Zidane had already been sent off in extra time for the headbutt on Materazzi. By the time the penalties came, none of us could sit still. We were leaning forward, hands on our heads, hands over our mouths, hands gripping the edge of the chair. Nobody was breathing the same way.

Pirlo went first. Goal. We jumped and shouted. Wiltord scored for France and the air went out of the room. Materazzi walked up and buried it and we were on our feet again, fists in the air. Then Trezeguet. The whole room went still. He hit the crossbar. The ball came down in front of the line and for half a second we did not know if it had crossed. Then we exploded. We jumped, we screamed, we grabbed each other.

De Rossi scored and we exulted again. Abidal scored. Del Piero stepped up and put it away clean and the room went up. Sagnol scored. Now it was on Grosso. The room went silent like somebody had turned the sound off. I was crossing my fingers so hard they hurt. Grosso took his run-up. The moment his foot hit the ball, time stopped. Everything ran in slow motion. I watched the ball travel toward the top left corner of the net, and I watched it cross the line, and I will never forget it. Then the room came apart. We were on our feet, jumping, hugging, screaming “Campioni del mondo! Campioni del mondo!”

Outside, the streets were filled with joy. People celebrating, cars going on parade, horns going off everywhere. Chaos all around, happiness all over.

I graduated from high school with honors. To me that was my greatest achievement. The thing is that I was only getting started. I was hungry for more. I wanted to go to university. I was going to be the first in my family to ever go to college. But how would I do it? I knew I had to work hard and save as much as I could during the summer. I couldn’t rely on anybody else. That was not new. I was used to it. I only wanted my mother’s approval, or maybe her blessing.

“Mom, I am going to university. What do you think?” I said in excitement, like I already had my mind made up.

Without skipping a beat she replied, “And how are you going to do that? You are alone. You have nobody. You have no money. Who is going to help you?”

“I am not asking you for money. I will apply for scholarships and cover student housing and two meals a day. Can you just be happy for me? Or give me a word of encouragement?”

“If that’s how you are going to do it, go ahead.”

Not one glimpse of hope. Not a hint of happiness. She was unable to see beyond the horizon, or even imagine the possibilities to make my life better. Did she think I was not capable of succeeding? Did she doubt my abilities? Or did she think I was stupid? She would only react to the negative, and when something bad happened, the prophecy became true. Failure was expected. How could I ever live like that? What kind of example was she setting for me?

In my heart I knew I could not rely on anybody else. I was alone indeed. But hearing it out loud made me sad. You are alone. The words stayed in my head for days. To be fair, my mother would give me a little money sometimes — five euros once, ten or twenty other times. I did not have time to feel discouraged. I would not give up. I had no other option. I could no longer use the excuse of being alone. Yes, I would be alone in facing new challenges without relying on anyone. So be it.

In June I made the last payment on my Lancia Y. The loan was done. I felt lighter. One thing less to worry about.

First week of September. A back road along a canal, leading to the resort’s back gate. Lifeguard shift. Every day without a break, for weeks. To this day I cannot say if I was half asleep.

The road. White light. The hum of the engine. My hands on the wheel. The canal on my left, flat and still. Something low and wide in the road ahead, but the sun. The sun. A shape coming together too slowly, the back of something, the shadow of a tractor in front of it. My foot moving. Not fast enough.

Boom.

The airbag into my face. My body thrown into it and held. The seatbelt across my chest. Glass. The car still going for a second after it had already stopped. Then it stopped for real. My breathing.

I opened my eyes. Broken glass everywhere. I opened the door and got out. I looked at myself. I was standing. Not a scratch. At that moment I would have traded a scratch or two to keep the car. The Lancia was demolished. I had hit an air blast sprayer being towed behind a tractor. The driver was already touching his neck. The neck. Always the neck. The oldest trick in the book for an insurance claim. Why would he let a profitable opportunity like this go?

I cannot describe the pain I was in. My body was fine. My soul was wrecked. The car was gone, and I had just made the last payment. I could not afford another one. My mother saw me in that state and cried. I do not remember feeling worse than I did that day.

In the end I found another car for a few hundred euros, a bottle-green Fiat Punto. It was not much, but it was enough to get me to work and then to university. I took the tires off the Lancia and put them on the Punto. It looked a little classier that way. I was being nostalgic, and I knew it.

I kept working at the resort until the end of the season. Every morning I drove the Punto down the same back road. It was not the Lancia. I missed that car. But the season was ending, and something else was beginning. I would miss the sea. UNICAL was inland.

When the time came, I packed my things into the Punto. It felt like a new beginning. The goodbyes at the resort were warm. Everyone was kind. I left for university. I was headed to the Università della Calabria — UNICAL — in Arcavacata di Rende, in the province of Cosenza. The campus is built along a long bridge, almost a mile end to end, with the departments and classrooms branching off from it in concrete blocks they call cubes. A small bus called the navetta runs up and down the bridge all day, stopping along the way.

I registered for a degree in Mediazione Linguistica — language mediation — in the faculty of literature and philosophy. I was thrilled to study literature and translation in Spanish and English. At the time it was unusual for someone coming out of a vocational high school to choose this degree. Most of my peers came from liceo or other types of high schools.

Because of my perfect scores in high school and my low income, I won a scholarship. The cost of attending a state university in Italy depends on your income. At the time, students paid fees twice a year, not per credit like in the United States. My scholarship covered student housing and two meals a day at the campus cafeteria.

The day came to choose my apartment. I had asked other students which residences were the best. The decision came down to one question: Do you want to study, or do you want to party? My priority was to study. I did not care to party at all.

I was also older than most first-year students. I was not the best decision maker, but I liked to think I had a decent chance of choosing right from wrong — keep telling yourself that, Pinocchio.

They suggested a residential complex called Santo Stefano. They said it was one of the best places available. Never listen to what other people tell you, I reminded myself afterward.

I went to the residential office to request my student apartment.

“Is there any preference for the location?” the clerk asked.

“Do you know if Santo Stefano has any available space?”

“The only saint available is San Gennaro.”

I thought he was being sarcastic, but San Gennaro was a real residential complex, eight minutes on foot from campus. Santo Stefano was farther and required a bus ride. I took the only saint available.

The apartment was in a basement. I shared a room with another student. We had a small kitchen with a table, two bathrooms, and a bedroom with two beds, two closets, two small desks, two shelves. To me the place was fantastic. And I would not have to pay anything because of the scholarship.

My cousin chose to rent an apartment with friends from high school instead, because he did not trust the student residences to be clean enough. A year later he changed his mind completely and moved into the same building, on the same floor as me.

For the first time in my adult life, I was living alone. A room of one’s own, as Virginia Woolf wrote. Like with my first car, having a room and a little space made me feel independent, away from someone else’s control. The truth is that for years I had lived under the lie that someone was always controlling me, that I did not have a choice. I always had a choice. I just did not know it. Once you get used to the idea that you are in a prison, sooner or later you stop noticing the bars. Even when you are out and free, you still feel the cell around you. You become the prisoner and the guard at the same time.

I could not believe I was independent. I could sleep, eat, get up whenever I wanted. I could go to class or not. There was no mandatory attendance. The only attendance was the one my conscience demanded if I wanted to succeed. I was diligent. I was focused.

The years away had not been wasted. I always kept my mind busy. I read books constantly. I studied English grammar on my own. I bought an English vocabulary book and started translating magazine articles for fun, just because I wanted to see if I could. I always had a curious mind, and I made sure to feed it.

I studied for the placement test and passed. In September of 2005, I walked back through those doors with classmates four years younger than me. The best part was that my cousin was in the same room. He was the son of my mother’s sister, and I spent a lot of time at their house — late nights playing Pro Evolution Soccer with him and his brother Francesco, weekend tournaments that ran until we could barely keep our eyes open. We were together most of the time. Now we were together in school too. From the outside, going back at my age looked like an embarrassment. To me it was nothing of the sort. I did not mind being older. For the first time in years, I was motivated.

As always, the biggest challenge for me was money. I had to find a way to work and go to school at the same time. I remembered another lifeguard from the summer resort talking about a winter job at a plastics factory. The schedule rotated — one week of afternoon shift, the next week of nights. To most people that arrangement sounded crazy. To me it was perfect. It left me exactly the window I needed for school. I signed up.

On my first day I was two hours late. I was so broke that I ran out of gas halfway there. I did not even have five euros to put gas in the car. The fuel light on my car was permanent at that point — I had prayed my way to a destination more times than I could count. Luckily, my buddy from the job came to pick me up. Unfortunately, that was not exactly the first impression I wanted to make on a new employer.

The afternoon shift ran from 2 p.m. to 11 p.m. My job was to feed plastic pellets into a large, noisy machine, and then collect the boxes it produced — the kind used for citrus fruits — and stack them on pallets. Plastic dust flew everywhere. The clicking of the machine surrounded the whole factory. I doubt it was a healthy environment. The job was repetitive, but it was indoors, often warm, and out of the elements. The next week I would switch to nights, 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. That was where I had to endure the most. Night work did not suit me. I had a hard time adapting. That was when I started drinking coffee for the first time, just to stay awake during the day.

The toughest part was the shift change on Monday. You ended your night shift at 7 a.m., and then you had to start your afternoon shift at 2 p.m. of the same day. The other rotation was much easier — you finished the afternoon shift at 11 p.m., and then you started the night shift at 11 p.m. the following day. That gave you a full day to recover. The short Monday turnaround did not.

School had changed since I last sat in a classroom. My first day was strange. When I was a kid, we used to stand up to greet the teacher every morning. Here, that was not the case. The teacher walked in and nobody cared. He sat down at his desk and just looked around. It was a habit. The students did not care, and apparently neither did he. To me it was strange and unusual. I was there to learn, so I told him I wanted to listen to the lesson. So he started teaching.

One day in history class I got so caught up in the teacher’s explanation that I was genuinely excited about it. The next day, the same teacher went around the room asking students to recap the previous lesson. One after the other, they declined. Then it was my turn. I had not prepared anything, but I started laying it out one concept at a time. To my surprise, and to the surprise of the whole class, I got through all of it. The teacher complimented me and gave me a 7.

That moment lit a spark. Slowly, one by one, everyone started paying attention to the lessons. Nobody wanted to be the one left behind. A healthy competition emerged. Everyone wanted to work hard, get good grades, and graduate. There was hope in the air — a quiet realization that they could actually become something.

It was hard to study with that job. I would bring my notes to the factory and read between one plastic box and the next. I did not mind the noise. I did not mind being tired. I moved forward because there was no other way. I did not have the time or the energy to find excuses — there was too much homework to do.

As always, home was not exactly an environment for academic success. From time to time I had to do extra work just to keep the peace.

One afternoon, after a brutal night shift and a full day of school, I went to bed to rest before my next night shift. About an hour later, around 3:30 p.m., I was shaken awake.

“Wake up! Come on! You are always sleeping. Let’s go!” Mario blurted out.

“What? I am always sleeping? What do we have to do now?” I replied.

“Come on, let’s go quickly to do a job, it’s not going to take much, a couple of hours,” he said.

What you should know about Mario and his “quick simple jobs” is that they are not quick, and they are definitely not simple.

I pulled myself out of bed to keep the peace in the house, and to keep the peace for my mother. Otherwise they would have ended up fighting, and who knows what Mario’s drunk alter ego would have come up with by the end of it.

Off we went onto someone’s property to cut and haul wood. We had to uproot a few tree trunks, cut them into pieces, and load everything onto a truck. The work was so heavy and so tedious that I barely had energy left to speak.

We got home around 10 p.m. To say I was destroyed is an understatement. I had just enough time to eat something and head back to my actual job. I do not know how I survived that night, but somehow I did.

The next morning I stumbled home and collapsed into bed. When I woke up and looked outside, it was still dark. I thought it was the same night, but I had lost track of time — it was already the next evening. I had slept through the entire day and missed school without even realizing it. I got up and went straight back to the factory for my night shift.

Do you know that feeling? Constantly drowning. Each ragged breath just another short-term chance to move forward. And yet little by little, you get it.

Even with my ability to basically sleep standing up at night, that job was a blessing for me. It did not matter how hard it was. I had no other option. I was on a course, and there was no time to complain. Before every test, I would carry my notebooks to the factory and read something here and there between boxes, and during my breaks.

The year flew by, and I surprised myself with how quickly I held my own academically. English was not a problem. Math, on the other hand, still haunted me — the old ghosts coming back to whisper that I was not good at it. With help from my cousin and a few classmates, I managed. Italian and history were among my favorite subjects. The technical subjects — Systems and Automation, Telecommunications — turned out to be genuinely interesting. Thanks to the teachers and the people around me, I made it work.

There was one important math test that year, given to the entire fifth year. That day I scrambled for help — to my cousin, to other classmates, one question here, one there. It was a frantic whispering going back and forth across the room. By some miracle, I managed to answer every question on the exam.

The results came back a week later. By some strange turn of fate, mine was the only perfect score in the entire fifth year. The others did well, but they were each short by a question or two. In a way, I had gathered the genius of everyone else and turned it into a perfect test. It was a miracle. So much so that the teacher had a hard time believing I could do such a thing.

Then June 2006 arrived, and the maturità — the national exit exam, literally “maturity” — was waiting. It is a different beast altogether. There is no whispering across the room, no help from your cousin, no classmate to lean on. It is a sealed national exam, graded by a mixed commission of internal and external teachers. The maturità does not care what you got on a math test in March. It cares whether you can stand on your own. And that scared me. I had already started my summer job as a lifeguard at the resort at the beginning of the month. Once again, I found a way to balance work and study.

The exams ran across three days. Two written papers — Italian on the first, your specialization subject on the second, which for me was Systems and Automation. Then the oral, where you had to make interdisciplinary connections across all your subjects in front of the commission. I got through the written exams with difficulty, especially the technical one. Still, I passed with a good score. The oral was almost a formality at that point, but I wanted to do more than pass — I wanted to prove myself.

The maturità ended in the best possible way. I passed with a perfect score of 100/100. When I read the result, a wave of joy hit me, mixed with a few tears. I had done it. After all the sacrifices, with no support, relying entirely on hard work, I had earned my high school diploma. I had walked out of that school as an immature, incomplete, average student. I had walked back in and graduated with honors.

That year, six other students in my class also graduated with a perfect score, including my cousin. Our class had the highest grade point average and the most perfect scores of any fifth-year class in the school. At the celebration, my Italian and history professor came up to me.

“You may not be aware of this, but the reason why everyone from your class graduated is because of you. You raised the bar and set a new standard for everyone. Your hard work inspired them, and suddenly, nobody wanted to be left behind.”

I thanked him and smiled, but the truth is I had never set out to encourage anyone. I was just shocked. Shocked that they would waste their time showing up to school every day and then not even try to get better. So I asked them, more than once: why not? If I can, you can too. That was it. That was the whole thing. The teacher saw it as inspiration. To me it was just common sense.

Later, the city held an award ceremony. It was an incredible experience. Throughout the event, I kept asking myself if it was real, and how I had ended up sitting in that particular chair, in that particular place.

For the first time in my life, I realized I was capable of something. My whole life I had been conditioned to believe the opposite — that I was incapable, that I would never amount to anything. Sitting there, holding what I had earned, I knew that was no longer true.

The diploma was not the end of anything. It was the first door I had ever opened on my own. And on the other side of it, for the first time, there was a future I could actually choose.

At the time, I did not have a lifeguard qualification. The next day, I registered for a course. The full training was a month long, but they told me that as long as I could pass the final exam, I was welcome to sit for it early. I bought the material and put myself through a week-long crash course, showing up for the extensive swimming and rowing training in the open sea.

I always enjoyed the water. It felt like second nature to me. I still remember swimming in the Tyrrhenian Sea during the orphanage years — I always wanted to stay in the water longer than anyone else.

Swimming in jellyfish-infested waters during the training sessions was not fun. And here is a disclaimer — peeing on a jellyfish sting does not work. But God, it hurts. Not the pee part, the wound itself.

