From my grandfather Vincenzo, I have a meticulous chronicle of life in Naples during the bombings of World War II, a few black-and-white photographs, and his resolve—what drove him to have two villas built in Fiuggi, one for each of his two children who survived the destruction of those years. When he died, one of the villas was sold almost immediately. The second remained, guarding a silent genealogy—an architecture of the soul.
From my earliest childhood, I spent the last month of summer there with my brothers, without my mother—she stayed in Naples, to rest, they said—surrounded by my father’s side of the family: uncles, aunts, cousins, and his new wife, whom he cheated on with my mother until I turned eighteen; often even when we were there, under the pretext of a quick trip to Naples “for work”.
That house fused with my flesh, became a kind of backroom; the archetype of something I still haven’t been able to define—frozen and unsettling, yet familiar. It was a threshold. Neither inside nor outside. A breach in time and blood. Maybe every life inherits at least one place like this, built by those who came before, so that we can start from one step higher.
Its corridors, the large silent rooms named after colors and opening onto the terrace, the yellow cloth dog, the attic with its chests, the Moroccan cushions around the fireplace, the Reader’s Digest collection, the gong that called us to meals, the red-brick paths, the weeping willow, the hydrangeas taller than me, the silver firs, the butcher’s broom, the rose garden I never saw in bloom, the damp, dark, frightening garage, the empty ground-floor rooms once meant for the maid—they keep filling my dreams, pulling me into a spacetime shift between what I was before the samsara and what I am now that I’ve come back to the countryside, to the same life-saving smells and sounds, to solitary spaces that are both comforting and pleasantly haunting—a cross between a windswept moor and an abandoned mall in the middle of nowhere.
Now it intertwines with, and digs into, the unconditional love I had for my father—whoever he was, whatever he did—which left me mutilated when he left with barely any warning, cutting me in two: the human part here, living and aging and enduring linear time; the other in the sky, in the earth, in the water, in the light with him. Now I take refuge there, while I wait for something to pull us out of this hallucinatory wreck we’re all floundering in.
The true entrance to the villa was not where you’d expect; the real entrances never are. You reached it from the back, up a short staircase that didn’t lead directly inside, but to a small veranda. There, on certain evenings, my father would light his pipe and teach me how to capture the light of the invisible through his Voigtländer. That place will forever remain a liminal space for me, an inlet in my being.
Maybe every life, in order to fully happen, must pass through at least one such place. Not non-places, but in-between places. Not spaces, but interruptions. In them, you don’t exist—you begin to exist.
Embroidery is a kind of small-scale theology: every stitch has meaning, every empty space its own reason. Embroidery is a form of writing woven into fabric, a silent calligraphy. Each thread crosses time. Each knot is a dam against nothingness. Embroidery art is the metaphysics of the slow act: it resists the speed of the algorithm not by opposing it, but by eluding it. It creates a parallel temporality, a different grammar of the present.
There are eras that slip out of the world, like shirts too tight to wear. Then all you can do is pause. The task is not to understand, nor to run. The task is to remain—on that veranda that is also a labyrinth, a baptistery. To remain there like someone keeping vigil beside a shadow, or beside themselves.
Some do it by praying. Some by planting seeds.
I—when I can—do it with needle and thread: now, materializing my grandfather’s diary on the selvages of old bedsheets stitched together.
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