Looking at it from our hills, the sea rises to the horizon like an immense building of light. (Francesco Biamonti)

The world we are telling you about has this different from other possible worlds that one always knows where the east and the west are at all hours of the day and night. It is a sloping world with irregular differences in height, with protrusions and recesses, so we always find ourselves somehow on a balcony, overlooking a balustrade of a theater whose proscenium opens onto the void, onto the strip of high sea against the sky crossed by winds and clouds. (Italo Calvino)