I learned as much as I could about first aid, CPR, and human anatomy. The day of the test, I showed up tired but confident. A Coast Guard officer tested me on the theory. Then I had to swim 100 meters without stopping, swim underwater for 25 meters, deep dive 10 meters to recover an object, and then row. Of all of them, I was most worried about the rowing, because I had never rowed before. The officer stood on the pattino — a sort of flat boat that sits low enough to the water to pull someone out fast — dressed in white. My biggest fear was tipping him into the water because of my inexperience. That concern faded as I mustered my courage and focused on keeping him standing and doing a good job rowing. We had nothing like the floating devices you see on the California coast. I grew up watching Baywatch, but reality was far more serious than the TV show. I had to adapt and learn as fast as I could. The week of cramming paid off. I passed the exam, interviewed for the job, and was hired.

The place was not easy to find. Heading north on the state highway SS 106 bis, I would turn off at the 21st kilometer. The road was poorly paved and full of deep potholes you had to dodge. Orange tree fields, scattered houses, fences. The road narrowed in stretches, then opened up again into wide fields. First-time visitors would wonder if they were on the right track to a vacation spot or if they had been scammed.

In the distance the tall pine trees would start to appear, and you knew the sea was close. The road bent into a tight curve and crossed a small bridge. That bridge carried a sad memory. Roberto, a classmate of mine from high school, met his end there one night. Speeding and drunk, he did not make the curve. His car went straight through the railing and into the river below.

Past the bridge was a small parking lot and a gated entrance leading to the main office of the Thurium Camping Village. Inside the gate, a straight paved road ran between bungalows and small villas on both sides. They called the place the forest by the sea. Many years back, someone had decided to plant pine trees across the properties that led down to the beach, and the trees had grown in thick enough that you could not see the water at all until you walked through them. The woods would suddenly open onto the beach and the Ionian Sea. On calm days the water was flat like a lake, especially early in the morning after sunrise. The sky and the sea would blur into one thing.

The pines were also the reason people came to camp there. The forest kept the air fresh and let the wind off the sea blow through, which mattered in the hot months when the sun was scorching everywhere else. Thurium drew visitors from different parts of Italy and Europe. People rented villas, bungalows, or set up their own tents. There was a beach, a restaurant, a bar, a small fruit shop, and a newsstand. An outdoor pool shaped like a caravan, which was the kind of detail you did not forget. Sports facilities where tournaments ran all summer. The guests were friendly, the staff was friendly, and for four summers it was the closest thing I had to a second home.

I would usually start my day early and be on the beach by 7:00 a.m. I would put on my red t-shirt with Bagnino printed across it. I always found the word silly — Lifeguard sounded much cooler — but once again, this was not Baywatch, and Pamela Anderson was not about to run out with me to save anyone. Then I would clean up, put the sunbeds in order, and open all the umbrellas. When the weather was bad and the wind was up, the sea would rage and come in close to the umbrellas, and that is when I had to work harder — cleaning up the debris the sea dragged in, along with the trash left behind. The days were long. I would have lunch around 1:00 p.m. and end at 7:00 p.m. I did not have days off and worked every day from June until the end of September. It became tiring toward the end, but it was the only stable job I had and a good source of income for what mattered. I became so tanned you could have mistaken me for someone else entirely.

There was a system for telling people whether it was safe to go in. A white flag meant the sea was fine. A red flag meant it was dangerous, and anyone who went in was doing it at their own risk. The tricky part was that the sea could look flat and calm, and people would think it was fine to go in. Instead it was a trap. The most dangerous situations were when the current was pushing outward, toward the horizon. It could be strong enough to carry you farther and farther from shore. Even an experienced swimmer would have a hard time. You would swim against it and cover almost no distance, and the moment you stopped to catch your breath, it would drag you back out. A recipe for drowning.

Once I was done with my morning chores and nobody was around, I would devote an hour to exercise. My workouts were epic. I would swim with paddles on my hands and a rope tied to my waist pulling a car tire, followed by sprints on the beach, push-ups, and rowing to top it off. I did it every day. I did not know what resting meant. I was in shape, but I ate like a horse — it was the only way to keep up with what I was putting my body through.

I met a lot of people over the seasons I worked there. The ones who had the biggest impact on me were kids around my age — some the same, some a few years younger. They would come on vacation and end up becoming best friends. In the mornings, they would gather under the torretta del bagnino — the lifeguard tower — and sit there with their beach towels and chat all day in the sun. We spent a lot of time together, but it was a distinction I had to keep in mind — they were on vacation, and I was working. We would go out at night together. It was my only chance to have a good time and be like them, even for a little bit. But I had to be there the next morning at 7:00 a.m. no matter what. Like that night we decided to sleep on the beach and watch the sun rise. Once the sun was up, they gathered themselves and went to sleep. I cleaned up the mess left on the beach and started my day as a lifeguard. To me it was a trade-off I was willing to make, because for once I had friends, and I had a chance to belong.

Somehow I wanted to be like them. Normal — whatever that word meant. Parents who loved them, a home that was not a battlefield, opportunities I would have done anything to have. It took me years to understand that no one really has a normal life, everyone carries something. But back then, from where I was standing, their lives looked like the thing I had been missing. My desires were not born out of envy. I admired them, and I was glad to be their friend.

In the meantime, my love story with Vincenza came to an end. It was my fault. I was not happy anymore, and the weight of what she expected from me made me feel trapped. I was 21, and I had no idea what I was doing.

Letting her go was harder than I thought it would be. For a long time afterward I could not stop thinking about her, especially once I heard she was dating someone else. We went back and forth for another year — I would leave, I would come back, I would leave again. I could not make up my mind. Eventually she stopped waiting. She let me go for good and never looked back. She met someone else, got married, and had two children.

The truth is, I could not picture myself in that kind of life. When you grow up in chaos, a calm and steady life does not feel like peace. It feels like something is wrong. Being happy, settled, stable — those things scared me more than anything else. I wish I had understood that about myself back then. But I was not in a good place, and I was not at ease with who I was.

My friends were all about to graduate from high school. They would tell me about their studies and their challenges. That is when the magic of positive influence comes along. If you recall, I did not have a diploma. Like a spark, I had a sudden realization. I asked myself, Why did I leave school? Why did I not finish?

After work that day, I ran, excited, to my mother to tell her I wanted to go back to school.

“Mom, I just realized something. I want to go back to school and finish my diploma. What do you think?”

“How are you going to do it? How are you going to support yourself? You don’t have any money, you have expenses, you are alone. Who is going to help you? Are you going to tell Mario? Because I do not want to be involved in this.”

Her answer shocked me. I could not believe what she was telling me.

“What are you talking about? I come to you to let you know I want to do something good with my life, a good change, and you bombard me with these negative questions.”

Everything she said was true. Yes, I was alone. I did not have any money. I had expenses. But what angered me most was what she said about Mario. Was I his property? Was my life tied to his will? Her answers fueled me with a fierce determination and grit to pursue the diploma even more.

I realize now that my mother saw the world in a different way. She could never envision opportunity, or the possibility of success, or even something good happening to her. She lived under the weight of negativity fueled by Mario’s unbearable control. She could not see what I was seeing. Like when you ask someone to look at a beautiful sunset and instead they focus on the tiny dirty spot on the window, missing the whole thing. She meant well, but she was trying to hold me back to protect me. The saying “misery loves company” comes to mind.

I was hurt by the lack of trust in my abilities. I was expecting some cheering and some well wishes, but that was never my world. The only assured expectation was always a negative one. I was done getting caught in the negative spiral. It felt as though I was being slowly sucked down, spinning faster and faster without even realizing what was happening. It was time to take a stand. To move. To do something.

I clenched my fists and went to talk to Mario. Of his own children, only two or three had ever graduated from high school. They all went to work for him right away. My courage faded on the way over. My mother’s words kept coming back. I was overcome by doubt, and I was afraid of what he might say. But the more I thought about it, the more I would tell myself, what are you afraid of? Let’s go.

Before I could talk myself out of it, I turned a corner and there he was. It was real. I pressed on.

“I am thinking, in September I want to go back to school. I just wanted to let you know. I am going to find a way to make it.”

I do not think he even had time to react to what I said. Because to me, there was no way back. He replied, “ok,” and I left with a smile on my face.

Sometimes we create scary ghosts in our head. We imagine ourselves facing the worst odds and make our existence complicated for no reason. They say the most beautiful things lie ahead, beyond our fears. Maybe that is true. At least that day I had the courage to stand for what I believed in, and for the first time I realized how many monsters I had built in my own head. In a sense, I had been shaped by my environment to resign to the circumstances, just like my mother. That day I took a different road.

Still to this day, I do not know what I owed that man.

For a few years, my work experience could be summarized with what I generously called a career plan — oranges and mandarins in the winter, unemployment filings in the spring, and hope in the summer. Rinse and repeat. Some people had it down to a science, timing their filings like clockwork to keep a continuous stream of income coming in. I never managed to work that angle well — I only got unemployment for a few months. For a long time I looked at the people who had it figured out and thought they were smart. Now I think we were all just trapped, doing what we had to do to stay afloat.

It is hard to reconcile living in a country that always moved at two speeds. Calabria and the south lagged behind while the north pulled ahead, and the animosity was real. People from Rome upward carried a particular resentment, convinced they were shouldering the fiscal burden of the entire country while southerners evaded taxes and collected subsidies. The truth was somewhere in the middle. Many worked the system with genuine cunning, timing everything to the day — it was almost an art form. Others simply filed because the process was there and there was nothing else on offer. Northern Italy rarely made that distinction, and honestly, from where they sat, it probably all looked the same.

The root of it ran deep. Calabria never industrialized the way the north did. For a long time investment never came, and the roads and railways were inadequate, which meant goods moved slowly and businesses thought twice before setting up shop. Things are changing on paper — investments are finally arriving — whether they actually reach the people who need them is another question entirely. The universities in the region were not bad, but the graduates left. They always left. North, Germany, the UK — anywhere the bureaucracy did not swallow you whole and where a degree meant something in the job market. We called it brain drain, but living inside it, it just felt like watching the smartest people you knew disappear one by one.

Those who did leave for Northern Italy traded one set of problems for another. The cost of living was higher, and even with better pay the expenses piled up fast. The weather was nothing like the Mediterranean south — grey, cold, and unforgiving for much of the year. And most left alone, with no family nearby, building a life from scratch in a place that did not particularly feel like home. Many people weighed all of that and decided to stay. Not because they were naive about the job prospects, but because poverty surrounded by family and sunshine felt more bearable than isolation with a slightly larger paycheck. There was no good option on the table. It was always just picking the least painful one.

What stayed behind was the ‘Ndrangheta. I never saw it directly — nobody hands you a pamphlet — but you were aware of it the way you are aware of weather. It was present. You felt it in the way certain things worked and certain things did not. Contracts went to the right people. Businesses operated within boundaries nobody talked about openly. And where organized crime left off, politics picked up seamlessly, because in many cases there was no clear line between the two. Honesty and personal gain were not competing values for the political class — they were the same thing, depending on the day.

The political class deserves its own chapter in this story. If you are Italian and you know the character of Cetto La Qualunque, you already understand everything I am about to say. For everyone else — he is a satirical Calabrian politician created by comedian Antonio Albanese, corrupt, shameless, and politically incorrect in every direction. His campaign slogan was “Cchiù pilu pe’ tutti” — more women for everyone — a riff on the old saying that a woman’s pubic hair can pull a cart of oxen. In other words, that female allure is more powerful than any physical or material force, capable of driving a man to do the impossible. A grotesque promise as the centerpiece of a political campaign, delivered in thick dialect with complete conviction. The joke landed because it was not really a joke. Albanese did not have to invent much — he just held a mirror up to what was already there.

Election season in Calabria was a reliable performance — promises of jobs, infrastructure, a brighter future, delivered with conviction by the same faces that had delivered the same promises the cycle before. And the cycle before that. People voted, hoped, and were disappointed on schedule. The EU allocated millions for development and infrastructure. Some of it built things. Much of it vanished. Not subtly — everyone knew where it went. It went to the people who were supposed to administer it. The corruption was not occasional or hidden. It was structural, almost ceremonial. And what it destroyed beyond the money was trust. When people stop believing that anything can change through legitimate means, they stop trying. They survive instead. They file for unemployment. They leave. They look the other way.

In this environment, the jobs that existed were barely that. Employers knew the desperation and used it. You could be hired part-time and work full-time hours without complaint, because complaining meant losing the job. Fixed-term contracts were the norm — short term employment with no path forward, let go the moment the need passed. And if you did not know somebody who could put in a word for you, your competence was almost irrelevant. Connections moved the needle. Competence was secondary.

This was the world I grew up in. Not a broken system read about in a newspaper — one I lived inside every day. It shaped every decision I made, every job I took, every compromise I accepted. The seasonal work, the unemployment filings, the survival mentality — none of it was laziness or lack of ambition. It was the only map available.

And here is the thing that still gets me. Calabria is genuinely beautiful. The climate, the food, the coastline, the Greek and Roman remains dot the plains, and the Norman castle stands as a reminder that this land has been fought over and shaped by civilizations for thousands of years. The region has everything it would need to thrive on tourism alone, to become a destination that generates real, lasting economic opportunity for the people who live there. The raw material is extraordinary. What was missing was never the land. It was everything built on top of it — or rather, everything that was never built.

Meanwhile, life at home had its own complications. I was still with my first girlfriend, Vincenza. We had endured together for a few years by this point. I knew her parents, she knew mine — or rather, she knew of mine. In Calabria, the meeting between families is not a casual dinner. It is a declaration. Once both sets of parents sit across from each other, it is official.

One Saturday evening, the meeting was finally arranged. Since I was living with my mother, Mario was supposed to come along as a fatherly figure — figuratively speaking, and I mean that in every possible sense of the word. He arrived home in a state that I can only describe as the brink of a dead drunk. Not the loud, belligerent kind — the sleepy, glazed kind, which in some ways is worse because it is harder to manage and impossible to explain.

We arrived at Vincenza’s home about an hour late. Tremendous start.

This was the formality that said we are serious, we are past the point of pretending otherwise. I had known Vincenza’s family for a while. This evening was not about me meeting them. It was about our families meeting each other, sizing each other up, deciding collectively whether this thing was worth blessing. And the man representing my side of the table had arrived pre-loaded and was now eating and drinking on top of it all.

I spent the entire evening calculating distances to the nearest exit and praying to every saint I could name that he would not explode in a fountain of vomit like something out of the Exorcist. The man was operating at a level I had no scientific framework for. I watched my mother from across the room all evening. She had the look of someone defusing a bomb with no training and no tools.

Did Vincenza’s parents notice? Of course they did. They were not blind. But by some divine intervention, Mario held it together well enough that no irreversible damage was done. Everything went well, given the circumstances. I walked out of there exhausted, relieved, and fairly certain that as first impressions go, mine had a particular flavor that most people’s did not.

The old Y10, my car, had its own final story to tell. One evening I was driving to kickboxing, quietly singing to myself, completely lost in my own world, when I rear-ended the car in front of me, which then hit the car in front of it. If you want a textbook definition of distracted driving, that was it. I was fine. The second car was fine and the driver left without a word. The owner of the car I had actually hit was a man in his thirties. He got out, appeared uninjured, and immediately began touching his neck. Slowly, deliberately, making sure I noticed. The neck — always the neck. The best real estate in the personal injury claim business. Cunning, I had to give him that.

After dealing with the documentation I still wanted to get to the gym, so I went, just late. The car was drivable, technically, but with a significant caveat — the front tires were now sitting at an angle, hitting the road diagonally. I drove it anyway. The sound it made was something between a wounded animal and someone doing donuts on dry pavement. People heard me coming and turned to look before I even arrived. It was that kind of sound. I drove it to work. I drove it everywhere. Since the misaligned tires were eating themselves faster than normal, I started raiding Mario’s junkyard behind the house for replacements. Old tires pulled off scrapped cars, swapped in as needed. I went through three sets.

Then one evening, about half a mile from home, coming back from work, a tire blew. I had been driving that car as if nothing was wrong, as if the road was smooth and the world was fine and the diagonal tires were somebody else’s problem. Not a slow leak — a full blowout, rim on asphalt, sparks and noise and the kind of sound that empties your stomach. The rim was scraping the asphalt, glowing red, drivers piling up behind me, and I am sitting there straight-faced like a limo driver on his way to the airport. And then my tire just rolls past me on the driver’s side. Smooth. Unhurried. Like it had decided it was done with me. I was sweating through my shirt, praying out loud to anyone listening. By some grace I cannot explain, I made it home. That was the Y10’s final act — a fitting end for a car that had carried me further than it had any right to.

