A father’s letters to his daughter

Sandro Pertini

It was 1980. Sandro Pertini, President of the Italian Republic, had travelled to Urbino to meet with a group of university students. At one point, a young man heckled him. Pertini didn’t flinch. He had known censorship, the real kind, first-hand, and had paid for it with prison and internal exile. He took the floor. He restated his position. And then he did the most extraordinary thing of all: he defended that young man’s right to challenge him, reminding him that being able

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Earlier letters

Speaking

More than a hundred years ago, six of your great-grandfather Giovanni’s eight siblings boarded a ship for America. I don’t know what they said to each other that morning. I only know that six left and two stayed behind. I imagine fear disguised as courage. The harbor. The smoke and the roar of the engines. The last lingering hugs. And the breathless thought that goodbye might be forever. They started new lives in New York. Some did well, some less so. But they all put down

Aug 83 min read

Hope keeps you standing. Then it starts holding you back.

I waited a long time for someone to become what I hoped they would be. We have all been there. I believed it. I saw the good moments, I told myself patience was enough. I was waiting for a person who, I understood later, didn't exist. The one who existed was the one I imagined. For a while it works like that. Hope keeps you standing. It gives you a reason to stay. The problem comes later. It comes when you realise you're building everything on a person who isn't there. There'

Jun 211 min read

The unsaid story of Joachim

He was the first of six. His father disappeared during the war. Prague, 1945, give or take. Joachim was eighteen years old and overnight became the father figure to his five younger siblings, helping his mother in a home that had almost nothing. He did not choose it. It happened, and he stayed. Then the decision to move to Milan. There was work at Piaggio. Night shifts, the factory floor, the smell of metal and engine oil. And somewhere inside the exhaustion of those shifts,

Apr 192 min read

To trust. To entrust

The first time you took the train alone, you held your ticket tight. You knew the platform, but you didn't know exactly what would happen once you stepped inside: who would sit beside you, if the train would be on time, or what you would find at the end of the line. You boarded anyway, with the look of someone thinking: it might just work out. That is trust. Entrusting is different. It’s when you hand the ticket to someone else. It’s when you say: "You lead the way this time.

Apr 181 min read

Lone Voices

There comes a moment when you feel the answer clearly within you, yet the chorus around you is saying something else entirely. In that moment, something inside you wavers. It’s only natural: it stems from that need to belong, to be mirrored, to feel that "I, too, think this way." But truth is not decided by a majority. History is full of lone voices that were right, and unified choruses that were wrong together. So, if your ideas truly convince you, if you have examined them,

Mar 141 min read

The second best moment

We are taught that timing is everything. That the window opens once, and if you miss it, it’s gone. We look back and see the time that has passed as a door that has closed. But not everything has to start early. Many things begin when we are a little more ready. When we stop waiting for the perfect conditions and find, finally, the courage to take the first step. And there is no need to torment ourselves with ifs and should haves. We cannot go back. But we can always choose w

Mar 131 min read

51/49

51/49 is a strange thing. The difference is tiny, almost laughable and yet it decides everything. We imagine that people who keep going must carry something exceptional inside them. A rare talent, an unshakeable confidence, a special kind of certainty. Then you look more closely and discover that's often not the case. Ordinary people. With fears. With doubts. With the same urge, at some point, to say: enough. The difference comes later. It comes when exhaustion sets in. When

Feb 211 min read

That tiny line

The doors close with a sharp, dry sound. The air grows heavy, and time slows down. But that place isn’t as far from us as we think. It’s just one step away. There is no clear line between those who are out and those who are in. This isn’t a story of "good" and "bad"; it’s a fragile weave of encounters, wounds, and absences. A parent who couldn't stay. A friend who steered elsewhere. A word left unsaid when it was needed most. Or, quite simply, life crashing down on you witho

Feb 141 min read

The art of riding the wave

If there is one thing I believe I’ve learned over time, it’s that life rarely follows the script we spend so much time writing. Change is often sudden, uninvited and, to be perfectly honest, a bit of a nuisance. We spend an infinite amount of energy anchoring ourselves to the idea of how we "would like things to go," but the truth is that the power of the waves doesn't care about our anchors at all. The secret isn’t to defy the wave, but to be ready to ride it. When a massi

Jan 232 min read

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