For Watamu and the Italian community in Kenya, it is a very sad day. Following respiratory complications from a short-lived bacterial-viral disease, Riccardo Lenzi, son of Roberto, a Roman entrepreneur well known in Kenya and owner of two hotels and as many restaurants in the tourist destination, as well as a member of Comites Kenya and very active in the development of coastal tourism, passed away in Mombasa hospital at the age of just 35. Riccardo worked with his father and for some time had started an agricultural and environmental project inland from Malindi.
Here is our memory.

In those green eyes that the ocean, in which he was mirrored almost every day, barely dimmed, there was the goodness, the purity, the simple soul of an eternal boy who did not want to be contaminated by the heavy and often useless logic of this world, and the over-sensitive soul that could not bear the weight of the fortune he had, which was more tangible in Africa.
I still called him Riccardino, because I met him when he was twenty years old and, like many kids of that age, he hid in discretion during the day and went wild dancing with his peers in the evening.
Handsome, tormented, easy to enthusiasms as well as depressions. 
But Riccardo Lenzi was not an actor, he never acted. 
When you met him he radiated enthusiasm, of future projects.
He would assure you that he was on the right track, that he was at least trying, and you couldn't think he wasn't sincere. He was, like an angel with wings always a little curled up from the falls of the night before, who has not lost the will to fly again.
It is easy to judge from the outside, especially when you are the scion of a family that has been able to afford to have it all, starting with an affectionate and accepting father who has always trusted and wanted you with him. Riccardo was proud to be part of the Lenzi family, to be the grandson of ‘Papa Remo’, and at the same time he felt the great responsibility of having to continue the businesses and fruitful investments made by his father Roberto in Kenya. But he was ambitious, stubborn and would have liked to find his own way, to displace those who considered him just a ‘daddy's boy’ and judged his excesses as children of excessive carefreeness and eccentricity. A journey in stages and challenges with himself, even dangerous ones, which in recent times had led to something concrete: love for his partner, new projects more in tune with his crystalline nature, the need, even physical, to abandon certain excesses.
And still many goals to achieve, first of all the serenity of accepting oneself and not being afraid to embrace one's fragility and turn it into a reason to boast, through the affection he was able to attract to himself, because purity, especially in this world of good masks over evil hearts, always has charisma. I would have liked to see the sea in your green eyes for a long time to come, the moments when your smile was not ashamed to abandon your cigarette and show off your shyness, listen to your Pindaric flights and dreams that wanted to break down all the walls, by dint of banging against them. 
Ciao Riccardino, it wasn't enough for you to grow up, you became eternal.