Since Mario dealt in used vehicles, there was one available that caught my eye. Five thousand euros, which does not sound like much until you have nothing. I asked Mario if I could pay him little by little. He said no. I had to finance it. My mother co-signed the loan, and I was able to get the car. A Lancia Y, blue, 1.2 litre sixteen valves — the Y10 had evolved, and so, slowly, had I. Bigger, though still tiny by today’s standards. A better car. A little more dignity.

It is strange how helpless we feel when life catches us by surprise. I lived in a state of constant uncertainty — not knowing if a year later I would be doing the same job, living the same life. Everything was day to day, week to week, just able to see what was right in front of me. Walking through fog. And like the fog, I could not see a clear future ahead. And yet there is only one direction. Like the sand in a clessidra — an hourglass — life flows whether you are ready or not. Same broke driver behind the wheel, stumbling through life.

It is like solving one problem only to find another waiting behind it. You find yourself staring at the empty gas light on the dashboard, hoping to make it to your destination, silently bargaining with the blinking light to push you one more mile — please, just one more mile.

But as energy cannot be created or destroyed, gas does not appear in the tank by wishful thinking. The rough huffing from the engine was a clear enough message — you are going to be stranded somewhere and somehow, humbled and on foot, you are going to have to find your way back home.

My mother would give me some money when she had it, and I could fill my car, but only to the reserve once again — always with that light still on, haunting me. Never enough for a full tank, because a full tank would have made me feel like a king, and a king I was not meant to be just yet.

And so I learned that it is far easier to find a new job when you already have one. That was a valuable lesson, even if I had to learn it the hard way. And as if destiny had a sense of humor — and I am convinced it does — it brought me right back to potatoes. Not on a mountain this time, not hauling sacks in the cold with a madman watching over me, but on the other end of the production entirely. Destiny has a funny way of showing its sarcasm.

Leaving the job with the coop left Mario a little concerned. Since I was living in his house, I had to find another job quickly. I found employment at a newly opened factory that made frozen potato fries. There I would work as an assistant electromechanic under a master. The owner hired me with high hopes of raising the next generation of technicians.

The factory supervisor was a spirited individual they called the Doctor. He was originally from the most industrialized part of Italy, up north, from the Emilia-Romagna region. The man had a distinctive northern accent and was hired for his expertise and knowledge in the field. No wife, no kids. Indirectly, he became my mentor and taught me many lessons.

Growing up in the south, we always held a certain belief that people from the north were more cultured than us. Part of that came down to language. Our dialect bore almost no resemblance to formal Italian — it was a world of its own, closer to a foreign tongue than to the language they taught in schools. In the north, their regional speech actually sounded like Italian. It was close enough that the distance between dialect and the formal language felt smaller, more dignified somehow. We carried ours like a mark, and not always a proud one. Yet with time I learned that there is dignity in our dialect. It is our inheritance, forged throughout history, shaped by every conquest, every hardship, and every generation that came before us. You do not apologize for that. You carry it.

Once inside the factory, I quickly realized that beyond helping with the machines, I would cover multiple roles. I took care of packaging the bags of fries into boxes and stacking those boxes on pallets. After production ended, I would pressure wash all the machines, clean the floors, and collect the potato waste. The peels were something else — especially when they sat outside in the large metal container baking in the heat. The smell could knock you sideways.

The owner was a short and stocky man. Word on the street was that people called him Ting Tang, for the way he walked — bobbing side to side, ting, then tang, like an overweight Bedouin swaying under the desert sun. That was strictly a behind-the-back kind of name, the sort you never let slip within earshot of anyone who might report back. He would often come around the facility, always watching you with suspicion and indifference. I rarely saw the man smile. He had two kids. The son was tall and good-looking, late twenties, always acting like a big shot — the kind of attitude that money and power can trick you into believing you deserve. If I had to describe him in a few words, “pompous prick” would be right on the money. The daughter, on the other hand, was blonde with blue eyes, a little younger than her brother. She gave no evidence of intelligence or common sense, none whatsoever. Her blank stares made me seriously reconsider the whole fake-it-till-you-make-it philosophy. There was no hope there — beauty alone could not save her. She seemed like a grown-up child. Together, they wore their status and privilege like a costume, treating the workers as beneath them, while those very workers were the ones who had helped build the family’s fortune.

I always wondered whether humility can survive once power and status are achieved. The only way I imagined it possible is if gratitude travels alongside them. Once again in my life, I witnessed grown men and women being mocked and disrespected by the young masters. Why did they do it? The ego is like a vampire — it needs to drain as much blood as possible to feed its addiction and grow out of proportion. The workers, for their part, avoided eye contact and kept their heads down. They did it because they had no other options. That is when desperation sets in — along with the hopeless reminder that there is no other job waiting for you, so this is it. You take the humiliation and you swallow it.

I often wondered at what cost, though. It is one thing to endure that alone, but it is a different kind of weight entirely once you have a family depending on you and bills that keep accumulating whether you feel like a man or not. Survival has a way of negotiating down your dignity without ever asking permission.

Of course, once the humiliation ritual was over and the master had moved on, the workers would find their voice again. Behind closed doors, behind stacked pallets, behind the noise of the machines, the bad-mouthing would begin. But you had to be careful who you talked to. Spies and favorites were always around the corner — people willing to trade your words for a little extra standing with the boss, cannon fodder climbing the hierarchy of the losers. Still, being a lesser loser than the rest of the losers meant something to them. And who was I to judge — when you have nothing, even that feels like something.

That part of Calabria is famous for its citrus production, especially oranges and mandarins. A large portion of the population in Corigliano was involved in the harvest and processing from October to March, depending on the season’s quality and length. The owner had made his fortune both as a landowner and as one of the largest processing facility operators in the area. When he hired me, he gave a little speech and made sure to mention, almost as a side note, that he owned land worth billions of lire.

I don’t know about you, but we can probably assume the man had a very high opinion of himself, measured entirely in material possessions. To my surprise, he also seemed to believe that financial success translated directly into sophistication. Let me tell you, dear reader — sophistication cannot be bought. It is built slowly, over a lifetime, through education, through travel, through sitting at tables with people nothing like you and actually listening. It comes from books read, from mistakes made, from places visited and cultures absorbed. But the ingredients alone are not enough. You can travel and see nothing. You can read and retain nothing. You can sit at the most interesting table in the room and leave exactly the same as you arrived. The difference is what you are willing to let in — and that requires something most people are not willing to sacrifice: the ego. You have to let it go. You have to allow yourself to be changed, to have your mind pulled open by new experiences, new people, new ways of seeing the world. A sophisticated person can speak to anyone about anything with dignity and respect. Not because they know everything, but because they are humble enough to know they do not. They are curious, well read, and open. They may not always feel comfortable in every room — but they have the awareness and grace to navigate it anyway. That is a man of the world. Money can open doors. But sophistication is what you bring through them. People might admire your outfits, your looks, the car you drive, or the cash you flash around. But the moment you open your mouth, that is when you are caught. Never let your ambition outrun your character.

The man was equally gifted at inflating his children’s egos. I was there one day when he cornered the Doctor and me and launched into a full celebration of his son’s great qualities. Honestly, I never noticed the son had any qualities worth singing about. You could appreciate the good looks, sure — but the character and maturity were nowhere to be found.

“My son is really tall, and height is half beauty — and on top of that, my son is beautiful and has money in his pocket. I feel sorry for you, being short.”

He was talking to me. I was shorter than his son, of average height, and I certainly had no money in my pocket. In his world, that made me twice short — once in stature and once in status. He was absolutely right on both counts, and he knew it, and he wanted me to know it too. I still wonder where that son would have ended up without his father’s wealth to carry him.

A few months later, without any clear reason — at least none that I was told — the frozen potato fries production stopped. The owner had half the facility dedicated to citrus processing, and I was transferred to that section. My job was to empty heavy plastic crates of mandarins onto a conveyor belt. The fruits were washed, waxed, and packed into clean boxes to be shipped and sold throughout northern Italy and across Europe.

The days were long and tedious, but some good humor among the workers made it bearable. The worst part was never knowing when the shift would end. We always knew the start time — 8 AM — but the end was anyone’s guess, sometimes dragging all the way to 9 PM with a break somewhere in between. When you cannot plan beyond the work itself — no errand, no phone call, no moment to call your own — after a while you stop trying. And that is when it hits you. Work has become the only reason to exist that day. That is not living. That is just enduring.

My time working there coincided with a significant moment for Italy. On January 1, 2002, the euro became the official currency. The transition from the lira was part of the broader eurozone rollout across several European countries. The fixed exchange rate was set at 1 euro to 1,936.27 lire, intended to make the changeover smooth. Smooth it was not. The average daily wage had been around 50,000 lire — under the euro, it became 25 euros, which, converted back to lire, came out to roughly 48,406. Workers immediately felt the loss. Businesses, tired of displaying dual prices, began rounding up the cost of goods and services, creating real inflationary pressure for ordinary people. The sense of purchasing power that people had known with the lira was gone overnight. Eventually, with difficulty, everyone adjusted, and wages caught up — but the transition was painful for those who could least afford it.

While working there, my hourly wage was a staggering three euros, paid out once a month.

The end of November arrived and it was time to get paid. The daughter was handling payroll. She informed all of us that there were difficulties that month and asked everyone to be patient. Two weeks, she said. I accepted that and walked away, which was my first mistake.

Two weeks became a month. A month became two. I went back five or six times. They never lost sleep over a gas tank or a grocery bill. I did.

“This is getting old. Can you please, for the love of God, just pay me?”

“I know and I’m sorry. We still can’t pay you right now. But soon, I promise. And just so you know — I just bought a new car and haven’t even had the chance to drive it yet.”

She said it the way someone complains to their rich friends at the salon — out of touch, unbothered, as if unpaid wages and a new car were just two items in the same conversation.

I stood there not knowing whether to laugh or to insult her. There it was — the living proof of everything I had already suspected. She knew the workers had not been paid. She knew the months were piling up. And yet she reached for her new car — not as a joke, but as genuine consolation. That is not cruelty. That is something worse — it is stupidity that cannot even recognize itself. The blank stares from the beginning were not shyness. They were a window. I left filled with frustration and disgust.

I received what I was owed months later. The November paycheck arrived in March. As always, they made it feel like they were doing you a favor — as if you should be grateful to receive the money you had earned and were owed. There was no apology. There never was.

Only four days after my return, Mario was up in arms. He became restless, and a sense of urgency overtook him. He wanted me to find a job at all costs — anything, be it a mine, a construction site, anything hard and backbreaking. He brought me around the city visiting construction worksites to ask if they needed a laborer. They all answered that they were fully staffed, nobody was hiring.

I talk as if I did not have any agency or control over the process. I did not. I was chained to live with my mother because I did not have the means to go and live on my own, let alone find a job that would be enough to support myself. Besides my mother, I could not rely on anyone else. I was overwhelmed by the circumstances, drowning in a negative environment, spiraling into the abyss.

Ultimately, I found a job. I would be working for an agricultural cooperative — small organizations you could find everywhere, since most of the population depended on seasonal fieldwork. Someone would hire people to fulfill contract jobs, often picking fruits or vegetables across different locations.

The owner of this cooperative looked like he had walked straight out of a casting call for a villain. They called him by the fearful nickname u terribile — the Terrible. To this day I do not know the reasons behind the legend. What I can tell you is that there was a comical discrepancy between the name and the man. He stood about five foot eight, probably in his late sixties, with a wrinkled face, white bushy eyebrows, and piercing blue eyes that locked onto you like a pair of headlights. Game of Thrones didn’t exist yet, but I had already found my villain — a short, mean White Walker.

The thing about the man that seemed terrible to me was his unpredictability. He was someone who would keep you on your toes, making you feel uneasy. You never knew what mood he’d be in on any given day. He was certainly glad if you showed up for work. He owned three vans, and with his son he had about fifteen to twenty workers.

Everyone showed reverence toward him. It was a type of subservience I could not comprehend — nothing about him seemed to earn it. Perhaps they felt gratitude toward someone who was giving them a job, or perhaps it was just a show of fealty mixed with the fear of falling out of favor. Oh yes, there were favorites indeed — a quiet, unspoken ranking that everyone understood but nobody dared to name.

There was a younger woman, around my age or perhaps a year or two older. She was always oddly close to the Terrible — always seated comfortably in the front of the van while the rest of us crammed in the back. One afternoon, as we were preparing to depart, I noticed a jacket draped across his lap, and underneath it her hand moving in a way that left nothing to the imagination.

Nobody said a word. Nobody ever would. Their livelihoods depended on his favor, and everyone understood the unspoken terms. That was the true nature of the hierarchy — not just backbreaking labor and cash handed out in reverent silence, but something far darker running underneath it all, covered by a jacket, invisible to anyone who chose not to see it.

These were rugged men and women from nearby towns, physically built like bricks. They had poor manners, spoke in dialect, and knew little formal Italian. They cursed with a creativity I had never heard before. They would laugh at the stupidest jokes and lose themselves in petty conversations and gossip. It was a common perception back then that speaking dialect meant you were illiterate and ignorant. Little did I know it was still their language — their cultural expression, carrying its own dignity.

Looking at them I thought we were worlds apart. They seemed alien to me. I was saddened by the job, felt sorry for myself, certain I was meant for something better. And yet, beneath all that self-pity, I thought I was better than them. That was the first crack in my armor. I had arrived thinking the job was beneath me. It wasn’t. I was just beneath it.

The van would come at 4:30 in the morning and we would head toward Sibari. The first job was to thin out peach branches — removing excess premature fruit to create space for the ones that would grow. I had braced for the worst, but the job turned out to be simple enough. With a midday break, I was back home by 3:30 in the afternoon. I didn’t mind the early start — what mattered to me was knowing when the day would end.

It was June. Everything was fine — for now.

After a month the peach work was done, and I had grown accustomed to the rhythm of it. The next job was clearing vegetable fields of weeds. Each of us was given a hoe and assigned a row. I wore long sleeves to protect my skin from the sun. The rows seemed endless — like walking on a treadmill, pulling weeds, going nowhere.

July arrived, and with it the difficulty increased with each job. Like a video game becoming harder with every level, I was solo leveling in field labor — but my stats weren’t keeping up.

It was time to pick tomatoes. When I arrived at the field I was stunned by its size — I could barely see where it ended. Rows of tomatoes stretched endlessly before me, and in the summer heat it seemed like a faraway mirage in a desert. Most tomatoes were not fully mature yet, so it was only the first pass — we filled plastic boxes with only the ripest, reddest ones.

Under the scorching heat, bent at the waist, I heard the leader’s voice cutting through the air:

“Fast! Fast! Come on! The red ones! Pick the red ones!”

Imagine having someone behind your back screaming at you to keep up, all along, all the time. I was often the one trailing behind, always struggling to match the pace of the others. In that little world, your worth was easily measured by how mighty you were in the fields — nothing else counted. My back ached, sweat soaked through my clothes, and the shouting never stopped. At the end of the rows they would have us load the heavy boxes onto a platform.

That was just the first day. The routine continued for the next month and a half. At eighteen years old I felt my body slowly breaking down, always sore, my joints aching and my back in pain from bending over for hours — aging faster than I should have been.

When payday arrived it seemed like a surreal experience, almost like a ceremony. There was an unspoken optimism in the air. When the Terrible handed out cash in the van, everything shifted. There was always a silence during the payment. Heads down, no eye contact — as if the man was performing an act of goodness rather than paying men for their labor. Once he handed over the money the workers would thank him with reverence, almost as if the due compensation was a favor, not a fair exchange for broken backs and sweat under a scorching sun.

Was that humility? Was it resignation? What was that? Did they not have the right to stand straight and proud?

I never got used to it.

As the weather cooled, so did nothing else. It was time to pick potatoes. This time we drove into the mountains of the Sila in Calabria. The van would come again at 4:30 in the morning, then drive two hours to reach our destination at high altitude. The roads were steep and curvy — that meant nausea for me. Once there, the cold air filled my lungs and half shivering we would gather to listen to the instructions.

