From 22 Hotels to 1:
From the Bubble to Reality
His hotel chain fails, and Orazio, after a year of absence from reality, starts over from an inn, discovering that “everything is welcome.”

The drama lies in the perception that you have of yourself an instant before things happen–“like the sign of the cross that you make in the morning, before beginning the day, when you recognize that nothing is owed to you. So the things that happen are welcome–because they are right, it’s right that they happen.” This is what Orazio gained, along with a new job–although “new” isn’t quite right. It all started with a hotel in Rimini, Italy, which, in less than 20 years, became a chain of 22 hotels in Italy and abroad–$65 million in turnover, 400 employees. Then came some errors and the crisis; at the beginning of 2010, he sold the company and the new stockholders ousted him. He lost everything. Today he goes grocery shopping, empties the trash cans, and prepares tea for his guests in a 50-room inn in Riccione, Italy.
But, before now, before starting over, he went forward “literally 20 centimeters at a time” in a year of absence from reality. “I lived in a bubble and everything annoyed me. Even the many beautiful things that happened around me comforted me for a moment, but didn’t change me.” Then there was the courage and the unrelenting companionship of his wife Laura, a civil servant at the town hall, who was the first to start working at the inn, though it wasn’t her job. “She went forward like a train; I felt grateful and annoyed.” Even his friends bothered him, and more so because, if they are there and they are real, “you can’t pretend that nothing is going on.” At the very least, you become arrogant. “I always thought that the others did not understand.” So he came to the end of every day feeling bitter. It seemed to him that he was at a party where everyone else was having a great time, and he was in a corner with a kidney stone. “Does that give you the idea?”
Then the spring was released. “The unforeseeable instant mentioned in the flyer published by CL about the crisis [“The Recession: A Challenge that Calls for Change”] really exists.” And beginning to take care of the small inn was enough to change everything. “In doing things, I saw my substance once again. If you dream, you can think whatever you want, even believe that you are awake when you are really sleeping.” But when you do things, you are yourself, the real you, in the good and the bad. “Nothing can remain abstract any longer, especially if you have the good fortune to have a job like mine, 15 hours a day in contact with people. It is from living that a different way of facing the day is born, that of welcoming the things that happen—helped by the grace of having certain friends and by the comparison with the work of School of Community.”
You can also think freely about the mistakes you made. “So much frivolity, quiet life...”—and see that always holding back on decisions led to superficiality, “which required a maturation on my part, on a personal level.” Now he can’t wait for summer and the beginning of the season. “Raise the curtain!”

A. S.