For a brief moment in time, I met my oldest brother. He made a series of beautiful portraits of me, sixteen years old back then, and just as he arrived into my life, he left again…

In one of those casual walks through our little city, my father announced to me that I had two older brothers. That moment in which the earth stops turning and the world disappears as you feel all the stars twinkle in your bloodstream, gave me an insight into new information that my mother wasn’t his first wife. She was the third. I was as well, the third child and not the one and only. I was the youngest one of three. The privileged one. That took a major adjusting of my lens and a river of questions… 

Last night, I saw her in a dream.

She smiled at me and invited me for an embrace.

No one else saw her standing next to me but they believed me as we stood in the circle having a pleasant chat.

Casually, they said I should enjoy her presence. It happens to them too sometimes they said. She comes and touches them with a moment of unthinkable love.

She is calm and she is seeing straight into me with the look in her eyes she always had. Joy and deep sadness in one expression, sparkling as if in feverish pain, kind and framed by long eyelashes.

She is smiling at me as the door of the time that lasts eternally opens for me and shows me that it is only our body that counts passing.

Nothing else ever does. Nothing else ever.

And that is a source of love and freedom which is just another word for nothing to lose.

Our family routine permitted us every year to spend more than a month at the seaside. One of my uncles had a beautiful house in a small place on the Adriatic Riviera and we would have the privilege of spontaneously melting into the scenery every summer.

It happened often enough to call It a habit that I would wake up before anyone else. I would love to wander in the garden in the silence of the morning. The sun would be still mellow but already strong enough to invite the little lizards to join me on the stairs and stone pavements. It would be my time to play with them while the rest of the family was still asleep. They would be so friendly to me and come into the palm of my hands so I could pet them on their head. They would close their eyes and seemingly smile. That connection and fascination with little lizards that started when I was two years old never left. I was known in the family as a lizard whisperer.

In a lifetime of playing the violin, the search for the right instrument, a 'partner in sound', is a quite demanding and sometimes nerve-wracking experience.

I remember the years I spent being unhappy about the type of sound that would come out of the various violins that passed through my hands. I was trying to make them sound different than what they were meant to and I didn’t have the talent to adapt or to make a compromise. Then, at some point, I got a beautiful violin to use, with the sound of butter, ultimately comfortable to touch. When the time came to return it, I was left with a feeling of tremendous loss.

Playing the violin for me was never a matter of sound only, but rather the physical feeling of what would be the dance and the limit where you touch the bottom of it. It is difficult to explain, but I never looked for the resonant, brilliant violinistic sound. I looked for something that even if you had no hearing you could feel. My ultimate goal was playing one note and make you deeply touched to tears.