A large tractor with a special attachment would dig the potatoes out, then we would fill large plastic boxes weighing an easy sixty pounds and haul them onto pallets. You could hear the birds chirping, the sun masked by a light fog. Cold at first, you would soon strip layers as you warmed up, picking the endless potatoes excavated from the cold earth.

Exhaustion set in already after the first hour. It seemed unnatural to carry that pace for an entire day. But for some divine grace I endured. I would return home around 6:30 in the evening. This rhythm continued for two weeks. I was worn down to the bone, exhausted, and demotivated.

What bothered me most was the relentless schedule — the hours in the van, the brutal labor, the endless days. And on weekends, there was no rest. Mario would require his “help” with the many projects he had lined up, heavy and laborious tasks every one of them. There was no such thing as recovery.

At the end of the first two weeks of the potato adventure level, I went to talk with the Terrible:

“Sir, I think I am done working for you. I quit.”

“What!? You quit?? Nobody quits on me! You are not going to quit because I own you!! I need you to carry plastic boxes in the fields for the orange season this coming winter!”

It appeared as if the man was not used to being told something different than what he wanted. The resemblance to slavery was staggering. While many would claim slavery today without a single violation of their rights, I was living in a system of ownership to an overlord — a little pawn to pick fruits and vegetables, carry heavy things, never complain, and of course be thankful for the opportunity.

“You own me? What are you talking about? I am sorry, but I am not going to continue anymore,” I answered.

“If you quit, I am not going to pay you what I owe you. If you want your money you will have to continue working for me.”

His answer was absurd — an insult dressed up as an ultimatum, and a belief that I was desperate enough to suck it up and beg for a job. But I had nothing to lose. I reminded myself that it cannot get darker than midnight.

I had no plan. I had nothing else lined up, no idea what came next. I just knew I wanted out, no matter what. Perhaps I was afraid to become like them — to see myself years from now, weathered and consumed by the hard labor and the sun, to get lost in the petty gossip and the jokes, trapped in that small world without ever daring to look outside. Some decisions don’t come from logic — they come from somewhere deeper, a point where something in you simply refuses to bend any further.

With the meanness of a White Walker, he was trying to turn me into one of the many in his army of the dead — winter was coming, and he needed me to carry oranges for him. For me it was different. I did not want to be turned into an old and worn out zombie by the age of twenty-one.

Unfortunately for me, I did not have a pretty face, blonde hair, and a couple of dragons on standby to defend me. Nor any degenerate taste for covert handjobs under jackets. I was more like the bastard in this story — no power, no leverage, just a refusal to bend the knee. I had to wait a month or two until he paid me the three hundred euros he still owed me. When I finally tracked him down, he gave me the money like I was some kind of dirty whore — like a man who has gotten what he wanted, satisfied, throwing the money at you with repulsion.

At least, unlike his yes-men, I had the courage and the dignity to say enough. I held my head high and never looked back.

Working in the fields taught me humility beyond measure and showed me how resilient I could be. It provided a foundation I would build on for the rest of my life.

Thanks to that job I managed to pay for my driver’s license — in Italy the cost can easily exceed a thousand euros. And I was able to buy a tiny car, a bottle-green 1987 Autobianchi Y10. It was remarkably small, and some people would laugh at me for it — I’m sure you would too. But to me that little car meant everything. Once you sacrifice enough for something, once you have gone through enough pain to get it, you feel that thing in your bones. That car was my luxury car. No more riding a bike in the rain, no more being at the mercy of the elements. It was mine. For the first time I owned something that shielded me from the world outside — small and unappealing to everyone else, everything to me.

Today I understand the hardship of those who work with their hands. I know the frustration. I know those feelings. People are quick to assume that certain jobs are beneath them — as if getting their hands dirty is somehow an offense to their dignity. But it is another world, filled with humility, with dedication, with honor, because it is done with dignity.

There is an old saying in the Calabrian dialect that I always come back to, for anyone who thinks they are doing something beneath them: “Do not feel diminished or ashamed — you are not stealing.”

I boarded a train with dozens of other young men. At the time, military service was still compulsory for all Italian men — the leva, as we called it. Most of us had just turned eighteen and received our call-up papers, so the scene at the station felt almost like a send-off to war: loved ones waving goodbye, some crying, hands reaching out one last time. My aunt Rosalia, my grandmother, and Vincenza were there. I can still see their faces that June evening — sad to see me go, while I was thrilled.

The train carried us to Avellino, in the Campania region, where boot camp began. Once on base, uniformed instructors screamed orders from every direction: “Stand like this! What’s your name? Move over there!” They inspected our hair constantly. Luckily mine was already short; I had no desire for a regulation buzz cut.

Life became rigidly coordinated. Every second, every minute, every hour had a purpose. You learned, adapted, and repeated the same movements until they became instinctive.

Beds had to be made with military precision: the top sheet folded exactly ten centimeters, the blanket creased in perfect stages and aligned at the edge. We slept on metal bunk beds beside simple metal lockers. No food allowed in the dorms. Lights out was at 8 p.m., and a bugle blasted at 6 a.m., followed by frantic shouts to shave, dress, and fall out.

Once I learned the rhythm, I started waking before everyone else to beat the bathroom lines. By the time the corporal arrived, I was already dressed and ready.

Meals were served three times a day in the chow hall. The choices were limited, but the food was enough to keep us going.

I loved the training — the marching, the shooting, the feeling of moving as one unit. We were training to become fuciliere assaltatore — assault riflemen, the core offensive infantry role whose job was to close with the enemy, assault positions, and carry out direct combat actions. Soon a strong camaraderie developed. For the first time, I felt like I truly belonged. I didn’t mind the endless drills or the shouting. The rules were simple: stay out of trouble, do what you’re told, and you’d be fine.

The most exciting part was the Beretta BM59 — a sturdy, heavy battle rifle chambered in 7.62×51mm NATO. You could definitely feel the powerful recoil when you fired it. We spent days drilling with it: holding it at arm’s length, switching shoulders, rotating it, then attaching the bayonet from the belt holster to the muzzle — all without looking. My fingers blistered and my arms burned from holding the five-kilo rifle straight out for long stretches. Eventually muscle memory took over, and we moved as a synchronized unit. It was mesmerizing.

Graduation from boot camp was a wonderful day that combined a grand parade with the solemn giuramento alla bandiera — the oath to the Italian flag. We all looked like knights moving as one across the enormous plaza on base, bayonets fixed and gleaming. My mother came to see me; it was a wonderful feeling. Word had circulated that someone had collapsed under the sun from exhaustion, so having everyone lined up with bayonets sticking up close to each other felt like a risky call.

After graduation, many soldiers from my hometown chose to finish their service locally sweeping streets or collecting trash in uniform. The idea of being seen in camouflage pushing a broom held no appeal. It felt wrong, like a warrior tending a garden. I was enjoying myself and wanted more.

One day a colonel from Rome arrived and spoke about recruiting for the RUD — Raggruppamento Unità Difesa — an interforce unit with intelligence installations. Eight of us were selected. I didn’t hesitate.

Once again we packed up. I said goodbye to my comrades and headed to Cerveteri, near Rome, for advanced training with the Security Services Unit. More drills, more marching, and now the newer Beretta AR70/90 — a lighter, more nimble 5.56×45mm NATO assault rifle that felt much more precise than the heavy BM59.

When training ended, I was assigned to Forte Braschi in Rome. Our uniform was striking: camouflage with heavy brown boots and a black beret. What set us apart was the blue kerchief with red trim worn around the neck.

As impressive as the uniform and the posting felt, earning your place was another story. Hazing — nonnismo — was everywhere. Veterans tormented the new arrivals in what was supposed to be a rite of passage. The idea was that one day you would earn the right to do the same and finally belong to the group.

The first nights in Cerveteri, veterans would burst in after midnight with flashlights, shaking us awake and shouting, “Where are the helicopter keys? We have to go!” Half-asleep and disoriented, you never knew what was real.

They had their own secret language. A veteran could freeze you instantly with a single word: “Block!” — and you had to stop dead in your tracks, completely still, like a statue. Then, when he said “Azione!” (meaning “Action!”), you were allowed to move again — usually with some silly or humiliating task attached.

“All’azione… vai a terra e fai dieci flessioni!” — On action, drop and give me ten push-ups.

You were only released after you hit the floor and completed the order.

Only veterans with nine months or more could shout “Generale!” — a command that froze the entire room at once. Everyone stopped, no exceptions. Some games were ridiculous, even cruel in their silliness, but never truly vicious. When my turn came, I said the word “Generale!” a couple of times. It felt strange to hold that kind of power over so many people, but I kept it light. I never used it to humiliate anyone.

The hazing reached its peak with the initiation at Forte Braschi in Rome. I had to crawl through an improvised obstacle course under bunk beds slathered in shaving cream, never letting a single drop touch my chest. It was absurd, exhausting, and hilarious. When I emerged, everyone was laughing. Something had shifted: I was no longer just the new guy. I had earned my small place in the hierarchy.

Those who “respected” — meaning they played along and accepted the tradition — were accepted as part of the group. Those who didn’t were ostracized and marked as outsiders. You could opt out, but you would find yourself very much alone.

For some, the days dragged unbearably. They did the absolute minimum, spending most of their time lying on their bunks smoking cigarettes or marijuana just to make the time pass. One recruit even deliberately broke his own finger hoping to get sent home. The army quickly saw through the trick; after enjoying a summer at the beach, he was brought back to finish the rest of his service.

There was also a subtle undercurrent of fascist nostalgia in the ranks. The passo romano — the Roman step, a high, stomping march rooted in ancient Rome and later adopted as a symbol of fascist Italy — was still used. While marching, the corporal would shout “Passo!” for a normal step. Then, by repeating the combination “passo, passo, pass, pass, passo,” you could conceal the full passo romano. Once the whole platoon had mastered the sequence, they would suddenly break into the heavy, synchronized stomp: stomp-stomp — stomp-stomp-stomp. It was meant to embody the “decisive spirit” of the Roman Empire and modern fascism. It was impossible to miss the few who still carried that old mentality. Once, someone even told me I had a “great name — Benito.”

I rose to corporal, then caporale scelto — chosen corporal, running details on base and at two other facilities in Rome. Night duty was the worst. I could literally fall asleep standing up. One night, more exhausted than usual, I drifted in that hazy space between sleep and waking. Through the fog I saw a dark figure creeping up behind me. Instinct took over. I snapped to attention and shouted, “Altolà! Chi va là!” — Halt! Who goes there!

It was the sergeant on duty, a carabiniere whose favorite sport was catching soldiers sleeping on post. That was a very close call. Others weren’t so lucky and were transferred for the offense.

As a chosen corporal I became a team leader, responsible for other soldiers during security shifts and leading platoons on parade. Coordinating a hundred men in formation, calling the rhythm so they stomped in perfect unison — it felt incredible. Not because I craved control, but because I finally understood purpose. I was only eighteen, full of insecurities, and no natural leader. Yet in that role I learned more about myself than anywhere else. You could hide behind the rank, but soldiers could sense from a mile away whether you truly had what it took.

There was something irreplaceable about having so many brothers around you. Camaraderie forged in hardship is a bond unlike any other. The military teaches you things about being human that are hard to find anywhere else.

My relationship with Vincenza survived the distance, but it wasn’t easy. I had dreamed of making the Army my career, yet at the end of my year I chose to leave — the decision of an immature eighteen-year-old who cared too much about what others thought and not enough about what he truly wanted. I was honorably discharged with a certificate in security services, rated with high proficiency.

Looking back, that single year gave me far more than I expected: discipline, lifelong brothers, and a sense of purpose I had never known before. I walked away from it by choice, and even now a part of me still wonders what would have become of that young chosen corporal had he stayed.

One evening I found myself in conversation with a group of kids I hadn’t met before. I don’t know how it started, but somehow, I ended up holding court on the subject of couples and love, a topic I knew virtually nothing about. But when you have an audience, the show must go on.

While I was talking, my eyes found her.

She was petite, brunette, with brown eyes and glasses and a face so well shaped it stopped you mid-sentence. And lips that said — well. They said things that had nothing to do with the conversation I was supposed to be having.

I gathered whatever courage I had and walked over.

“Hi, I’m Benito. What’s your name?”

“Hi, I’m Vincenza,” she said, smiling at me.

We talked for a long time. She was an apprentice hairstylist at a nearby salon. By the end of the evening we had exchanged numbers.

Vincenza was the brightest ray of sun in my life up to that point. I had met casually other girls before, but this was different. For the first time I was truly captured — not just interested, not just attracted, but captured. I experienced love in a way I hadn’t expected and couldn’t have prepared for. Maybe I put too much on her. Maybe she became my everything a little too quickly. But she didn’t mind.

On Saturday nights we would go out for pizza, taking long walks through her neighborhood, laughing about nothing in particular. It was the kind of laughter that doesn’t need a reason. We had fun just by being together.

There was the anticipation of seeing her again — the butterflies in the stomach every time I saw her. Missing her when she was not around. Time that stretched into an eternity when we were apart, while a few hours together passed in the blink of an eye. That is first love. Nobody warns you about it. And nothing quite feels like it again.

What I found with her wasn’t just a first love. It was a language I had heard of but never spoken. I knew love existed — I had seen it, read about it — but I had never lived inside it. She taught me. Not that she could fill the void left by years of missing parental warmth and affection, nobody could do that. But she filled something else. A different kind of emptiness. And with her, for the first time, everything was simply okay.

We discovered things together the way only two young people can — with the ingenuity and innocence of kids who come to each other without preconceptions, without a blueprint for how things should be. With Vincenza, things just were. And that was enough.

Outside of those hours with her, home was a different story entirely.

Living with my mother was somehow uneasy. Mario, of course, wanted a portion of my salary to contribute to the household expenses — something I was against from the very beginning. At the time, I did not fully understand the financial pressures in the house. My two brothers were living there, along with several of Mario’s children. There were many mouths to feed.

Another condition for me to stay there was that on weekends I had to help with the endless menial work on Mario’s property. Farm labor, hauling bales of hay, splitting wood, digging trenches to lay irrigation pipes for the field behind the house. There was always something to dig, build, or move, and nothing was ever light or easy. My body was already spent from the week working at the supermarket. By the end of it I had nothing left. Still, those hours of work, tedious as they felt to my teenage mind were also an opportunity to learn something. To appreciate hard work. To remember that life is not always easy. It kept me grounded.

On those Sundays, Mario would repeat the same mantra: “Come on, let’s go. It won’t take long — just a couple of hours.” It never was. Those “couple of hours” always stretched into something much longer.

At home I shared a room with the eldest of Mario’s sons and one of my brothers. One of them had the infuriating habit of falling asleep with the TV on every night. I despised the light flickering, and the sound murmuring in the background. I have always had a hard time falling asleep that way. Everyone in that house woke up early, yet it didn’t seem to matter to anyone but me. Living there felt like being a guest among strangers. My mother was the only person I truly knew, along with my two brothers. I never connected with the others.

After all those years, it was the first time I had the opportunity to truly spend time with my mother. The longest stretch since childhood. To me it was an attempt to mend a relationship I never had the chance to develop. Mario quickly noticed how much I wanted her approval. Showing affection toward her in front of him was never a good idea — it made him uneasy, almost angry.

The problem was wine. When Mario drank, his repressed emotions came to the surface: the jealousy, the paranoia, the need to dominate. He was capable of twisting almost anything into something suspicious or offensive, and sober or not, that side of him was always there, just waiting.

My mother, on the other hand, never changed around him. She remained completely submissive. She was afraid to speak up, afraid to protect herself, afraid to protect me. After all those years she still endured that man. And for what?

Did she love him? I do not think so.

She had become a prisoner of habit. Mario was everything she knew. She could not imagine herself independent, capable, and free. She was more afraid of facing the unknown than of continuing to live with the devil she already knew. She had no money and no way to live on her own. To me, that bargain felt like a slow death. To Mario, she was simply his insurance for old age — someone who would cook and clean for him, like a servant. In that silent transaction my mother traded freedom for security.

