A Young Anthropologist's Notebook

If I go back to a few months ago, this Summer and all that came with it would seem rather impossible to accomplish.  In April or even May, the situation in Italy concerning the Covid-19 was quite bad and no one could have imagined discos and pubs to be open again in late June or people freely travelling not only around the country, but abroad too.  Nevertheless, from mid-June on the situation was getting safer and safer, hospitals were discharging more patients than they were admitting and less and less people were diagnosed with Covid. Everything went back to normal, and only the constant recalls of maintaining a safe distance from others and the mandatory face masks reminded us of what had happened only two months earlier.  The past weeks, with the slow but constant rising in Covid cases and new measures implemented by the government to stop it, proved us that the fight against Covid is not over yet, and that we must keep our guard up. On the other hand, we now know man...

Just in case anyone is keeping track, I recently moved to yet an other place where people don't believe in heating up the house during Wintertime: Rome. Villa Borghese. Tempietto di Esculapio. Don't get me wrong, I love Rome. It's one of my top three cities in the world (sharing the podium with Lisbon and Sydney), but people should understand that WINTERS ARE COLD HERE TOO WHY DO YOU NOT USE THE HEATING AAAAH Anyway, up to six weeks ago, I had no idea this was the direction my life would take. As all good things in life, this transfer was unexpected and sudden. 2020 - and the new decade - has just begun and I am already accomplishing one of my goals. Piazza Navona In my life, I realized, things either move very fast or are still for ages. And yet, when I think of everything that happened over the past five years, I can barely make sense of it. In five years I got two degrees, lived in four different cities (weeeeelll a village and three cities) and in five...

It has been almost a month since I arrived in Australia, but I think the moment I truly felt my travel has started was only two weeks ago. It doesn't always happen, but there are times, during a journey, when you stop and realise "I'm here. I arrived where I wanted to be". For me, this moment happened a week after arriving Downunder, during my first night in Sydney. After a very long and tiring day I had spent travelling, I walked through CBD to reach Circular Quay and found myself with the Sydney Opera House on one side and the Harbour Bridge on the other, and I finally felt like I was in the right place. Sydney Opera House from Circular Quay  Maybe because of the weather - it rained half of the days I spent there - or maybe because I was very jetlagged and tired and worried about some things back home, but I didn't enjoy my time in Perth as much as I would've liked to. I was starting to wonder whether the reasons that moved me to take this trip to Aus...

I was born in 1993 so, for me, the idea of a divided Europe is quite foreign. I was born in a world  with a unified Germany, a fallen Berlin wall, a divided Czechoslovakia, and with Jugoslavia and the whole Balkans on the edge of a terrible war of which I don't have any memory, even though it happened when I first started walking and talking. Despite this, in my memory Europe has always been a peaceful, borderless place - even though it not always was for everybody, of course.  Yet, when we think of all these historical events listed above, they look as far in time as, say, the man landing on the moon, whereas the 9/11 terrorist attacks seem to be much closer in time despite only being three or four years apart from other historical events of this kind. Without getting into a much more complicated debate, which is the post-9/11 world and the effects it had on Europe too, my point is: the past twenty five years have defined an idea of Europe that has never been seen before...

If I remember correctly, I opened this blog in January 2017. At the time I was a young, hopeful anthropology student who thought she had something to say about her field of studies... …but I didn't (and I still don't). So I moved on to the next idea: what about a commentary blog on TV shows from an anthropological point of view? As it turns out, this would require a long amount of time - not time devoted to watch TV shows, which is something I do religiously and with a little bit of demonic addiction, but time devoted to studying actual theories that I could link to the shows I would like to comment. Well, I realized I really don't like studying. At least not in an academically accepted way. You can imagine how fun it was to write my master's thesis. So here's what I was doing in January 2017. In the meanwhile, since January 2017 I have travelled a bit, visited the Maldives, had a lazy vacation in Puglia, moved to Portugal, somehow survived a Win...

Hi. This is me again. First post of 2019. I bet you were all waiting for it holding your breath.  Enjoying the sun in Dresden, and of course some coffee was involved. 18/02/2019 So, here I am, in my house in Milan, pretending I have nothing to do instead of catching up with work and responsabilities that I put on hold when I left for a ten days on-the-road trip through Central Europe (this was almost one month ago because I took my time writing this ngl) . Well, that's exactly why I left - to forget for a moment of all the things I am supposed to be doing and to find myself again. For a long list of different reasons, the last couple of months haven't been easy. I really needed to go away for a while, possibly alone, and do what I like to do most: getting lost in a new place I also get lost a lot in places I already know but this is not the point Hello Dresden. 18/02/2019 Maybe because, while I was planning the trip, the one-year anniversary of the offici...

31/07/2018 Time is relative. How can it be already August 2018, when in my mind we are still in September 2016? If I look back at the last 18 months, I gape at how many things happened, how many people entered my life (or left it for good) and, above all, how much I changed. Yes, I know - I am not saying anything new. Pretty much anyone would say the same, old thing: "oh, I am so different from who I was one year ago! I cannot believe it! New life and yadda yadda". Look at me, pretending to know how to take selfies in Ronda So let me skip to the interesting part. One year ago, anxious and borderline depressed as I was, I don't think I would've ever pictured myself walking in a deserted valley in Andalusia, backpack on my shoulders, water bottle in my hand (gotta stay hydrated in that heat) as I had to hike in the sun to get to my hostel. One year ago, I had almost never set a foot in a hostel. I have always wanted to be like that, free and uncaring and br...