Do you see the two pictures here? One was by Monet and represents the Waterloo Bridge in London, it’s a pastel and it was part of a series which Monet dedicated to this bridge during his stays in London. There would be many interesting details to tell about the experience of Monet in London and why he sketched also pastels, besides the oil paintings, but this is another story. The other picture represent a “Harlequin’s Head” by Pablo Picasso. No-one will ever see them in reality anymore. They are gone, forever. They were burnt together with other art masterpieces which had been stolen on the 16th October 2012 from the Kunstahal in Rotterdam, Holland.

The responsible for this act of pure idiocy is the mother of ringleader of the thieves, a Rumanian woman called Olga Dogaru who wanted “to protect” her poor son, her gentle child, Radu, who had not been able to sell to little scrupulous private collectors his loot. 

So he was arrested for the suspicions hanging over his head and his loving mother tried first to hide the stolen paintings in a cemetery of the small Rumanian village of the improbable name of Caracliu or Carcaliu (reality is so often more absurd that imagination), then, when she realized that the Police was inspecting accurately the area, decided to put all the paintings together with old paper and old shoes into a large stove at her home and burnt all merrily.

 “What a good mum I am” she probably thought, relieved to have a chance to defend her boy ”I make all that rubbish disappear, so nobody will have any proof against my son”.

What makes stupidity really insufferable is that it is forever in action - idiocy knows no rest

“Verus amicus amore, more, ore, re cognoscitur”.

“You can recognize a true friend from affection, behaviour, words and deeds”.

This Latin proverb concentrates in a few words the noble and fundamental value of friendship, a deep and strong relationship which is based on shared thoughts, shared feelings, shared projects and needs a constant mutual empathy for each other’s sorrows and joys.

Nowadays we live in an age of somehow aseptic and exasperating individualism, emotional distance, and incapacity of speaking with others in the context of a real communication from person to person. No problems! The social networks are there to fill this gap and to help us to build up easily an immoderate number of “virtual friends”. Just a few clicks and we are able to multiply our friends and with another click we can get rid of friends who have become obsolete. We don’t need to work regularly on our friendly relationships, to keep them alive, to make them grow stronger…Just a further click on the button “I like” and it’s enough.

I’m awfully old-fashioned, a real dinosaur, but I’m still faithful to the Latin approach…

Bertrand Russell wrote in his autobiography:

"I was told that the Chinese said they would bury me by the Western Lake and build a shrine to my memory.
I have some slight regret that this did not happen as I might have become a god, which would have been very chic for an atheist "


I have always  appreciated this kind of  lightly ironical humour, which I consider a proof of deep intelligence.
I wonder why, according to my personal, irrelevant and surely too limited experience, the best people, from every point of view, including positive human values, I have ever met were all atheists.


"With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."


Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery, because in years of living in antebellum Missouri she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery was God's will.