Mario often came home drunk late at night. We made sure to go to bed before he arrived. I would pretend to be asleep. From my bed I could hear him calling my mother, ordering her to go to the kitchen and make him something to eat, even at those late hours. Sometimes he would call us too, expecting us to sit with him and keep him company while he ate.

Those moments were uncomfortable — and dangerous. The air was thick with tension and the smell of alcohol, and you had to be careful about every word you said. It felt like being a hostage, waiting for him to explode over the smallest thing. He would ramble endlessly, speaking badly about people he knew, expecting us to agree with him. I nodded along, careful not to provoke him.

One night he came home drunk and already agitated. Earlier that day we had words over something trivial. He claimed I had offended him, and he had not forgotten. He stormed into the room, grabbed me by the neck, and dragged me to the ground.

My mother tried to intervene, and he lunged at her.

At that moment something inside me broke. My blood began to boil.

“Leave my mother alone! Leave my mother alone!” I shouted, my voice shaking with rage.

Then I collapsed into tears. All the years of held-back pain — the orphanage, the broken promises, the loneliness — it all came out at once. I was not crying for myself. I was crying because I was seventeen years old, watching my mother get lunged at by a drunk man, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. That helplessness was the worst feeling I had ever known.

He eventually walked away and went to sleep. The next day everything was back to normal. Smiles. Jokes. As if nothing had happened.

This was not the first time. Countless times my mother had mustered the courage to leave him, finding refuge at her sister’s house or her brother’s. The next day Mario would show up with flowers and another promise — that from that moment on everything would be different, everything would be alright. And she would go back. I do not know what made her return each time. Maybe it was the hope that this time the promise would hold. That this time would really be different.

That was many promises ago.

Just like with my father’s wife, the slate was clean once again. But promises are cheap. We carry our wounds not only on our skin but in our memory.

I could never reconcile the idea of someone acting violent one moment and smiling the next as if nothing had happened. I had seen them doing their worst. You cannot unsee that, but you can choose how to feel about it. Maybe you will find someone that will make you remember that there are many other things worth living for.

Vincenza was my island of peace. When I was with her, none of the rest existed—not Mario, not the noise, not the crushing weight of everything else. For those few precious hours together, the world was simply good.

I was always cheerful around her. Knowing how dark life can be gives you more reasons to smile when the chance comes—and perhaps to pass that lightness on to someone else. Making her laugh was reward enough. Even then, I carried hope in my heart, because I had learned something early: misery is a choice. It is a path to self-pity and destruction—a lonely path toward despair and bitterness, and I had seen more than enough of both.

Just because the world around you is dark doesn’t mean you have to match its shade. You always have the choice to be different—to become that single ray of light breaking through a gray, clouded sky. That is what I tried to be.

To me, that calling came in the form of exercise — or more specifically, martial arts.

In high school I had the chance to compete in different sports. Every year we held tournaments against other schools, and I played volleyball and ran track in the afternoons. The school had no money for a proper training facility — we made do with what we had. But in that environment, stripped down and unglamorous as it was, I forged my work ethic and discovered something important: I was athletic. Genuinely athletic. I loved competition the way some people love music or painting — it was the thing that made the rest of the day worth getting through. I looked forward to staying after school to train the way other kids looked forward to going home.

The tournaments were held in May, when the weather turned warm. Parents had to sign permission slips for students to compete. My father was always reluctant — afraid something might happen to me, he said. He didn’t want to be deemed responsible if something went wrong. I was his son. Who else would have been responsible for me? I never understood that logic. The real obstacle, in any case, was simply that he didn’t want to sign any papers.

On a couple of occasions, I found my own solution. I forged his signature and went anyway. I knew I was doing something wrong. But to the mind of a teenager, what could possibly go wrong? Why should such a small thing be allowed to stand between me and competing? I felt afraid — afraid of breaking the rules — but at the same time there was a rush of excitement. That sublime feeling of standing on the edge of a precipice, of playing with fire and coming out unscathed. So I signed his name and didn’t look back.

Then, around the age of sixteen, something happened that changed the direction of my life. I met Nunzio at one of the local arcades. He talked about a kickboxing school he was attending — the Black Scorpions Club — and invited me to try it out. I had wanted this since the orphanage, where the nuns had never allowed us to do any sports. To them, running around in the courtyard was exercise enough. I went without telling my father.

From the first lesson I felt home. For those few hours each night, I forgot about everything else — the problems at home, my father’s lack of money, Immacolata’s quiet campaign to make my life miserable. None of it existed in that gym. There was only the work.

All those martial arts movies I had watched growing up — Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jean-Claude Van Damme, hours of them — suddenly made a different kind of sense. In that gym, punching and kicking came naturally, as if my body already knew the language and was just waiting for the chance to speak it. To me, martial arts were the fullest possible expression of what a human body could do — power and precision and grace, all working together. Facing an opponent was exhilarating rather than frightening. I did it all with a smile on my face and a sense of purpose that never left me, not even when I was struggling, not even when it was hard. I had found my thing.

Even as a novice, it was clear I had something. I was flexible in ways that surprised people — I could kick higher than fighters who had been training far longer than me. I felt excitement just from hitting something — or someone in sparring. On a lucky day I could score a point or two, a roundhouse kick landing clean, a jab finding its mark. On other days I got obliterated by more experienced fighters. But even in those moments there was something valuable — I could touch greatness in what others had, see what was possible, measure the distance between where I was and where I wanted to be. The frustration was real, and so was the hunger to get better.

Then slowly things began to shift. I started to move around more, to read my opponent, to dodge rather than absorb. The hits I landed came with more certainty, with strategy behind them. My physicality caught up with my skills. The defeats became less frequent. I started to hold my own.

I threw myself into the technical drills with everything I had. Hundreds of repetitions, the same kick over and over until it was precise and powerful. I took pride in seeking perfect execution and got frustrated with myself when I fell short. Perfection was the standard, anything less felt like failure. I would arrive at the gym two hours before practice, put in time in the weight room, and then step onto the mat ready to train — because that was the best part of my day. That is what it meant to be a teenager — all that testosterone had to go somewhere, and I drove every last bit of it into the training.

Beyond the technical improvement, my body was becoming strong in ways I hadn’t expected. And somewhere along the way, an obsession I had carried for a long time finally became reality — I could do the splits.

Master Emilio saw the potential from early on, and he never missed a chance to push me. One night after practice, he set me aside and said: “You are a Ferrari, but you believe you are driving a Fiat 500.” At first my young pride took it as a slight. With time, I understood it as the highest compliment he could have offered — and the most honest challenge. Slowly, I learned to drive the Ferrari like a Ferrari.

Master Emilio was more than an instructor to me. Outside of my father, he was one of my first real male role models — someone who pushed me, believed in me, and helped me grow up in ways that went far beyond the gym. He saw something in me worth developing. That meant everything.

And then there was the camaraderie. The others in that gym — the friendships, the rivalries, the shared exhaustion after a hard session. It was a den of tigers, and I had to learn to grow inside it, to find my place, to make my way among people who were all hungry for the same thing. That environment shaped me as much as any technique Emilio ever taught me.

Outside the gym, the world I came from still had its own ways of explaining things.

My grandmother had a gift. Or at least, that is what we believed.

Sometimes I would get a headache around my temples — that particular pressure that sits behind the eyes and won’t let go. I would go to her and describe it, and she would look at me with that knowing expression and ask: affascina? The evil eye, in our dialect. Not the malicious kind — that was the malocchio, cast deliberately by someone wishing you harm.

The affascina was different. It came from admiration, from someone looking at you with too much intensity, too much wanting, even without meaning any harm. The result was the same — the headache, the heaviness, the feeling of being weighed down by something invisible.

She would sit me down, place her fingers on my forehead, and begin to whisper her prayers. Then the yawning would start. Slow at first, then deeper, more insistent. The intensity of the yawning told her everything — the stronger it came, the deeper the affascina had taken hold. She would work through it, prayer by prayer, yawn by yawn, until it passed.

When the prayers were finished, she would have me wash my hands in a small plastic basin. Then she would take the water out to the balcony and throw it over the edge, turning away as she did.

“Don’t go back that way,” she would say. “Someone will pick it up now.”

I don’t know what to make of it now. I’m not sure it matters. Real or not, my headache was gone every single time. I just wish she’d had a spell for my sense of insecurity too. That one proved harder to wash away. Years of exposure to my father’s words and the quiet cruelties at home had taken root, shaping a sense of worthlessness that no amount of prayers, camaraderie, or encouragement could undo.

Inch by inch, those messages would resurface. Worthless. Stupid. I didn’t know how to silence them, even when the evidence was right there in front of me — in the discipline I showed up with every day, in the talent that was beginning to speak for itself. But self-doubt doesn’t need evidence. It just needs a crack.

That is when the self-sabotage comes in. The voices that wait for the moment you are closest to something and then strike:

Who do you think you are...

You can’t do this...

You can’t win...

You are not capable of winning...

You are a fucking loser.

Not a whisper — a conviction. And the worst part is that you recognize the voice. You grew up with it.

Competition showed me exactly how this worked. I’d start strong, win the early matches, move through the bracket with confidence… and then, at the final, I would lose. Every single time. It was like climbing all the way to the top of the mountain, getting close enough to touch the summit, and then turning around and walking back down.

Second place. Many, many second places.

It was as if I had decided somewhere deep down that I didn’t deserve to win. That second place was enough. That I had done my part, shown up, proved something — and then handed the most important moment to someone else. And the worst part was that I was fine with it. Relieved, almost. Like I had fulfilled some obligation and could now relax.

That is the mentality of a loser. I know that now. Not someone without talent, not someone without discipline — but someone who had convinced himself that the top of the mountain wasn’t for him. That getting close was the same as getting there. It isn’t.

That beaten-down mindset never fully left. It is still there today, quieter than it used to be, but present. The difference now is that I know how to notice it when those voices start. I recognize them for what they are. Old noise. I don’t argue with them. I don’t obey them either. I just watch myself, and keep going.

Outside the gym, life continued on its own terms.

My third year of high school brought the electronics qualification exam — a sort of midpoint assessment before the final diploma two years later. Up to that point, I had cruised through my subjects: never outstanding, just doing enough to get by. The only class I genuinely enjoyed was English. I was good at it, and I knew it.

The examination was held in July. After the written portion I completed a lab test, building an electronic circuit on a motherboard. I thought I had done well. In reality I had barely scraped through. My final score was 74 out of 100.

That was the last day of my formal education. I didn’t go back the following year. Nobody tried to stop me. Nobody sat me down and made the case for staying. I left and that was that.

My plan was the Esercito Italiano — the Italian Army. Military life fascinated me. Since I was still a minor, I would work for the next two years and then, at eighteen, enter for compulsory service and apply for permanent status. Italy had mandatory military service at the time, and all males born up to 1986 were required to serve for one year once they turned eighteen. Many found ways around it — declaring university enrollment or claiming a physical disability. I was not one of them. I wanted in.

That same summer, my father decided to leave Corigliano and move to Acri, Immacolata’s hometown. He had convinced himself that her family would somehow support him and that life there would be easier — of course, pure fantasy.

When Elia and I found out, we had a private conversation. She knew what living under Immacolata — that psychotic bitch — could do, and she was determined to protect me from her manipulations.

“You go and live with mom,” Elia said. “I’ll take care of Immacolata. Don’t worry.”

My father was hurt that I wouldn’t come to Acri. But in a way I surprised myself with that decision — it was as if, for the first time, I could choose my own fate. It was self-preservation, plain and simple. I could not keep living under the same roof as Immacolata, absorbing her quiet cruelties without any way to fight back.

It wasn’t an easy decision. Going to mom meant dealing with Mario — a dangerous, jealous drunkard. It was a move from the frying pan into the fire, but the lesser of two evils. I decided to go anyway. My father couldn’t understand why, and there was nothing he could say to change my mind.

By that point, we no longer had Frizzy either. My father’s first child with Immacolata had been born, and he decided it was better to keep the house free of pets for the baby. Just like that, Frizzy was gone too.

With Elia leaving for Acri, her position as store clerk at a local grocery store became available. I was lucky enough to step into her place. I would work there for the next two years, then join the army. The job was at the Conad supermarket in Santa Lucia area, in Corigliano Scalo.

I went to work on a beat-up bike, 2.5 kilometers each way, Monday through Saturday, from seven in the morning until nine at night. The days were brutally long. My monthly salary was around 500 thousand lire — roughly five hundred dollars in today’s money. It wasn’t much, but it was enough for the times. They exploited you for a paltry wage, knowing that if you walked out, ten others were waiting to take your place. The owners carried themselves as though employing you was a personal favor, even as you worked yourself into the ground.

What did I learn from all of this? A sense of duty. Of sacrifice. Of hard work. I showed up every day, gave everything I had, and proved to myself that I was capable. And yet, I couldn’t stop thinking about my father — the person who should have been my greatest supporter, the one who mattered most to me. He saw me as a good-for-nothing. Those words didn’t just sting — they demolished my core beliefs and crushed my self-esteem in ways I would spend years unraveling.

But here is what I carry forward. I look for the potential in people — what they might become if someone believed in them long enough — and I treat them as if they are already that person. In turn, they begin to feel it, act as if it is true, and slowly it becomes true. Maybe that is the real eudaimonia — not just finding your own calling, but helping others find theirs.

I usually walked Frizzy in the neighborhood. Near the house there was a plot of land with trees, and I would let him loose there to roam around. One morning, after setting him free, I heard someone screaming. I looked up to see the garbage collector running with his pants around his ankles.

“Get this damn dog away from me!”

The man had been relieving himself under a tree when Frizzy appeared and scared the life out of him. I still laugh thinking about it. What made it worse — or better, depending on your perspective — was that Frizzy found what the man had left behind absolutely delightful.

Life with Frizzy was rarely dull. But what came next was less amusing.

By eating scraps from the butcher shops every night, it was inevitable that Frizzy would eventually get sick. He developed an intestinal virus and what followed was a diarrhea of truly historic proportions. He would go at any moment, in any place, including inside the house.

My father, to his credit, took Frizzy to the vet. The diagnosis was not good. The dog had a serious intestinal virus and the vet wasn’t sure he would make it through the night. We went home with that hanging over us. That evening, I kept Frizzy outside longer than usual, partly hoping the fresh air would help, partly dreading what might happen if I brought him upstairs too soon. When I finally did, I was exhausted. I put my head on the pillow and was gone before I could think another thought.

“Wake up! Wake up!”

My father burst through my bedroom door, shaking me like the building was on fire and we had seconds to get out. I was still half asleep, barely aware of what was happening, a torrent of Coriglianese dialect that I won’t attempt to translate here. Nothing kind, I can assure you.

“I told you to keep the dog outside longer! This is your fault! Now take him downstairs so people will think he was out there all night!”

The sheer stupidity of that plan was slowly filtering through my half-asleep brain. I took Frizzy and went outside. From the street below our fourth-floor balcony, I looked up and couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

Frizzy had suffered explosive diarrhea during the night, but was apparently more afraid of my father finding out than of his own condition. So, the dog, in a moment of pure genius, stuck his butt over the edge of the balcony and went full blast. The result was a magnificent green cascade that hit the sun blind of the lady on the third floor, the sun blind of the crazy lady on the second floor, and the balcony of the family on the first floor — car included. Floor by floor, nobody had been spared.

How was I supposed to convince these people that the dog had been outside all night? Who else would have done this to their balconies?

My father went to work.

I spent the morning going door to door, apologizing to each neighbor and offering to clean up the mess. I have never felt so embarrassed in my life — and for something that was entirely out of my control. You could not make this shit up.

The dog was the least of my problems. Something more sinister was in the works.

Every day in school I would take notes so that once home, I could study and do my homework. From one day to the next, while going through my notebook, a page of notes from the school day would disappear. I could see that the page had been ripped out. All the students in my class took their own notes, so I found it odd that someone would steal mine specifically. I was going crazy, especially because in the same period my grades started to go down. I talked about this with my father — he blamed my peers at school. We spoke to the teachers, but they all thought I was imagining things.

If you had to guess, who was sneaking into my room and ripping out pages from my notebooks? Your intuition is as good as mine. That was only the beginning of the things done to me in secret, while I kept believing I was the one going crazy. My sister started to notice as well — at least I had not made anything up. I was not insane after all. In all her vacant stares, dull smiles, and unimpressive personality, Immacolata was beginning to unveil herself as something entirely unexpected. In reality, she was mentally unstable.

