Nell'ora del dolore

 Ed è una musica che va

There are perhaps only three Toscas in the world worth knowing about: Tosca the opera by Puccini, the singer Tosca Donati, quoted above and featured below, and the sim Tosca on Soul Grid. 

Tosca is the social heart Soul Grid. Soul is a predominantly German grid, but this sim has an Italianate feel, as though you had stumbled into a village  in Emilia Romagna. A church and an arengario, a piazza, subtle brown stone buildings under terracotta roofs, and a long table set for a village feast beneath a floral pergola.

One sim - but multiple venues. It's no surprise that sim Tosca has often topped the charts  on OpensimWorld for the number of active avatars. Events on Tosca at have a family feel, where no-one is a stranger for very long. The wall of friendship is testimony to this.

It's a charming place to visit even when there are no events on - you can go on the art walk...

... enjoy the placid lake, the picturesque ruins, and the charming houses on little islands...

if you're feeling romantic, you can take a twirl around the dance floor where every day is Valentine's day...

... or shop at the Christmas Market, full of crafty and colorful gift ideas for yourself an others.

The father of Soul Grid, Rudi Backerly, passed away suddenly at the beginning of this month. His spirit lives on, however, in this sim, as on the whole grid. It seemed appropriate to drop by to pay my respects, and see a picture of the real man, for the first and last time, positioned appropriately at the head of that long family dining table.

It's too soon to say if Soul Grid will survive this immense loss. Most grids, if we're being brutally honest, cannot keep going without the energy and inspiration that one of the principal grid founders provides. But the community of Soul grid is big enough perhaps to overcome all this. 

Their sheer bloodymindedness may do it!

Opensim is resilient, should things work out differently, and if one grid fades away for practical RL reasons, the residents generally get absorbed into other communities and are able to continue. 

The power of the hypergrid is what fuels this endless possibility, and we should all be grateful for that, just as Rudi was, when he set up his version of the Weltraumbahnhof HG portal hub.

In Puccini's Tosca, everyone is pretty awful to one another and things end very badly. That is so not what Soul grid is all about, so I prefer to think of this as a sim for Tosca Donati, elegant, talented, soulful. Here she is, singing 'Ho amato tutto'.  

This is dedicated to Rudy, and with all possible best wishes and condolences to his very dear wife Nasti, to recall with affection their love affair with life, creativity, and the community of opensim. A flight, as the song says, that has departed, gone off into the blue.

HG Address: soul-grid.de:8002:Tosca