'A casa vecchia

'A casa vecchia. Sixty-seven is the house where no one lives anymore: your grandparents’ house, the one back in the old hometown, the one you grew up in and still pass by whenever you’re in the neighborhood. In the Smorfia it isn’t a building — it’s time that has settled inside a place, with the furniture left where it stood and the smell you recognize before you even walk in. In dreams, sixty-seven arrives when something old comes back. A room you see again in a dream with impossible precision, an object found in a drawer, a person who is gone and who, in the dream, sits in their usual place. These dreams leave a distinct taste, somewhere between tender and wistful, and almost always they speak about who you were more than where you lived. The number has a rougher side too, and tradition doesn’t hide it: an old house is also a house that wears out. Plaster peeling off, shutters that won’t close, things that need to be kept standing. In dreams it becomes the feeling that something of yours needs upkeep — a relationship, an actual house, a habit that used to hold and now creaks. The image that leads here is the old house: the place that remains even when you no longer live there. And inside that house there’s also the dust of time, the kind that settles on the windowsills when you come back after months away. If sixty-seven came up in your dream, your roots were in it. We won’t tell you to go back or to let them go: we point out that in your dream there was a place you come from, and that it keeps sending you messages.