The underwear incident came first — or at least it was the first one that played out in front of everyone.

One day my father noticed women’s underwear hanging outside to dry. They were washed, but had a visible yellow streak running through them. When he asked Immacolata about them, she told him they were Elia’s. He went straight to her room and confronted her — disgusting, he said, questioning her hygiene in front of everyone. Elia, appalled, went to her drawer and pulled out a pair of her own underwear. Thongs. Not the ones hanging outside. Those belong to your wife, she said. You can imagine what followed.

The notebook pages were already gone by then. But I was still telling myself it had to be someone at school.

That summer I worked a week at my uncle’s woodshop. With the money I earned I went to the store and bought myself something I had been waiting a long time for — Intesa Uomo, the red bottles. Shower gel, shampoo, deodorant. Mine, bought with my own hands.

I showed them to my father when I got home.

“I’m going to use those too,” he said.

“Dad, I bought those with my own money. I’d prefer you didn’t.”

He got upset. Since he bought everything else in the house, he told me, once my products ran out, I would not be able to use anything else he bought. Zero. He meant it as punishment for daring to have my own stuff. End of discussion.

I took Frizzy for a walk to clear my head. As I was going around the building, I noticed something near the wall — the manhole cover for the building’s sewer drain was foaming. I got closer. The foam was large, and the smell was distinctive, familiar. I ran upstairs and went straight to the bathroom.

The bottles had a quarter of product left in each one. Someone had poured most of it down the sink while I was outside.

I stood there in the bathroom and cried. Quietly, so nobody would hear. I didn’t know what to do with the injustice of it — so deliberate, so small, so impossible to prove.

It kept happening. A favorite blue Nike shirt came out of the washing machine discolored — bleach, not an accident. A fly on my plate, placed there on purpose. Rabbit served for dinner with the intestines and some dung left inside, cooked just for me. I still recall my exclamation “There is shit inside my plate!”

Each incident was deniable on its own. Together they told a story I was only beginning to understand.

There was a boy at the arcade I had become friendly with. He knew I loved the game Street Fighter and offered to lend me his copy. I was excited — brought the game home, asked Immacolata if I could use the PlayStation, she agreed. When I went back the next day the game was in its case. I took the disc out and turned it over. Deep scratches, all the way across. She had taken a pair of scissors to it. When I asked what happened, she said the dog did it.

I protested to my father. It was useless.

For a month I avoided the arcade. I didn’t want to face the boy who had been kind enough to trust me. When he eventually came to the house, I handed him the disc and told him the dog had got hold of it. That day I lost a friend. It was painful in a way that is hard to explain — not just the loss of the friendship, but the shame of having to lie to protect myself from something I hadn’t done.

Life has a way of surprising us, usually to teach something. We go through hard times and figure there’s probably a lesson buried in the pain. At times the pain comes from our own dumb choices, then yeah, we need to grow up. I was a silly, inexperienced teenager—I’ll own that part. But what happened had nothing to do with me or any mistakes I made. Even now I can’t really say what the lesson was supposed to be, or if there even was one. I don’t know if some higher power was watching and trying to tell me something, or if it was just random with no point.

What we didn’t know then was that Immacolata’s behavior had a history. As a child she had fallen from a height and hit her head. She had developed mental health problems — personality issues that her family had quietly decided to ignore, hoping that marriage would fix what medicine hadn’t. They said nothing to my father.

She had episodes of rage that came without warning. In those moments she was a different person — mean, screaming, out of control. In one of those episodes she cornered Elia and me and hit us with a radio charging cable. The bruise on Elia’s arm was visible for days. My father didn’t believe us. She would hit him too, and he never raised a hand back. After her storm passed, she would return to normal, as if nothing had happened. As if we hadn’t all just lived through the same thing. It was surreal.

We knew. We couldn’t unknow it. And there was nobody to tell.

One night Elia and I heard them arguing from our bedroom. Her voice was soft but wrapped in anger.

“It has been forty-two days,” she said.

My father, exhausted, replied: “I want to go to sleep. Leave me alone.”

It wasn’t hard to understand why. After the wedding she had settled into a life of telenovelas and the couch. She barely cleaned, rarely cooked any good meals, and had let herself go entirely — not that she had much to let go of to begin with.

When she went grocery shopping, she came back with processed food and snacks, which she would crunch with great satisfaction during the day while the television ran. My father was a man who had worked with his hands his whole life, who dressed well, who took pride in himself. I wonder sometimes what he saw when he looked across the room at her.

My father, for his part, thought that having a child would calm her mental illness. Then he thought a second one might finish the job. Neither did. If anything, having two babies made everything worse — because now her episodes were no longer just a danger to herself, but also to two small children who had no say in any of it.

I witnessed one of those moments myself. In the middle of one of her rages she turned to my father and said:

“You want to see something? I am not going to feed the baby anymore.”

I stood there in shock. I had seen a lot by then. But the idea that a mother’s bond with her own child could be overridden by whatever was happening inside her — that was something I wasn’t prepared for.

Before all of this, I had believed that life after the orphanage would be different. That I had paid my dues, that a lucky break was coming. Instead, I found myself still without agency, still without control over my own circumstances, still living under the weight of someone else’s instability and troubles. I didn’t know how to respond, what to do, who to turn to. In my heart I always carried the idea that someone would come to the rescue. Nobody ever came.

Maybe that was the lesson all along — stop waiting, start relying on yourself, make your own way. You need to get stronger.

He was the second of ten children, the first male born in the family, a physical outlier among them. Where his siblings barely cleared five-ten, my father stood six-three. In dialect they called him u luong — the tall one. They said he took after his paternal grandfather. Whatever the reason, he always stood out in the family photo — you couldn’t miss him.

When he was young, the whole family relocated to Bisacquino, a small town in the province of Palermo, after my grandfather landed a stable position as a school janitor. Sicily was where my father spent most of his childhood, and by his own account, school was not a place he distinguished himself.

“I repeated first grade four times,” he told us more than once, “and second grade five times. They called me grandpa.”

I was never sure how literally to take that. What I do know is that he eventually finished elementary school through an evening program, and that was the end of his formal education.

When he was sixteen, the family moved back to Calabria — his father had applied for a transfer to a school in Terranova da Sibari almost as an afterthought, never expecting it to be approved. It was. So the family packed up again. A big truck showed up, and everything they owned went into the back. The whole family rode back there too, among the furniture and the boxes, watching Sicily grow smaller behind them. To the children it was an adventure — a return to a place that was theirs by origin but had grown strange through absence. They called it u cuntinente — the mainland, as Sicilians called everything across the water., in the way people do when distance has made something feel foreign and far. In those days, the journey truly felt that way. My father left behind the only place he had ever felt at home, rattling northward in the back of a truck, surrounded by everything his family owned.

He never really talked about that, but it was there if you looked for it.

So he went into construction, starting at the bottom — working as a manovale under a master bricklayer, learning the trade from the ground up. And it turned out he had a gift for it.

What my father lacked in schooling he made up for in everything else. In construction, he was exceptional — fast, precise, strong in a way that made other workers look like they were moving through water. When he was laying bricks, he would often stop and wait, hands on his hips, while the others scrambled to keep him supplied. People in the trade called him Mastro Cuosim — Master Cosimo. He had earned it.

He had a natural gift for mathematics too. No formal method, no steps you could follow on paper, but he would arrive at the right answer anyway, through some process that seemed to happen entirely in his head. I used to think about what he might have become with a real education. Then again, the man he became was shaped by the life he actually lived, not the one he didn’t.

At some point during those years, a door opened briefly. With his elementary school license — which carried real weight in those days — he had a shot at becoming a carabiniere. They turned him down. A job injury had left him unable to shoot effectively with one of his fingers, and that was enough. Door closed. He went back to laying bricks, and eventually became a master himself.

He loved cars. He loved anything mechanical. You would often find him tinkering with something in his spare time, or crouched over one of his RC cars with the concentration of a surgeon. That was him at his most content — hands busy, mind focused, no one to answer to.

He could dress too. He had a natural elegance, an instinctive sense of style that no one had taught him and that sat oddly but perfectly alongside everything else about him. In a suit and tie he was something else entirely — six foot three, broad, unhurried, a cigarette at the corner of his mouth and a half smile that said he knew exactly what impression he was making without ever needing to announce it. People turned to look. He had the kind of face and bearing that belonged on a movie poster — the old kind, where the actor didn’t need to do anything except stand there and let the camera find him. In those moments, while he was getting ready, shaving or putting on his tie, I would sit and watch him, mesmerized and proud. I could have stayed there for hours. Happy that the man looking back in the mirror was my father.

He never set foot in a gym in his life. He didn’t need to, construction had done that work for him, year after year, brick after brick. In a shirt you could see his biceps filling out the sleeves, veins running along his arms like he’d been carved in marble. It was a careful dance between humility and vanity — he never boasted, never showed off, and yet the awareness was always there, just beneath the surface, expressed in the way he carried himself rather than anything he said. A man who knew he was attractive and had decided that knowing was enough.

He loved speed too. Behind the wheel he was a man liberated — it didn’t matter if the car was empty or full of his children, the accelerator had one correct position as far as he was concerned. Seatbelts were optional, in the sense that the option was always no. If he’d had an argument, you could tell by the speedometer. If he was in a good mood, he would blast the music and drive with the windows down, which was its own kind of danger. It was a particular brand of machismo common to the time and place — the loud stereo, the speed, the complete indifference to the concept of consequences. He was not alone in this. An entire generation of men drove that way, and most of them somehow survived it.

At family gatherings he was a different man entirely — loud, laughing, holding court. A cigarette always on the go, sometimes what felt like his fourteenth of the hour. He smoked everywhere, including in the car with us, windows up, doors sealed, the whole family hotboxed without consent. In fairness, everyone did it back then. The science just hadn’t caught up with the habit yet, and nobody was going to let a little thing like air quality get in the way of a good time.

He was a remarkable cook — the kind of person who could walk into a kitchen and produce something extraordinary without apparent effort. He could dance too, and had a natural sense of rhythm that made it look easy. At home he had assembled a serious audio station — double cassette player, amplifier, microphone, large speakers — back when that kind of setup was a genuine status symbol. He would blast it at full volume and take to the floor, completely in his element. He would also attempt to sing along. That part was less successful. The best way I can describe it is a duck, a loud one, fully committed to the performance and entirely unaware of the problem.

He was also a storyteller. His best material came from the time he spent working in Germany — the hunger, the chaos, not speaking a word of German and somehow surviving anyway. And then there were the poop and fart stories, which I will leave to the imagination but which were, by any measure, extraordinary. I know, I know, not exactly refined. But trust me, they were something else. We laughed until we couldn’t breathe. That laughter would linger, the kind that comes back in waves long after the story is over. In his own way, without ever trying to be, he was our comedian.

His personality was harder to love. He was proud in the way that can curdle into arrogance. He took criticism personally, raised his voice when he felt cornered, and had a stubborn need to be right that sometimes cost him more than winning ever would have been worth. There were real blind spots in him — stubbornness dressed up as principle, ignorance he never questioned. But underneath all of it was something I can only describe as a sense of duty. It wasn’t tender. It wasn’t always expressed in ways that made sense. But it was there.

There was a period during my second year of high school when work dried up completely. My father had always operated on his own terms — no employer, no one to answer to — and when the jobs stopped coming, there was no safety net. We couldn’t afford groceries, let alone a winter jacket or new shoes. My uncle’s wife, a generous woman, quietly went to the store and brought food over for us.

My father, rather than simply saying thank you, complained about it.

I understood his pride. I didn’t excuse it. There’s a version of dignity that protects you, and a version that just makes things harder for everyone around you. He never quite learned to tell them apart.

The dogs are where I have to be careful, because there are two stories, and they say everything about him.

The first started when my sister Elia and I began pushing for a dog. My father mentioned that a client of his had two huskies with a new litter. He went to ask if he could have one of the puppies. The client said they were for sale. My father, in all his wisdom, replied: O mu run, o mu fric — give it to me, or I’ll steal it.

A few days later, he came home with a husky puppy. Black and white, blue eyes, the kind of dog that makes you forget everything else. Elia and I were captivated. We were on the floor with it, already attached, already naming things in our heads, when the intercom buzzed.

My father answered. He went downstairs. He came back a few minutes later pale, sweating, looking like a man who had just been told very bad news.

“The owner is here. We have to give the dog back.”

He could barely get the words out. We were as stunned as he was. He took the puppy and went downstairs, and when he handed it back, he offered the following explanation to the man he had threatened days earlier:

“I deeply apologize for this mishap. You have to understand — my daughter Elia is handicapped, and I only wanted to show her the little dog.”

I hope the embarrassment was instructive. Elia will tell you that when she ran into the man sometime later, he looked at her like he was still trying to find the handicap.

My father had a friend named Giovanni who made his living through what I’ll call unconventional means. If Giovanni saw something he wanted and it was large enough to carry, he generally took it. When the subject of a dog came up again — it always did — my father and Giovanni put their heads together.

One afternoon, my father came home with a full-grown German shepherd. Gold and black, about a year and a half old, beautiful in the way that well-kept dogs are. What followed could have come straight out of a comedy.

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“Frizzy,” my father said.

“Frizzy? Where did that come from?”

“I needed something to call him. To get him to come.”

“To come from where?”

“The owner didn’t want him anymore. He gave him to me.”

I stopped asking questions.

From that day, Frizzy was mine to care for. Up early to walk him before school, out again in the afternoon, out again in the evening. He consumed my schedule, just the dog and the clock. If Frizzy had an accident inside the house, it was my fault, no matter how long I had kept him outside. My father had decided this, and that was that.

On weekends, my father would take Frizzy to the beach or into the mountains and let him run until he dropped. He loved those walks. The dog was something he could enjoy freely, without responsibility, because the responsibility had been handed to me.

And then there was the food. My father refused to give Frizzy dog food. He was convinced the dog didn’t like it — a conviction he held with the same stubbornness he held all his opinions.

So every evening, I walked a circuit of the city’s butcher shops, asking for scraps. Scraps were not always available. When they weren’t, I waited. I stood in the back of those shops, often for a long time, while the butchers finished their work and whatever was left got set aside for the dog.

I don’t know what my father thought about while he was taking those long walks on the beach with Frizzy. I was usually somewhere across town, waiting in a butcher shop.

In his own way, he tried to teach me. Not through explanation or patience, but by calling me stupid, or questioning my abilities. I think that was his version of encouragement — pushing me to prove him wrong. But I was a fragile kid, and I needed something different. Something he didn’t know how to give.

I don’t blame him for that entirely. His own father was hard on him in ways I’ll never fully understand, and maybe that was the only model he had. You teach the way you were taught, until someone shows you another way. Nobody ever showed him.

With Elia it was different, and I never fully understood why. He was still hard, but there was a kindness in it — she could get away with things I never could. Maybe he held me to a different standard because I was the son. Maybe, in his own clumsy way, he was trying to shape a man. I’m still not sure whether to be grateful for that or not.

Elia loved him beyond measure. Her eyes would light up every time she saw him — not just admiration, it made her heart sing. She looked at him the way you look at someone you can only love forever, even after they are gone. But she was also the one who challenged him the most. She would make him think, call him out, catch him in a lie. He could never fool her because Elia was him — the same blood, the same character, the same way of seeing things. How do you lie to yourself? She was his sweetheart, and she could read through him like nobody else. And somehow, he let her.

What I know is that eventually I found my own way, shaped largely by his absence. I learned through my own mistakes, in my own time, without a map. And today I am the father I did not have — for my kids. I chose to do it differently. I won’t always know if what I’m doing is right, and that uncertainty never fully goes away, but I’ve learned enough to do my best. Sometimes that has to be enough.

Today I am not afraid to show my children affection. I have no pride to protect, because I don’t believe it is a weakness — on the contrary, it is my strength. I tell them I love them. I listen to them. I hug them. I encourage them to be strong, fair, and good.

