Prayer rug

This prayer rug is small, lightweight, and made to be folded and carried. Its sharp creases have become something like wrinkles – the mark of daily use. But it is more than a religious object. Step by step, it became a shield against the cold, against fear, against the roughness of the ground. It was found on the “death pass” of Ventimiglia, among rocks, scrub, and silences broken only by the wind. No one knows when it was left behind, or why. Perhaps it fell from a backpack during a sudden dash, perhaps it was abandoned because it had become too bulky – or too heavy for someone already carrying the weight of fear. You can almost picture the person who carried it. A man, or a woman, who had set out from far away with only the bare essentials. The rug, folded carefully and slipped into a backpack, was something like a piece of home – likely used at night as well, to curl up against and sleep. And then to pray, of course: to pray for survival, laid out in the direction of Mecca, perhaps in search of some kind of orientation, a direction — not only geographical. That rug witnessed brief rests and sudden departures. It gathered dust, sweat, perhaps tears. It absorbed the cold of the nights and the warmth of bodies pressed against it. It was a silent witness to a crossing made of waiting, of measured steps, of borders invisible yet brutally real. Now it is still kept here in Rome – but it goes on telling the stories of lives held in suspension, of people who travel not by choice but by necessity. It still speaks of those who cross passes more dangerous than most – like this one through Ventimiglia – not in search of something more, but to salvage what little remains.