Trousers and blue jeans

Did you knnow that, Giuseppe Garibaldi, our italian national hero, the man who made one and all this bootlike country called Italy, wore denim trousers, in two words, blue jeans? Yes, Italy wa denim-made. If you happen to come to Rome you can check it out with your own eyes and see the very pair of jeans that he wore during the mythical "spedizione dei Mille", visiting the "Vittoriano", in Piazza Venezia. This marble, gigantic monument badly wanted by the piedmontese (the Savoy kings) who wanted to display their might and power in the Rome of the Popes overlooks the Via del Corso and was never loved by the Romans who called it for years on end "the typewriter"...

Trousers? I held my breath for a moment and wondered: when did the Romans, meaning our anciet fathers, stopped using the "toga" (the white cloth that looks like the priestly garments in the catholic tradition?) prefering the easy going trousers? I found the answer in the Galleria Pitti in Florence, many a time ago. I found myself in front of two stautes. One was of a Parthian captive, the other  represented Augustus in all his youthfull, laureate, classical beauty. I looked and looked and, all of a sudden, I realized that the parthian, the persian, the barbarian, with his messy hair and fierce face, wore trousers and shoes that looked like our modern Clarks! And that Augustus, with all his beautiful curly hair crowning his head, still wore a toga that left his knees bare and had sandals in his feet, fingers in the wind. And all of a sudden I understood that Augustus was the past, never to come back...