I was born in Autumn, when the Luna Park was in town. Its lights and sounds filled the night, the kids screamed on the rides, their hands sticky with cotton candy.
As a kid I lived on the "street of the thousand turns", with the school on one end and my family house on the other, where lived mamma, papà and nonna Valentina. My grandma survived the war, taking care of her siblings despite the bombings and walking miles on foot to sell salt so she could feed them. She told me this story every day, while knitting, with me at her feet playing with my sticker book.
I was 4 years old when my 10 year old cousin unveiled to me the secrets of the alphabet. I loved to help her doing homework, feeling the weight of the dictionary and its slim pages.
My primary teacher said of me:
"Bookworm Lisa, some day she will be a writer"
so don't be surprised if you find me here today telling you that's what I have become.
The day after my Bachelor Degree in Clinical Psychology I put on my backpack and left to go see for myself what was there to find. It turns out there's a lot more than I imagined around the corner. Fifteen years on, and I'm still not at peace that it'll not possible to see all there is to see.
I am sure about very few things in life, except I love my family, I've been to 32 countries, I speak three and a half languages, and I hate tourists and contracts. At some point in my life, you could have met me publishing scientific papers, cleaning hostel toilets or serving tacos y guacamole barefoot. I laid awake at night wondering the mystery of human relations, genetic disorders, and falling stars. I swam with mantas, I smoked a cigar, I jumped off a plane... the biggest rush remains the day my daughter was born.
Will I move back to Italy at some point? I would love to eat lasagna and prosciutto round the clock. I would sit in the sun with my best friends, looking at passersby and gossiping over espresso coffee. And yet, somehow, I'm spending most of my time in Canada, where I kept going back year after year to visit the man whom I accidentally fell in love with.
And so here you find me, writing from a little window overlooking the maple woods, plotting new exotic adventures and making my dreams come true.
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