MY LOVE DOES NOT DIE

MY LOVE DOES NOT DIE

Aug 10, 2025 | BOOKS, PENDING COFFEE FOR, WOMEN

My love does not die is a book written by Roberto Saviano about the story of Rossella Casini, which I read thanks to Monica.

The origin of the title My love does not die is explained in the book, but it is surely the story of a love that is both disruptive and unavoidable.

Rossella Casini is a name that in itself inspires sympathy. Rossella is Tuscan, from Florence, a city of art where the struggles between the Guelphs and Ghibellines belong to ancient history.

It is the end of the 1970s, when heroin begins to take the lives of young people. Years of political struggles and cultural ferment.

1977: the year the first Star Wars is released, the Pompidou Centre is inaugurated in Paris, Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland form The Police, and David Bowie records Heroes in Berlin.

Rossella and Francesco are university students but do not attend the same faculty: fate brings Francesco right in front of Rossella’s house.

As in fairy tales, everything seems perfect, and at this point it remains to understand whether love really makes you blind and deaf, but love surely makes you strong.

With this strength, but alone against a sick world, Rossella follows Francesco to Calabria, despite his family turning out to be a ‘ndrina.

With this strength, Rossella even manages to convince Francesco to collaborate with the justice system, together with her.

But Francesco ends up in prison and his imprisonment somehow breaks their union, allowing the affiliation to prevail.

On 22 February 1981, Rossella is in Palmi, planning to return to Florence, but she disappears into thin air.

A nothingness that lasted 13 years. A nothingness during which her mother dies. A nothingness that swallows everything about her, literally.

Look closely at the photo on the cover of the book: that is the only image of Rossella.

The only image.

In an age when we fill our mobile phones with photographs, it took the intuition of a group of journalists to find Rossella’s face, which they recovered through her enrolment in the faculty of psychology.

I am grateful to them, to the Libera association, which works to keep Rossella’s voice alive, and I am grateful to everything that honours her memory, such as the school: Istituto Comprensivo Rossella Casini. 

Rossella’s love does not die, and neither should her legacy.

 

EVA SLEEPS

EVA SLEEPS

Sep 24, 2021 | BOOKS

Eva sleeps is what her mother replies to the postman in charge of delivering a package while we still don’t know anything about her.

Eva sleeps is a title that made me imagine something else.

Eva sleeps at the end of the book, but when I got to that point, I was moved because sleep represented a restitution.

And I was moved because there are bonds that can have the duration of a fragment but the indissoluble strength of something that nothing and no one can break.

This reading, once again from the series “Monica’s books” that I will never stop thanking, was a slow surprise, just like when something happens in life that you no longer expected.

And it is perhaps the things that did not happen that I appreciated, those that basically correspond to the truth exactly because of their absence.

Curiously I took another train trip this time from the far north of South Tyrol to the red and white lighthouse of Villa San Giovanni .

Looking from the window, images of the landscape and history alternate.

The history of Italy from 1919 to 1992.

The history of Italy seen from a very precise point of observation, high up, from the vertical earth.

But above all the history of that area that the most distracted, like me so far, call South Tyrol.

Francesca Melandri in her book published by Bompiani traces the events of the autonomous province of Bolzano, reconstructing a history that I had never considered in such detail.

Good and evil, souls and ideals, strategy and bad luck, intolerance and compassion are mixed within states, peoples, families, faces.

You should never forget to try to put yourself in the other’s shoes.

Ask yourself questions. All time.

Speaking of questions, there is one in particular that is constantly asked to Eva “Do you feel more Italian or more German?”

Her answer arrives right on the train, it is multifaceted and it could not be otherwise, considering all aspects.

Do you ever think about how much of you is the expression of your roots?

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