It is such a pity to travel to Rome and not spend a couple of days there: this city offers so much to see every time and you never stop knowing her. Anyway I felt lucky to be there for work, even though for a very short time, since I had a nice walk in Piazza Navona and a very tasteful cappuccino, in a warm bar.
Very soon and for a long period! We need to celebrate… :-)
I was a bit scared to find nothing interesting in Derby, but I was wrong. I am editing my final selection of pictures for the workshop slideshow of Saturday and for the prints to show in the exhibition at Quad, during the Format International Photography Festival.
The bad news is that I have too many pictures. The good news… I have to struggle to choose them and not anymore to get.
Oh yes, another good news: Richard Kalvar is great!
Yesterday I played for five minutes with my iPhone: it was really funny when my colleague asked me what special drug I use to see the world in this way.
During the flight that brought me to my family in Italy, I met a Dutch doctor who has been living and working in Italy for more than twenty years. We could not help speaking about how you feel when you stay for a very long period in a Country that is not the one where you were born and grew up in.
It is a difficult topic, it makes me moody, since my feelings keep on swinging between conflicting positions. Inspired by the title of my next photographic exhibition, my new friend told me that he feels “in between” still now. For an instant I thought his confidence was not a big consolation, it sounded more as a sentence. I expected a more definitive solution, even though I appreciated the apparent simplicity of his words.
Then he revealed that it will be the same for me, I will never be completely sure about living there or here. Anyway he spoke to me with a Buddhist smile, strengthening my opinion that it is possible to be happy as an expat, luckily not in exile, but deliberately abroad..
I am a foreign in my own homeland and the opposite at the same time, without regret. I understand it when I leave, when I come back home there and here, when I eat a sandwich during lunch, when I eat pasta during lunch, when someone tell me I am Dutch by now and I do not know how to reply, when someone tell me I am still Italian and I struggle to reply.
On second thought, it is true what is written on the magnetic photo that my angel gave me once. It is stuck on our freezer now, it represents a family in a van full of baggage and it says:
Having a place to go is a home.
Having someone to love is a family.
