The word freedom is gaining weight and interest these days. It is a very common term, but it is not a well defined concept. Many people think that freedom is just doing what you want. Roberto, a mechanical engineer who has been working at CERN for eight years, does not agree. “That is not really freedom. To have the opportunity to develop yourself, to make your own decisions and, with them, perhaps, to make mistakes, that is mostly freedom”, he states.

It was in September 2012, a few months after the Higgs Boson was observed, that Roberto became a CERNie. He is part of the Handling Engineering (HE) Group, internally known as “the people from the transport”, because they are in charge of all the equipment used to transport a wide variety of objects: from huge unconventional shaped pieces to extremely delicate detector parts.

In particular, Roberto takes care of the overhead cranes which are inside almost all CERN buildings. They are as yellow as the sunflowers that surround this large lab in the summer months. And what do these cranes have to do with physics? one might ask. Perhaps not much, but without them, the handling and transportation of essential components of the accelerators would not be possible. And without accelerators there are no experiments. No discoveries.

This is, more or less, how Roberto tried to explain to his mother why he was moving to the other side of the Mont Blanc, the one that looks so beautiful in the mornings on his way to work by bike.

For Roberto, who comes from a country with a great artistic tradition like Italy, beauty is anything that leads to astonishment. Something that really shakes your soul. Something that, when you experience it, you feel is hard to breathe. A song, a landscape, a Botticelli’s painting… We have so many examples around us that we only have to be prepared to recognize beauty.

Besides the family and friends he grew up with, Roberto misses the smell of the typical food of his region and the medieval essence that characterizes Corridonia, his hometown, located in central Italy. “Everyone is probably a little attached to the roots, to the origins”, he believes, but over the years, Roberto has become accustomed to live outside Italy.

Although it is not far from here, our current circumstances make it difficult to travel there as often as before. That may be why Roberto now dreams of taking a four or five week road trip around the United States. “Anche il parassita vive, in natura, con puro inarrestabile slancio”, says a verb from Gaia Danese. The present time has turned the plans we had to postpone into dreams.

This Italian poet also wrote that she began to suspect that “la chiave stia nel sangue freddo”. Perhaps that is what is needed now. For Roberto, being cold-blooded seems to be the best way to solve problems, at work and outside it. “Just stay calm and try not to be too impatient to react”, he explains.

It is time to take distance and let everything cool down. Everything but the dreams, the freedom and the yellow overhead cranes.