In 2021 I booked an off-road excursion in the Gargano. I booked it for one reason: to fill Dany’s eyes with wonder.
There is a good kind of selfishness in doing things like that. You don’t do it only for him. You do it for the privilege of being there when it happens.
When people think of the Gargano, they think of the sea. The beaches. The postcard views. That tour promised something else: the inland landscape, the dirt tracks, the karst gorges, the ridgelines, the forest. We weren’t simply driving around off-road. We were entering a part of the Gargano that asks for attention, slowness and a willingness to be surprised.
Dany and I were on the roof of the Defender. The entire time.
Put like that, it sounds like pure adventure. In reality, it was also incredibly tiring. To keep my balance I had to grip the side rail of the roof tightly with one hand, while holding Dany with the other arm — protecting him, steadying him, letting him experience everything without fear. By the end, my hand and arm were in terrible pain. But it was one of those times when the body willingly pays a price the soul considers irrelevant.
The view from up there is hard to describe. Not because of the scale of the landscape, but because of the position we were seeing it from. We weren’t inside the experience. We were above it, suspended and exposed. Everything looked sharper.
The route took us into the Romondato streambed, one of the narrowest karst incisions in the Gargano: geology telling a story on a timescale far greater than our own. From there we climbed towards the ridge leading into the Foresta Umbra. The ancient beech forest recognised by UNESCO doesn’t need to impress you. It only has to exist to put you back into perspective.
Along the way: deer, tortoises, fish. And tiny frogs, barely half a centimetre long, sitting at the edge of the ponds like little details placed there deliberately to teach you to look more closely. Wonder did not always arrive on a grand scale. Sometimes it appeared in miniature, asking only that you slow down enough to notice it.
The strongest memory I have of that day isn’t the Defender. It isn’t the Foresta Umbra.
It’s Dany. His face. His amazement. The way the world in front of him still seemed untouched and enormous.
Being a father is partly this too: making an effort without letting your child experience it as a burden, only as protection. You feel your arm giving way, your hand aching, your muscles tightening. And inside, you are fine. Because that physical pain is softened by something that has no precise name but that you recognise immediately.
Sometimes we think a memory needs something extraordinary to be made. Then a sheet-metal roof proves us wrong.
An old Defender is enough. Staying balanced for long enough is enough. A forest, a karst gorge, a deer in the distance, a tiny frog at the edge of a pond. Watching someone you love discover how big the world is — that is enough.
That day I hadn’t booked an off-road excursion. In the most human way possible, I had booked a piece of memory to build together with Dany.