A Beautiful Swim
It is today eighty-seven years, eight months, and thirty days that the San Franciscans wake up to the view of their spectacular vermillion bridge. This 25th of February 2025, is not, however, a day of which history will probably preserve the memory. Today is merely the day when I finally re-start my blog.
In the greater scheme of things, this does not sound like big news. Indeed, it isn’t. My blog will be just a drop in the wide ocean that is already surrounding us. But the reason why I am creating it is not to follow a plan of conquest of the world—that will ensue at some later point in my life.
No, this space will be a home for the mind, a harbor for my thoughts and ideas, where everyone is welcome to join if they wish to.
To start with, I should probably tell you a little something about myself.
The first thing that you should know is that books and story-telling have always accompanied me throughout my life. They have shaped the person who I am today. Thanks to them, I have been able to stretch the muscles of my imagination, I have travelled to remote times and places, created new worlds and lived many lives. To me, books represent a friend; a teacher; a source of advice and discovery that constantly adjusts the way I look at the world and myself.
Other than a reader, you could say that I'm an Italian girl who has recently moved to the United States for love, washing ashore in this extraordinary country that has already bewitched the hearts of many, with its thousand promises and its thousand contradictions.
Before that, my life meandered from Wales to England, from France to Malta, always with an eye and a foot on my beloved Italy. In each country, books and people, new and old, have always accompanied me. They did so when I felt lost and unsure in Wales at the age of seventeen, and they continued to do so when I lived my fairy-tale dream to study French and Spanish at the University of Cambridge, in England. And as in any fairy tale, there were some wonderful moments and some darker and more difficult moments, but the stories that I found in the books I was reading and translating were always there to comfort me and ground me.
So yes, due to an odd series of coincidences and choices, I currently find myself back in San Francisco, ten years after the first time I decided to follow that bright and gorgeous young man that is still by my side today to sunny California. And today, like then, I once more proceed to start my book-blogging adventure.
This alone might explain why this first post started the way it did, with a reference to San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. But the beginning is also a little reference to the first paragraph in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Why? Well, I studied French. And I’m also clearly trying to confer some authority to my blog by quoting some wise-sounding literary personality. Yes... but not only.
There’s an actual connection between Hugo’s work and what I’m trying to say here. Hear me out. There's a chapter in the novel that talks about the printing press. Hugo compares it to a magnificent monumental building, where each storey, addition and decoration corresponds to a contribution to the giant mass that constitutes human knowledge. I find this analogy fascinating. It describes so well the different layers of knowledge and experience that make up our civilization and our individual lives. Like an intangible Tower of Babel, each author and book contributes new ideas to add to the old. Can you tell that I've recently read Babel, by R.F. Kuang?
Anyway, this blog will be my small addition to the building, an extension of the profound relationship that I have with books and literature. What should you expect from it? Book reviews, literary discussions, book news discussions, and any other reflection relating to reading and writing. There’ll also be the occasional unrelated post, because you should never impose rigid boundaries to the river of creativity.
So, yes, today is not a day to remember for everyone. Today is just for myself. Today I set the first stone.
Today is just a tiny drop in the ocean. But it will be a beautiful swim.
