The Conca small waterfalls
"You don't know the miracles that Nature can perform, just as the learned don't know either"
"Didn't the learned believe until twenty-five years ago that a flying dragon was a fantastic monster? And don't we know now that there are hundreds of them, fossilized, on and inside the earth? Only, we call them Pterodactyls, because we are ashamed of calling them dragons flying, after denying their existence for a long time.
The truth is that man believes that what he does not see is impossible, just as the savage does not believe in the locomotive, because he has never seen it run...
After all, each of us, at birth, is destined to a series of changes as surprising as those of an egg or a butterfly. And reason, analogies and the Holy Scriptures warn us: the human form is not the last form we take...
What if I'm serious? ... don't you know that I write a fairy tale, strange and fantastic, and that you must not believe a word of it, even if it is true?
In any case this is certain... the keeper, the page, Sir John were greatly mistaken when, seeing something black floating in the water, they thought it was Tom's corpse and mourned him for dead. Tom, on the other hand, was very much alive and cleaner and happier than before. The fairies had washed him in the river with rapid waters, removing not only the soot, but the rind and the shell, and exposing the real Tom, which is new like an aquatic moth larva, when it emerges from a hole in its casing. of pebbles and goes away on its back, towards the shore, to lay down its skin and fly like a butterfly around the candles, burning its wings; let's hope that Tom is more prudent than butterflies, now that he has freed himself from the old fulliginous skin!
But good Sir John did not understand all this and got it into his head that Tom had drowned...
Meanwhile Tom swam in the river, with a graceful collar of gills, as lively as an eel, as clean as a salmon. If you don't like my story, lock yourself away in the study and learn the multiplication table which perhaps you will like better. There is something to satisfy all tastes in this world.
Tom had become a true amphibian... and, what is more important, he was clean for the first time in his life, he felt the joy of having nothing on his body except himself... and, instead of believing that the body generates the soul, as if a steam engine could generate coal, or that the soul is independent of the body and is only stuck in it like a pin in a bearing, destined to fall at the first shock, you must believe the only true doctrine of this wonderful story: the soul produces the body, like a snail makes its own shell.
Tom was very happy in the water. In the terrestrial world, he had been terribly burdened with work; now, on the other hand, he could enjoy a long period of vacation and had nothing to do but enjoy observing all the wonders of the clear and fresh water, where the sun is never too hot, and the ice is never too cold ."
Fragments freely taken from "Water Babies" by Charles Kingsley - 1862/63
The Conca waterfalls are located in Ponte del Conca, on provincial road no. 6 between the towns of Serra Nanni and Villa Grande, right on the border between Romagna and Marche. They can be reached with a very short walk on a dirt road which then becomes a path, to go over the waterfall you need to be careful and then you can continue along it and into the stream, but it is not a tourist route.