Margins · Streets
Places, waiting and encounters where stories begin.
I was living in a small studio apartment on Via San Tommaso, in the old town.
It was a simple place, but the light that came through those windows made me feel good. One afternoon I heard an accordion rising from the street.
I leaned out and saw these two very young people: he played looking upward, she gathered the coins people tossed down from their windows.
For a few minutes, the street seemed to stand still.
They didn’t look like musicians just passing through.
Anna. People called her “la Pisuna.”
She slept in bank ATM lobbies. Here she was sitting on Viale Papa Giovanni XXIII.
There was something about her I have never found in anyone else: a rough, fierce, almost cinematic presence.
To many she was just a woman on the margins. To me, she seemed to have stepped out of a story already written somewhere.
In Vicolo San Lazzaro, I saw this woman kneeling against a wall.
I had never seen anyone beg like that, on their knees, with an almost unreal composure.
I walked past once. When I came back, hours later, she was still there, in the same position, with a few coins in a small open container and a slip of paper clutched in her hands.
It was her gaze that truly struck me. Not a desperate look, but something quieter, impossible to explain.
When I left her a coin, she gave me the faintest smile.
Ever since, I have carried that scene with me as one of the strongest images of my margins.
In the courtyard, a young man is sweeping in silence. He does it without anyone really asking him to, as if caring for a small patch of ground were already a way of living in the world.
A little farther on, sitting in the middle of the street as if it were their living room, are Don Mario, a priest, and a man from Eastern Europe with a long beard and eyes worn by the road.
That’s what strikes me. How naturally they sit there. In the middle of the courtyard. In front of everyone.
The bearded man lives on the street. Don Mario has walked the streets all his life: Bolivia, city outskirts, poverty, encounters, human struggle.
But in this picture I don’t see hardship. I don’t see poverty.
I see two people sitting side by side, still able to truly listen to each other.
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Book talks, a podcast and reels, mostly in Italian: I don’t tell you what I write, I let you see and hear it.
