estimated reading time: 3 minutes

On San Servolo island, spring is the most wonderful time of the year. The calm water mirrors the clear sky and the daylight lasts until dinner time. Flowers of all kind blossom around and daisies reappear on the fresh grass after winter, in which all kind of small animals and insects spread around. As it happens every year, the huge wisteria bush was ready to blossom as well. It waits always so long until its moment, but then the fame is worth the wait. It becomes always very popular in spring, since it occupies a quite big portion of grass right at the entrance of the Island. Therefore, not only the students – who sometimes happen to be rude and take some twigs from it to enjoy them – but also tourists and occasional visitors cannot stop admiring its beauty and praise its great smell. The wisteria bush gets very proud of itself in spring and waits an entire year to get its generous dose of loving compliments.

This year, however, a few days of warm spring were already over, but no compliment or human smile even reached the wisteria brush. It could not understand what happened and why the island seemed so desert, more and more as days passed by. It tried to enjoy the lagoon, the sunlight, the fresh grass, but the whole situation made it doubt about itself: was it no longer beautiful? How could it know if its flowers were still there, beautiful as always, with nobody complimenting about them? The weeks went by and still no contact, no eyes making the bush feel alive and pleasant, no compliment, no human admiration.

Around the wisteria bush was buzzing a big Bee. 

“Look at that bush and its lilac flowers” the Bee used to think. “I’ve never seen something so beautiful in the whole garden”. The Bee used to fly around the bush every morning, close enough to smell its charming perfume, far enough not to be noticed: it was the most beautiful bush in the whole island, admired every spring by lots of people. Compared to it, Bee felt just a regular bee: not too small, not too big, with a powerful buzz but all in all just a bee, nothing compared to flowers. The Bee has seen human beings taking care of flowers for all its life: buying them, selling them, smelling them and gifting them to the loved ones. Bees did not have the same success with humans. Very few humans ever spend some seconds to look at them, most people are just frightened and shoo them away. How could the bush even look at Bee? They simply came from two different universes. 

Bee kept on visiting the bush secretly everyday until the end of spring. During one of those visits, in a hot morning at the end of June, all of a sudden a gust of wind pushed Bee right into the wisteria bush. Very embarrassed Bee did not know what to do and started mumbling something about how graceful its flowers were. The wisteria bush, surprised and flattered by these words, payed the compliment back with a kiss. 

Since then, they have loved each other until the end of their days and started to live the most loveful springs on San Servolo island. From that day on, they did not care anymore about humans and their odd rules on what does or does not deserve attention in the world. In fact, if you see a wisteria bush outhere, there is probably a bee around it, trying to woo it.