The Rainbow Bridge

By Caporali Giorgio

The love for animals is a deep, natural bond, free from all the prejudices and conditionings of the love between human beings. For Giorgio it started to be so when, on a cold morning of January, he meets Lupa, a dog with whom he shares many happy years, full of adventure and outdoor walks, becoming true life companions. The one bond between them is a true friendship, special, such as the one that binds many human beings to their animals who share with them their lives, in a reciprocal exchange full of emotions and deep feelings until, as narrated by an old Indian legend, the animals, after having left us, they run over the Rainbow Bridge, that connects the Earth to the Heaven, and beyond which, in a beautiful nature, they will return to live happy and healthy, waiting to be reunited with their human friends. The author, with his words, with his touching stories, moves us so much so that in his relationship with Lupa comes back to memory the atavistic bond between man and dog, now ennobled by deep and unalterable feelings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Europa Edizioni
• Release date: May 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9788868548926

Book preview

Giorgio Caporali

The Rainbow Bridge

as if they were

all the years of our life

Translator

Manuela Vetromile

Europa Edizioni

© 2015 Europa Edizioni s.r.l.

www.europaedizioni.it

I edizione aprile 2016

ISBN 978-88-6854-821-6

I edizione digitale maggio 2016

ISBN 978-88-6854-892-6

to Lupa, my loved friend

In open field we go

man and dog

Pablo Neruda

Nicoletta, thanks

Franco, thanks

I did not know Lupa. I did know Giorgio’s love for Lupa. Intense, full, complete. I felt this love by his words, by his eyes which lit up when he was telling about his life with her. I felt it mainly through this book that tells of the casual encounter between a man and a dog, both certainly unaware but almost predestined for the impulse that was in them and that, somehow, had placed them face to face on a cold January morning, up there, where the summit of the mountain invites the eyes to a panoramic view of the great valley that unrolls its meadows until it reaches the Apennines.

An encounter that has turned into a life together, so long as it is the life of a dog, therefore, too short compared to the life of a man. Giorgio, however, has lived during those years, as if they were all the years of our lives so much immediate and intense their friendship was. Giorgio and Lupa were life companions, or to say it better a pack for many happy years. As the author says: We were happy together, Lupa and I. Many happy years full of adventures, outdoor walks, and experiences. Then suddenly the old age; sad and painful was the time when the dog illness manifested itself as well as her death. It was above all devastating because Giorgio believed that Lupa was a mythological hero who would not have known the fatal point.

This story of a life, this story of a friendship between a man and a dog, is like hundreds of thousands of other stories. Whoever loves dogs knows how much love they are capable of and knows the strong relation that might arise between us and them. I am one of them. I loved my dogs, I rejoiced with them, and I cried inconsolably upon their deaths. Giorgio’s book and the story of his life with Lupa is therefore a narration shared by many of us who have deeply loved our animals. But in Giorgio’s book there is something more. There is, first of all, the ability to pass on the love he had felt, the ability to say the words that everyone would have wanted to say to his animal friends, to express the depth of feeling that had united him with Lupa, to make palpable and alive the symbiosis of affections that had united man and dog.

He does it with a narrative that is often a fresco; vivid and intense as the colors of the Rainbow Bridge between Earth and Heaven, that a poign

ant Indian legend imagines crossed by our dear animals when they leave us lonely and folded up in our sorrow and clinging to the memories of our short and long life together.

Loretta Santini

In the moment we decide to tell a part of our life, a veil, a feeling of sadness seems to envelop us, perhaps because that important part of our existence has passed, perhaps because those years were lived as if they were all the years of our life.

There are moments when I feel the need to review some pictures, slide them between my hands, let me go to the emotion of those fragments of life that they represent and hear their voice; a photo first, then a second one and so they follow one another to repeat that story, that experience which is now behind me.

Those images, that I cherish, are imprinted not only on the paper, but in my deepest, along with others that the eye of the camera was not able to stop, but my soul did.

I would try to leave to words the task of telling that path of life, to be able to enclose it in a few pages, from which free the voice while the photos will slip through my hands.

1.

the meeting

Our first meeting took place on a cold morning in January, up there, where the summit of the mountain invited your gaze to embrace the great valley that unrolls its meadows until it licks the Apennines Ridge with the Sibillini Mountains which extend, almost as a gesture of submission, to the Gran Sasso of Italy, which imposes on the landscape its undisputed majesty. We both stopped, perhaps in surprise, perhaps for fear; she was statuesque in her immobility, elegant in her posture, while sniffing the air to translate into danger my presence.

For a moment I felt her intense, penetrating, fearless look which pushed its way inside me making me experience a confused feeling of