As a woman who came back to Italy after years spent in other beloved places, trying to salvage what feels lost, buried and forgotten, I identify as a “pagana,” from the Latin “pagus:” an inhabitant of the countryside, one of those who were outside the bounds of city jurisdiction and administrative power, at the fringes, and therefore not easy to control.
Living about an hour away from the city feels exactly that way, refusing all that Rome, with its long history, came to represent (empire, patriarchy, domination, religious dogma and influence, coercion, grandeur and decadence) while being still mischievously close.
I was born in Rome from a non-Roman family; a family still able to remember the old times of simple and difficult living in the countryside. And yet, in this very native village, the cultural amnesia brought about by Church influence and national pop culture feels very tangible, especially in summer, when the crowds flee the hot city, looking for some ease on the hills, carrying with them their penchant for noise.
I have chosen to come back and take refuge here because this is the way I can retrieve an interrupted connection, by listening to the land, both her beauty and grief. I can’t identify with the modern narrative of what an Italian is supposed to be like. I am delving deeper, through and beyond layers of erasure, denial, dispossession and sorrow.
In Italy, there’s such a huge cultural variance among regions, and even provinces, that experiences and perceptions are bound to be very different. The narrative of the unitary national state has not been enough to mend the fractured alliances, the rivalries and prejudices, not to speak of profoundly different histories and heritages.
Dwellers of the countryside have been the first to become “others” under the rule of the powerful, the state, and the Church, which have exercised their disciplining influences, while forgetting, breaking and homologizing by various means.
On a deep level, this national state I was born in doesn’t feel aligned with the longing in my soul. I have felt the depths of belonging in the Scottish Highlands, and in the Baltic forests, and now, in this half-forgotten corner of the Italian countryside, even though here my belonging is more frayed with friction.
My way of dealing with this is through deep attuning and listening to what I can observe and experience in my surroundings and in the interwoven lands of the imagination. Both crossings are passages into subtler perception: thus, flowers, plants, trees, birds, insects, animals, features of the land, mountains, lakes, rivers, people, and emergent feelings and stories, theirs and my own. Wherever I am, I listen, also when it is difficult to make out feeble voices and inarticulate emotions.
I offer one-to-one guided poetic and narrative journeys. You can book or contact me here.