For him it was different. He repressed what he felt, kept it hidden behind his pride and his loud voice. But at night, without fail, he would come and check on us. To say goodnight, a kiss and a hug. Perhaps it was something he needed too. In those moments you could see what he kept hidden the rest of the time — a man with a big heart who seemed convinced that showing it would cost him something. As if tenderness were a weakness he couldn’t afford.

Elia and I were lucky. We got to see him. And he really loved us.

He would clean himself up, sit down for a little while, light a cigarette—he smoked two packs a day—and relax in front of the television with a beer. His wife Immacolata would cook, or warm up, I should say, the same processed dishes every night: cordon bleu or würstels—cheap, prepackaged meals.

His workday in construction was grueling, and he consistently encouraged us to aspire to be better than he was, urging us to attend university and pursue careers as doctors or teachers. He frequently cautioned us not to follow in his footsteps. Perhaps this was his way of protecting us, caring for us, loving us.

“You, who have endured suffering, will one day lead a better life because fortune will favor you,” he would often say to me and Elia.

In my immature state, I took that expression literally. I believed we had already paid a high enough price in suffering, and therefore a better future was simply owed to us. It was naïve thinking—as if all the suffering stopped there, and good things would just arrive on their own. He should have stressed that if we worked for something, things would change. Instead, the focus seemed to be on fortune rather than responsibility.

For now, fortune was the simple freedom of walking out the door each morning and making my way to school. I would leave the house and walk, taking in everything around me. I enjoyed the morning sun, often looking at the clouds, even admiring the rain from under my umbrella. The idea of doing that for the first time felt liberating. Soon I learned to find different ways to get there, like exploring an open world for the first time. I would observe the cars going by, someone coming out onto a balcony beating a rug, people heading to work. The world was moving, and for the first time, I was moving with it.

The area around the high school had its own ecosystem. Most kids would hang out in a small bar not far from the entrance. Others would sit outside on a low wall that marked the edge of a dirt soccer field. The bar sold sandwiches, and inside there were a couple of arcade machines where kids would try to beat the games right before the bell rang. I was there often to watch. Like any kid my age, I was mesmerized by video games.

The class was not that large—eighteen kids at most, and only two girls. The subjects were mostly technical in nature: electrical circuits, electronics theory, along with physics, math, English, and Italian literature. Everything was new to me, and every little thing left me appreciative and in awe in a naïve way. I was detail-oriented, taking notes religiously, determined to complete every assignment and learn as much as I could. I was a good student. The saying “the master appears when the student is ready” felt true. Teachers seemed more motivated knowing there was someone following so closely, with curiosity and diligence.

I discovered I could really focus on sports. Physical effort gave me a sense of control—as if by doing something hard, I was taking ownership of my destiny for once. For years, everything had been decided for me: when to wake, when to eat, when to sleep, how to behave. But here, on the track or the court, the harder I pushed my body, the more immediate the results. If I ran faster, I got faster. If I practiced longer, I got better. It was simple, direct, and entirely mine. I enjoyed playing volleyball twice a week and soon joined afternoon meet-ups for track and field.

We did not have much of a sporting infrastructure. Along with the dirt soccer field, there was a narrow stretch of asphalt behind the building—a makeshift court squeezed between an emergency staircase and a cement fence, with a net stretched across what had once been a parking lot. It was not the kind of surface you wanted to dive onto to save a volleyball. Still, we made it competitive enough to push our limits and have fun.

To prepare for track and field competitions, the PE teacher would let me run around the building for time—just going around and around. It turned out I had good athleticism and stamina. I took every instruction seriously, as if someone finally believed I could do something. And I gave my all.

But what appeared as diligence in academics turned into neglect at home. Without disciplinarian figures telling me what to do, I failed to take care of myself. There was an aspect of social living I did not fully grasp—that going to school meant existing in the world with other people, being seen by them. The unfortunate part was that people judged me by the way I dressed, and appearance somehow mattered. I developed poor hygiene; my socks were torn, my heels exposed. This mattered in a place where everyone took pride in how they dressed—their shoes and clothes were brand new, and they smelled good. I had none of that. And for obvious reasons, kids at that age can be cruel. They picked on me.

My father was not paying attention to how I showed up to school. He was exhausted, consumed by work, by survival. The details of how I looked when I walked out the door in the morning simply did not register as urgent to him. His wife barely ran the washing machine and said nothing about my broken socks. And I don’t mean a small hole here and there. The fabric at the heels had completely given way, threads hanging loose, my skin pressing directly against the inside of my shoes.

No one asked whether I had showered. No one checked whether my clothes were clean. There was no quiet inspection before I left the house, no hand adjusting a collar, no voice reminding me to look presentable. We lived on a single salary, and maybe these things felt secondary. There were bills to pay, groceries to stretch, electricity to keep on. Appearances must have seemed like a luxury.

My sister had her own world unfolding. Whatever attention existed in that apartment was scattered and thin, divided among too many needs. I moved through it largely unnoticed, learning without realizing it that if I wanted something fixed—washed, replaced, improved—I would have to be the one to notice it first.

One day, my peers told me I literally stank and suggested I take better care of myself. I felt a wave of embarrassment so strong it burned in my chest. From that day on, I made sure to always be clean. That moment was a turning point—humiliating, yes, but it lit something in me. No one else was going to take care of me, so I would have to learn to do it myself.

Still, there were weekends when I would spend time with my mother, and there, things felt different. She would tell me to take a shower, hand me deodorant, and quietly put clean clothes and decent shoes aside for me. There was no lecture, no accusation—just care. I would return to school on Monday morning washed, dressed properly, smelling good. For a couple of days, I blended in.

She cared for me in those small, practical ways, even while managing two other children and Mario, who was still there. Those weekends reminded me that I was not invisible, that someone noticed. But the weekdays taught me something else: that if I wanted consistency, I would have to build it myself.

At home, I saw a different kind of survival. My father, worn from long days of work, had his own ways of making do, solving problems, and keeping the household afloat—often in ways that were inventive, unpredictable, and at times almost comically so.

One night, it must have been past nine, when the building was quiet and every family seemed to be resting, he called me down to help him in the parking lot. I got to the car and heard something moving in the trunk. He opened it, and to my shock, there was a sheep. He looked at me and whispered, “Keep quiet and help me carry it upstairs.”

“Upstairs?!” I said.

“Yes! Move it! Keep quiet!” he replied, still whispering.

And so we carried the poor animal up the staircase, all the way to our fourth-floor apartment. Its tiny hooves clicked against the steps, its breathing sharp and panicked. I was sweating, embarrassed at the thought of a neighbor opening their door. Halfway up, the sheep let out a bleat. The sound echoed in the stairwell. We hushed it and hurried the rest of the way, finally locking the door behind us.

My father led our guest into the small closet where he kept his work tools—no more than four feet by four, crowded with a toolbox and a few scattered cans. “Hold the head down!” he ordered.

I pressed the sheep’s head into a blue plastic basin, my hands trembling. I had never been this close to an animal, and it felt strange and uncomfortable. The sheep struggled slightly, its hooves scraping the floor.

Then my father acted. The knife plunged into its carotid artery. My heart pounded. The bleating filled the closet until it faded, and the basin began to fill.

That was reality, and it was for our sustenance. My father told me to put aside my feelings and acknowledge that we would eat well for weeks. From this death came our nourishment.

“Mort a tia, e salut a nua,” he repeated softly, almost ceremonially.
Death to you, and health to us.

It sounded like a strange pagan offering to a deity—but in our world, it was simply life.

I’d never thought about the idea of leaving—that concept seemed foreign in my mind. So when my dad told me that he would take me out of the orphanage, I didn’t expect it. After that, my mind started racing. I started counting the days, the hours, the minutes.

When I told my friends that I’d be leaving soon, they didn’t believe me. We were all used to being disappointed, and trust was a hard currency to come by. So many times, I fantasized about my new life outside. Elia was already living with our father and his wife in an apartment in Corigliano—they were just waiting for me.

There were no angels singing and waving goodbye on that July 14th, 1997. No songs, parties, or celebrations. I left the same way I arrived—just another day. I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel. I had reasons for hate, memories of the “disciplining” and the punishments that should have made me bitter, but I felt nothing. No anger, no sadness. I didn’t cry. Just: Let me out of here.

As I packed my few belongings, I found the old glasses frames—the ones Suor Eugenia, the mother superior, had given me when I was eight and they discovered I had myopia. They were her old frames, repurposed for a child. I looked like a grown-up wearing them, oversized and awkward on my small face. I still recalled how the other kids would make fun of me. I held them for a moment, then left them behind. By now I could see a little better, with different eyes.

I understood the impulse to leave a mark, to make them remember I existed. Months earlier, when my friend Daniele left the orphanage, he was so happy, so desperate to strike back at the nuns who’d treated him badly, that he unscrewed every cap on the wall-mounted radiators and let the water flood out. He did it because he was leaving and wouldn’t have to deal with the consequences.

I didn’t destroy anything or leave a mess. There were hugs, kisses, and thank yous for everything. But beneath all of that was something else—fear. I didn’t understand anything about the outside world or even have any idea how to interact with it. Yes, we went to public schools with classmates from outside the orphanage, but the idea of living without a regimented schedule was somehow terrifying. Asking for permission for everything. Waiting for someone to tell you what to do, and to do it only when you were told. All of that had become who I was.

I was four years old when I entered those walls. I arrived with lots of questions, wondering why I was there, why my parents were not with me. The place now did not look as intimidating as when I arrived—it was familiar, yet filled with memories and the fear that somehow, I belonged there. Good or bad, that was where I was raised. In trying to make sense of it all, I can ultimately say that without it, I would not have been the same man I am today. Shaped by abandonment, by pain, and with the naïve belief that from that moment on, things would take a better turn, that I would be rewarded after going through so much. I did not know it then, but life has a tendency to test you continuously, no matter what.

Up to that point, I didn’t know myself. I existed because someone else said I did. No personality, no particular tastes. I had to relearn how to breathe, how to think for myself. I was naïve beyond understanding. It was almost as if you took a human child, raised him in captivity, and then released him into the world. There was no need for experiments because I would be the first trial.

The nuns were, after all, my family—they’d been there through each stage of my childhood. They were the ones who raised me, even if they did it out of duty, with the intent to discipline. I want to imagine that sometimes, in some moments, they really loved us.

They taught us to do many things: not to be picky eaters, how to take care of ourselves, to care for others, to pray. Without them, I don’t know if my life would have taken a turn for the worse. They taught us morality through religious values, the difference between good and evil. But in their humanity, they were vulnerable to their emotions, and at times victims of their own disappointment and frustration. Dealing with such a large number of children, trying to fill an insurmountable and overwhelming parental role—who knows how many times they thought about what their lives would have been like if they hadn’t become nuns and brides of Christ?

Still, their patience had limits. Maybe they were shaped by their own upbringing, by an older way of thinking where discipline meant something harsher. Perhaps they too had been taught through strictness and fear, and simply passed on what they knew—the only methods they’d ever learned for teaching respect and obedience.

But all of that was behind me now. I was leaving one family for another—one I barely knew.

After he married Immacolata, Dad lived in Corigliano Scalo, in the same building as my grandma. She was on the third floor; my father was on the fourth.

For the first time I was on my own, out there, in a world I didn’t know how to function in. This should have been the moment when I received the most guidance, attention, and care. At fourteen years old, I was experiencing so many changes in such a short time. Instead, I was left to figure it out alone. Everything was expected of me as if I already knew how that world worked. I had to learn and adapt quickly.

I would be attending the Professionale, my first year of high school. The vocational school—just like my middle school principal had predicted. Despite everything, despite proving I could do better, I ended up exactly where she’d said I would.

Everything about this new place felt foreign. The differences between the east coast of Calabria and the west coast were staggering. People spoke a different dialect, and the culture among kids was different. Even in school, it seemed my previous education was far better than the level of the other kids. I was better in grammar, in English, and history. Math, on the other hand, was still my Achilles heel.

Soon I got used to the environment and the kids around me. My days and months became more predictable, and I could find comfort in knowing that I was going to be there a month from now, in the same school, looking at the same faces. Stability gave me comfort. I had my own room, my own bed, a closet.

Even better was seeing Elia and getting back into our old relationship. Things had changed, of course—she was older with different interests—but I loved the fact of seeing her again. The concept of family felt real for the very first time in our lives.

During the same period, something else started to happen within my family—you know, the one that raised us and took responsibility for us all those years.

Oh wait. Not really. You know I’m joking.

Whenever we would visit during the holidays, my sister and I were seen as different. Paternal aunts, uncles, and grandmother were constantly praising the achievements of my uncle’s children, my cousins—the ones my grandmother raised without issue. We lost contact with the family from my mother’s side. We rarely saw them or heard from them.

Even though we knew these people were family, it didn’t feel like it. We felt like strangers among them, outsiders looking in at something we were never truly part of.

Among the grandchildren, we were unique. Not because we were less capable, but because we’d grown up in an orphanage while they were at home with their parents. What my family didn’t understand—what most people don’t understand—is that growing up in an institution actually changes how your brain develops. When children grow up without stable caregivers, in environments where they never know what to expect, their brains adapt by staying constantly on alert. The part of the brain that detects threats becomes hyperactive. You’re always watching, always waiting for the next bad thing to happen. This helps you survive in chaos, but it makes everything else harder—learning, connecting with people, managing emotions. It’s not stupidity. It’s your brain doing what it had to do to protect you.

I couldn’t keep up the way someone from a stable home could. Sometimes I was slower to understand things, slower to adapt—not because I lacked intelligence, but because I’d grown up with limited one-on-one attention, inconsistent caregiving, and no secure attachment figures. These gaps weren’t permanent, but closing them required understanding and support.

But instead of seeing this as the natural result of what we’d been through, they saw it as proof of stupidity. That was the difference in treatment.

The word “stupid” in the Coriglianese dialect is “ciuot.” I can tell you with confidence that I heard that word hundreds of times. My father thought the same of me—he’d already made up his mind about who I was. We needed support, understanding, and nurturing to help us figure out the limitless doubts we had about ourselves and the world around us. Most of all, we needed love and compassion.

To them, we were lost causes, branded with the curse of the immutable mark of failure. To them, we were irrecuperable—at only fourteen years old. Their biggest mistake was believing that where we came from defined where we could go.

One day, my father went to school and inquired with the professors about my grades. Dad came home shocked. He couldn’t believe it. Initially, he didn’t want to tell me anything. Then he let it go. Apparently, the teachers said that I was a very curious and intelligent child, that I was applying myself and doing well.

Dad was surprised. Still to this day I don’t understand why. He didn’t believe that his son was capable of doing something, of achieving something. Up to that point, he was the one thinking I was stupid, incapable, inept at doing anything. I know this because of how he treated me. Tell a child enough times he is incapable and soon he will start believing it. I developed a sense of self-sabotage, because I thought of myself as unable to dare, unable to achieve anything. In the end, I developed self-esteem issues.

What I needed was not complicated. I found myself stuck between my own insecurities and the constant reminder of my ineptitude. Yet, it appeared easy for my father to brush that off, to choose not to look closer. I craved the encouragement of a father, a man who believed I could be more than what I had been through. Someone to show me the way forward.

In all of that, I never stopped feeling positive, and had an unusual sense of humor. Laughing with Elia was the best part of it all—we would joke constantly about anything. That was my relief, what gave me hope for the future. I learned that tomorrow may be better if I ended the day with a smile.

Even then, I could sense something was off about that moment—the way she used our guilt like a tool. By getting older you become aware of the many little things hidden behind the world around you. You can distinguish when someone tells a lie, watch how people behave when they say one thing and then do something totally the opposite—you can see hypocrisy. I am not talking about seeing that there is indeed one person behind the little stage moving the puppets; I am talking about that fine line in people’s faces, their expressions, the feelings. I guess growing up makes you see the world in HD.

That clarity came gradually. In the orphanage, hierarchies had changed. A few nuns moved on somewhere else, and Suor Eugenia also left to become the mother superior of some other place. Suor Elisa—if you recall, the nun with the mustache—became mother superior. No more cheers and joyful laughs from Suor Eugenia, the ones you could hear coming from afar even before you could see her. That was a performance, of course, but also an attempt to make us feel better.

With Suor Elisa in charge, the place felt darker, with more grim faces around.

