Finalmente posso andare
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Dates2020 - Ongoing
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Author
- Location Spoleto, Italy
“Finalmente posso andare” whispers of a realm within the soul: a suspended, parallel world where farewells remain unspoken. In 2020, I lost my paternal grandmother and aunt. To navigate this emptiness, I turned to creative expression.
“Finalmente posso andare” — “Finally, I can go” — whispers of a realm within the soul: a suspended, parallel world where farewells remain unspoken.
In 2020, during Italy’s first COVID-19 lockdown, I lost my paternal grandmother and aunt. Though their passing was unrelated to the virus, the pandemic became an insurmountable barrier, keeping me physically apart from my family and emotionally removed from the rituals. My grandmother lived just half an hour away, yet I was confined to my home with my brother, grieving the loss of two essential parts of ourselves. The impossibility of saying goodbye in person left a wound I could not fully comprehend.
To navigate this emptiness, I turned to creative expression. I grew up surrounded by nature—my maternal grandparents live in the Umbrian mountains, in a rural village of only nine inhabitants. That landscape, both wild and familiar, has always offered me comfort. In its stillness, I found a language I could understand and speak. Confined indoors during lockdown, I began revisiting my photographic archive. It became a way to reconnect with nature, seek peace, and compose a visual diary.
When restrictions eased, I continued building this narrative—instinctively and intimately—through the landscapes of Loreno and the familiar corners of my hometown, Spoleto. Almost without realizing it, I was shaping a parallel world — a timeless space filled with “non-places” and dreamlike fragments. Through these imagined geographies, I could gently confront the difficult reality I was living. Light emerged as the connective thread between the images—a silent witness to grief, memory, and transformation.
Even after five years, their absence remains a presence I carry every day. It lives in the spaces we once shared, in the rituals now stilled, in the quiet moments that catch me unaware. In this ongoing act of remembrance, I continue to find solace—nurtured by the land, by light, and by the lingering echoes of those I’ve lost.
I find peace in imagining that those who have left us — people and animals alike — now dwell in a luminous world, untouched by pain.
