Birkenau Block 25. Call me Lavinia but I have no longer a name, numbers instead. I live, if this can be called life, in block 25 in Birkenau. My block mates are numbers like me… We are going to die, we know. We are packed in this block, waiting, or no longer waiting, resigned, weak. It’s dark here, narrow windows, we can hardly breathe but I can still see the moon, a big moon, lightning the dark. There is something comforting in that light. Now I am beyond the ground I am a tree, I am moon, I keep the distance from all this cruelty and sadness. I am free. The house is silent. The wind on my branches just seems a breath of clouds on an extinguishing fire. I’m alone again. A cycle has been completed: my destiny of seed that has sprouted, the design of my ancestors. Lavinia is now earth and humus. Her  spirit dancing in the evening wind (translated from the Italian...

Shortly before Christmas, in a tiny little town, high up in the mountains where there was a very strong wind, a Santa Claus’ helper was thinking about how he could cheer  up the tiny little town. This small, small town is called Bolognola, lately it has been a bit shaken up but now it’s pretty good! Thinking and thinking again and again,  today and  tomorrow, he decided to call Santa Claus. He called him in a small town, a bit bigger than Bolognola, in the plains. There was no wind there but some fog indeed. Sometimes it snows and in the plain 10 cm of snow are so many! Last year it  snowed just before Christmas. You have to know  that the inhabitants are a bit clumsy (they are not used to snow) and to move around they  needed a 4X4 sleigh! The helper and Santa Claus wrote to each other via chat (and yes… even Santa Claus has become technological). They decided that...

I have heard so many times the word magic during my stays in Marche and Umbria, magic meaning a peculiar characteristic, uniqueness of the Sibillini territory. This peculiarity was highlighted during Concita De Gregorio’s interviews to the “Women of the Sibillini” too. Most of the women’s answers on the meaning of “home” and “future” after the earthquake, were connected in an essential way to the territory women belong to. I, as an external “character” and not involved in that specific place, started thinking about this topic. I asked  myself “what would I tell a tourist to convince him/her to visit these places?”                 I thought about it for a short time but. As I tend to base my  judgments on parameters as much objective as possible, the word magic has begun to be unconvincing. To be more precise I do not...