We will know it there too, in the dark depths of space. As we know it in many places here, in Sicily, where he has linked his name to multiple forms of beauty and art. Antonio Presti, the patron who takes to heart the dry rivers, the abandoned neighborhoods, the empty hotels, and above all the too many places of the contemporary mind and soul marked by silence, or by senseless noise, or by abandonment or discouragement. On a mission for Beauty, we could define him: a Mediterranean and Magna Graecia and Sicilian Blues Brother who constantly measures himself against the Impossible. How to bring great artists to re-make a river, all of art. How to re-make the Librino neighborhood, invent doors and windows to let beauty in, make it a daily interlocutor in places where no one realizes that fighting ugliness is fighting a battle of civilization and humanity: a strongly political battle, outside of any political party.
Asteroid 20049 is in the Main Belt: it is a small fragment of a planet, a small rocky Earth in orbit between Mars and Jupiter, witness to a very ancient past. Like Antonio Presti, who did not join any planetand orbits – stubbornly – in its irregular and unpredictable way, a celestial body of rare luminosity (generosity is a form of light) that lights up our dark skies. It is very far from here, the asteroid “20049 antoniopresti”but how beautiful to think of it in its stubborn orbit, up there, perhaps looking at the sky from the Pyramid – 38th Parallel of Motta d’Affermo, or through the “Window on the Sea” of Tano Festa, or in any of the terrestrial places where Antonio Presti he chose to sow beauty to reap humanity.