Lince

On a particularly dark, cold, late winter night on the very cusp of spring, Paolo and Tiziana were in Palermo with their grandfather Guglielmo and the whole family. In the city the festivities for the Solstice were being prepared and the people were animated by that confident euphoria that precedes great events, full of expectation for the blessing of the new harvest, fruit of their hard work in the fields. Luck, they said, was coming to town and so they lit up the darkness with fires and the streets with the colour and hypnotic perfumes of flowers. The sky was the blackest of blacks and a light mist hid the steps of the children as they ventured out into the alleys between the baroque palaces to see the bonfires that brightened the valley with long tongues of fire, their crackling breaking the uncanny silence that lay upon the city. Their grandfather traced the outline of a constellation suspended in the heavens that is only visible on the darkest of nights. Even on these rare occasions the beautiful, seldom noticed stars that comprise it are revealed only to the eyes of those really experienced and patient observers who are willing to wait and recognize them. So too an artistic scent is revealed only to those true connoisseurs who have the knowledge and the soul to understand it! The vault of the heavens looked like a black cloak that had enveloped, no swallowed the entire milky way, but Guglielmo skillfully began to point out tiny luminous dots that seemed distant at first but grew steadily in intensity, becoming ever more beautiful and mysterious as the children stared at them. Lince is in fact famous for being a constellation full of double stars, pulsating like a beacon in the night, sending signals to travelers and dreamers.