I’m in Portopiccolo - You won’t believe what is once was!

Welcome to Porto Picolo, Italy. Now, I know what some of you are thinking. Porto what? Fair enough. So, where in the world is Porto Piccolo? Great question. If you picture Italy, most people immediately think of Rome or Venice or Florence or the Amalfi Coast. But Porto Piccolo is nowhere near any of those. It's tucked away in the far northeastern corner of Italy, just a few miles from the Slovenian border, overlooking the crystal clearar waters of the Adriotic Sea. It's hidden between the historic city of Trieste and the towering limestone cliffs of the Gulf of Trieste. Most tourists drive right past it. In fact, until recently, many Italians had never heard of it. But that's exactly why I wanted to come here, because sometimes the most breathtaking places aren't the ones everybody knows. They're the ones quietly waiting to be discovered. Now that we know where Porto Piccolo is, let's find out why it's here. Let's light it on fire. Porto is a breathtaking little harbor town overlooking the Adriatic Sea. And if you would come here today, you'd probably assume it always looked like this. With the marina, the crystal blue water, the restaurants, the luxury hotel, everything feels like it was always meant to be here. But not long ago, this place was far from a paradise. This was a quarry, just a giant scar carved into the coastline where workers for decades did nothing but carve out the stone and haul it away, making it a giant hole in the ground. For decades, people looked at this place and saw nothing but blasted rock and emptiness and destruction. They saw a landscape that had been stripped apart. All they could focus on was what had been taken away. But then a group of developers came with a completely different vision. They didn't look at the query and ask how do we hide this? They asked okay how do we use this? Instead of filling it up, they built into it. They didn't cover the cliffs. They embraced the cliffs. In fact, what makes Porto Piccolo so breathtaking today isn't despite the quarry. It's because of the quarry. The rock walls, the natural terraces, the entire character of this village exists because the wound was never erased. It was transformed. And honestly, that's how many of us look at ourselves. So many of us stare at the places where life carved into us. The disappointments, the failures, the mistakes, the heartbreaks, the regrets, and we assume, okay, that's the end of the story. But Hashem often sees something we don't. He doesn't just see what is. He sees what can become. This entire village exists because somebody looked at a scar and saw potential. They looked at emptiness and imagined beauty. And maybe that's exactly how Hashem looks at us. We see the poor, but Hashem sees portaola. We see the broken stone. Hashem sees the finished masterpiece. We see everything that we've lost. Hashem sees everything that still can be built within the things that we lost. Sometimes the greatest miracles are creating something breathtaking from what looks beyond repair. And if developers can take an abandoned quarry like this overlooking the Adriotic Sea, and turn it into a masterpiece, we can do the same with ourselves. Most people look at the quarry and see what was destroyed. It took a visionary to look at the quarry and ask, "What can I build here?" That is what Shuva is asking us. Hashem isn't asking you to erase your past. He's asking you to build with it.