera larga e piena,
cosi' quel fiato li spiriti mali

di qua, di la', di giu', di su' li mena

The contrast with the 'historical' lovers, described as cranes, and the 'literary' lovers, described as a pair of turtle doves, seemed obvious enough. What had never hit me before was the concreteness of Dante's description of the starlings, in their cloud-like, changing flight.

Those inhabiting southern climes may have read this as self-evident, but for one from the Boreal regions, it was a revelation, an ornithologically realist simile.