Another big change occurred around my second year of middle school. Elia was sixteen by now, and our relationship shifted. She was more interested in her peers than in me. She became rebellious against the nuns, reaching that phase of adolescence where she was unmanageable.

She enrolled at the Professionale—a vocational school—but wasn’t actually going to school. She was doing “filone” as the youngsters used to say, skipping classes. She would go with her friend Sandra, who drove a black Aprilia RS 50. Sandra had darker skin, an athletic build, shoulder-length brown hair, and blue eyes. She gave me the impression of being a girl who knew what she wanted from life, living carefree about the problems of her age. She’d zip through traffic on that bike, revving the engine—fearless. That motorcycle made her look untouchable.

The nuns didn’t have a good impression of her. She represented rebellion and freedom, and they thought she was a bad influence. Maybe she was. But to me, watching from inside those gates, she looked like everything we weren’t allowed to be.

Elia and Sandra would disappear together to the seaside, the market, nearby cities. Sandra would come to the orphanage in the evening and bring Elia pizza. They’d eat outside the gates, hidden in the shadows.

Elia had caught that same spirit of rebellion. She didn’t like rules. She would talk back to the nuns, oppose them at every turn. It was then that our father decided she needed a change of environment. Elia got transferred to another orphanage in Acri, where she attended teacher training school and later finished her diploma.

For the first time in years, I was alone. She left a void. I couldn’t go to anyone else for help or support. I missed her deeply. We had the chance to talk on the phone sometimes, and she noticed how my voice had changed—I was hitting puberty. I wasn’t that little quiet child anymore. I was more capable of fending for myself, even if I didn’t always feel that way. The last year of middle school arrived along with my final exam. I barely passed with sufficient grades—just enough to get by.

Around that period, it was customary for the good kids—the ones with good grades—to choose a more prestigious liceo, the type of high school that prepares you for university. The middle school principal held court over these decisions, telling parents which schools their children were ready to attend based on their grades. She dispensed her judgments like an oracle, handing down edicts that felt like sentences you couldn’t escape.

She was in her mid-sixties, fragile in build—skinny and short, with short blonde hair and makeup caked on so thick it seemed excessive even for a stage performer. Her presence was an oxymoron. The makeup made her look like a clown, but her perpetual scowl turned her into a sad one. She was always up in arms disciplining children. I never saw her smile.

When the moment came for her to meet with me and a nun, I could already read her expression before I sat down.

“Hi Benito, how are you?” she asked, looking at me like I’d committed some crime she hadn’t yet identified.

“I am fine, thank you.” Enough with the fake pleasantries, I thought.

“Which school do you think Benito is suitable for?” the nun asked.

The principal’s face soured further. I thought she must be sucking on a lemon.

“I would like to go to the Liceo Tecnologico,” I said. The technological lyceum—a more academic path that could lead to university.

“Hmm, no. I’m sorry, but you are not suited for a liceo. The Professionale would be better for you.” She said it like the matter was already settled, annoyed I’d even suggested otherwise.

Her “recommendation” was bad news, though technically just an opinion. But people back then took it seriously—it came from someone with education and authority. The Professionale was a vocational school teaching trades like electronics and telecommunications. People called it “a scola i ri ciucci”—the school for donkeys, since “ciucc” means donkey in dialect. It was meant for students with low grades. There was nothing inherently wrong with that education, but society drew sharp class lines. Students at the liceo were either rich or smart. Students at vocational schools were poor or stupid. I was poor and struggling academically—condemned on both counts.

Even if I’d been allowed to choose the liceo, I couldn’t afford university afterward. My father still worked day jobs as a bricklayer. I couldn’t expect him or anyone else to pay for higher education. Once again, I found myself stripped of agency, reduced to a label. A few numbers on a piece of paper became a verdict on my character, my abilities, my entire future.

The only person who saw past that verdict was the good doctor. He saw what I could become. He gave me hope. He was kind enough to want to adopt me—to give me a path to the liceo, to university, to a different life.

Once again, the adoption was stopped. And with it, my aspirations. What stayed with me wasn’t just the principal’s judgment—it was how everyone accepted it as gospel. A few test scores at thirteen became a prophecy about my entire future. No one questioned whether I might grow, might work harder, might become something different than what those stupid grades said I was. Potential didn’t factor into the equation. The grades were the verdict, and the verdict was final.

My father promised this time he would take care of me.

In his own way, he tried.

In a way we always met this process with anticipation and anxiety. Each new woman who entered our father’s life represented possibility—the possibility of finally having what we’d been missing. I remember my sister asked Nilla: “Ti posso chiamare mamma?”—Can I call you mom? The question was loaded with a meaning that meant everything to us. For too long we had been starved and deprived of a mother. To us, it wasn’t only the need to speak the word “mamma” it was the meaning behind it—safety, someone that had our backs, just to be there for us. A sense of normalcy, to actually have a present mother. Yet, it’s difficult when two children you’ve just met ask if you’re willing to take on the burden of motherhood. We didn’t know that, of course. We were starved for motherly love like a thirst that can never be quenched.

For a brief moment you could hear a pin drop. Then she replied: “Certo gioia”—Of course, sweetheart.

That answer was equally powerful and reassuring. You could gather from her voice a courage and a responsibility that few had expressed toward us up to that point. We felt glad. For a while, things seemed like they might work out. Nilla brought structure to the chaos of our lives. When we visited her house in Rossano, she cooked meals that felt like family dinners. She asked about school. She noticed when we needed new shoes or when my sister’s hair needed cutting. These small acts of attention felt monumental to us.

After a year or two they couldn’t keep up the relationship due to constant arguments. Nilla had two grown children, and I am afraid she was too smart for my father, she was not someone he could subjugate easily due to the fact that she had a strong character. I suspect now that their arguments weren’t just about personalities clashing—my father had certain expectations about how a woman should behave, how she should defer to him, and Nilla simply wasn’t built that way. She wasn’t afraid to confront him when he needed to hear it. She questioned him. She had opinions. She didn’t back down. In a good way, she could have helped him channel his intensity and wildness in better directions, refined his rougher edges without trying to extinguish what made him who he was. That’s what a good partner does—they don’t tame you completely, they help you become a better version of yourself while letting you remain yourself. Nilla was a good woman for my father. Still, he didn’t choose to stay with her. When they ended things, we lost another mother before we’d even fully had her.

My father continued looking for company. I cannot blame him for searching for someone who could fill his soul, someone understanding who could also care for us and give him peace, care, affection. But I realize now he was also looking for something else—someone who wouldn’t challenge him the way Nilla had, someone who would fit into the life he wanted without complicating it.

Aren’t we as men in need of someone who can elevate us, and someone we can elevate as well? Why seek superiority over a partner just to remain childish and immature, drowning in selfishness, thinking that any attempt to disagree with our childish notions is a threat to who we are? Instead, that person, the other half, should keep us accountable with the burden and responsibility that pushes us towards growth and understanding. A true partnership requires the humility to be shaped by another, to accept that being challenged is not an attack but an act of love. My father never grasped this. He wanted comfort, not growth. He wanted agreement, not truth. And so he chose accordingly.

One Sunday—I could have been twelve—he came to visit us at the orphanage with a woman. He also remembered to bring some sweets as usual. Her name was Immacolata. She was twenty-eight at the time, an average-looking young woman. Dad could have been in his mid-forties. The age divide was big. He looked excited to present us this lady, almost proud, though there was something in his enthusiasm that felt rehearsed.

After sitting down and introducing ourselves, he said: “Papá ad Agosto si sposa”—Dad’s getting married in August.

A heavy silence fell over us.

“Whaaat?!” We couldn’t hold back the excitement. We were glad to hear it, but it sounded strange to us. It felt forced, rushed, unusual. After Nilla, after the emptiness that followed, here was another woman, another chance. But something didn’t sit right. The announcement felt too sudden, too calculated.

While our father was talking, we sat eating the sweets. Our observation skills were above average indeed. Our eyes occasionally fell on Immacolata eating. The way she was biting the cake was like a small child having it for the first time. Now the way you bite cake is pretty straightforward—you use your teeth, then your lips to make sure anything stays inside your mouth. She was using her teeth, yes, but it all seemed like a chimpanzee nibbling that damn thing, making a complete mess. Crumbs were falling on her lap, and some cream was left on her lips and the sides of her mouth. It wasn’t only that. The way she was biting it was strange. My sister and I exchanged looks, like saying “what is going on here?” We had a great understanding.

She finished eating and stood there with her upper lip still covered in cream. Dad glanced over, took a napkin, and told her to clean herself up. She obeyed immediately, wiping her mouth like a child being corrected by a parent. We were left a little… confused. She didn’t say much. She only had the facial expression of a person who was glad to be there, or to be anywhere for all that mattered. Maybe like somebody without character or purpose, like a leaf flying in the wind. She wasn’t hard to read, at least at the beginning. She also had an odd smile—her gums showed excessively, what they call a gummy smile or, technically speaking, excessive gingival display. When she did speak, her words came slowly, as if she had to search for each one before releasing it into the air. Yet something about her made you uneasy—a sense that something more sinister lurked behind that naive look and behavior.

Immacolata lived with her parents in Acri, a small town in the mountains about 35 kilometers from Corigliano. I never liked Acri—the crumminess of the city, the mountains, and getting there made you nauseous from all the curves twisting up the hillside. She was unemployed and had grown up there without ever leaving, never venturing beyond the familiar streets and the walls of her family home. As it turned out, it took a long time for my father to convince her parents to make the trip to Paola to visit us. They were protective of her in a way that suggested they knew she needed protecting.

We were anxious and happy for him, and went along with his plan. Once again, we asked if we could call her “mom.” Our father declined our request, mentioning that she was far too young to be called mom, and that we should address her by name. The rejection stung. If she was old enough to marry our father, why wasn’t she old enough to be our mother? But we didn’t argue. We had learned not to push too hard for things we wanted.

The following summer we were introduced to her family and stayed at her house for a week. I didn’t like the place, but eventually I made a few friends around the area. They lived in a small house built on a hill with homes stacked around and on top of each other. The neighborhood felt claustrophobic, all those houses pressing in on each other, narrow alleyways instead of proper streets. Her parents were both seniors. They welcomed us warmly, treating us like family from the moment we arrived. Her mother was very short and didn’t say much. When she smiled, I could notice she had few teeth. The father, on the other hand, was a robust guy in his late sixties. He was a heavy smoker with not many teeth to see either. Same went for her brother. They were generous with what they had, always making sure our plates were full, always offering us the best chair, the coolest spot in the house.

During our stay, I mostly enjoyed the food. They made everything from scratch. That season I gained a few pounds since all I was doing was eating and watching TV. There was something comforting about the simplicity of those days, even if I felt out of place in that mountain town. Her mother, despite being so quiet, had one peculiarity that still makes me smile when I think about it—whenever she did speak, her voice came out in this high-pitched falsetto, like she was perpetually surprised by her own words. It made even the most mundane statements sound comical, turning “Would you like more bread?” into something that belonged in an opera.

My father and Immacolata met through a friend. The story goes that a friend of my father’s introduced them, though I suspect the introduction came with certain understandings already in place. I would assume that Dad chose her because she was younger than him. She had never been married or had any children before, she had a boyfriend long ago, but things did not go well. With my father, I don’t know how much they had in common, but I think love is something that comes when you least expect it, especially when someone introduces you to it.

Knowing my father, though, he had other ideas regarding his choice. There were deeper reasons. Apparently, her family had property—houses and land scattered throughout the mountains. My father was allured by the possibility of having some part in that. He saw in Immacolata not just a wife, but an investment. A way to secure something for himself, maybe for us too, though I doubt we factored much into his calculations. Ultimately, what pushed him to marry her were most likely a series of materialistic interests. Other than that, she was good-natured and naïve. Certainly not the kind of person who would engage in intelligent conversations or challenge his decisions.

My father’s family couldn’t help but notice this during their first meeting. She would sit there quietly with half a smile on her face without saying much, nodding when spoken to, agreeing with whatever was said. My aunts exchanged glances that said everything.

The actual wedding turned out not to be in August but far later, because I remember I had to take time off from school to be there. That day our father was well-dressed and elegant. He was always handsome and prominent when he dressed up. His suit was tailored, his shoes polished to a shine, his hair slicked back in that way that made him look like he belonged in a different era. It was his day, and we were happy for him. We understood that the union with Immacolata meant a lot to him, even if we couldn’t fully understand why.

We couldn’t help but notice that throughout the day, he acted as if we weren’t there. We felt left aside, pushed to the background. Maybe we were selfish in thinking that, but ours was a legitimate concern. After all, we were his children. We were part of his life. We sat at a table far from the head table where he and Immacolata presided. When he made his rounds greeting guests, he passed our table quickly, barely stopping. When photos were taken, we were called in for a handful of shots, then dismissed. The message was clear: this was about his new beginning, not about us.

In Southern Italy, weddings are a big deal, guests are counted past the hundred, and smiles, happiness and food are all over the air. The celebration went on for hours—course after course of food, toasts with wine and limoncello, dancing that lasted until the early morning. We probably expected to feel more included in our father’s new life, yet we somehow felt hollow, you know that feeling when you are completely happy for someone, to see them move on, then realize that even if that person will still be in your life, a part of them is gone. Maybe we felt that. Or maybe we felt something more specific—that in choosing Immacolata, in choosing this new life, our father had made a choice that didn’t include us in any meaningful way. We were witnesses to his happiness, not participants in it.

As the night wore on and the guests grew louder and merrier, my sister and I found ourselves outside in the courtyard, away from the noise. We didn’t say much to each other. We didn’t need to. We both understood what this meant. Just another day in our lives.

On Sundays, some families from the city would come and pick up a few of us for a “Domenica in famiglia”—a Sunday with family. It was supposed to establish some normalcy in our already chaotic lives, but the reality fell short. Some of us needed way more than a single day to have any long-lasting positive effect. Still, we really enjoyed it. For me, it was especially about the food. I could finally eat seconds and thirds until my belly couldn’t hold any more.

These benefactors were often couples—some with no children, others with children of their own. We’d go to their houses and play, have lunch, do activities. It was a great way to break out from the routine of the orphanage.

What we didn’t fully understand then was that these Sundays often had a deeper meaning for these compassionate couples. They were evaluating us, seeing if we might be compatible with their families. Some children got adopted this way.

During the same period, a doctor took an interest in me. He was a tall man with blue eyes and a dark beard, unmarried and living at home with his mother and sister. He worked as a pediatrician at the local hospital. An honorable, educated man who liked to challenge me intellectually, asking smart questions in a way that taught me how to think.

He would bring me to his house on Sundays and gave me books to read. He taught me how to use the computer—the most majestic thing I had ever seen at my age. I was captivated by it. That became my obsession—as a child, all I wanted was to go to his house and play games on it. He also wanted to make sure I learned English, so he had computer software for that too. But he was teaching me more than I realized. We had conversations about medicine, about becoming a doctor. Maybe he saw something in me, a potential I couldn’t see in myself.

He was one of the few people who took the time to truly understand me. A true mentor. Certainly better than my own father. I had hopes he might adopt me, that I could become part of his family the way some of the other kids had found theirs. But it never happened. Still, what he gave me mattered—a glimpse of what I could become, if someone believed in me enough.

My best friend Raffaele was one of the lucky ones. He found a good, loving family through those Sunday visits. I was happy for him—I really was. But watching him leave felt like losing a piece of myself. In the orphanage, you learned not to get too attached to anyone, because people always left. Either they got adopted, or they aged out, or they just... disappeared into the system. Raffaele was proof that good things could happen to kids like us. He was also a reminder that good things didn’t happen to all of us.

In another instance, there was Andrea, an eight-year-old who caught the attention of a lady, another doctor. She seemed to like the child, and at the beginning he had a good time as well. Andrea was the second of three siblings—Luigi, Andrea, and Filomena. The doctor seemed interested only in him.

A week went by and the lady brought him back, exhausted. She couldn’t control him. He was restless and had become almost violent. Once back, we couldn’t understand how he could squander such an opportunity, how he could throw that freedom away, the chance of finding someone who could take care of him.

In reality, Andrea did it on purpose. He couldn’t bear the idea of separating from his siblings. Would you have done it? Would you have abandoned your only family in the world to find comfort in another life, not knowing what happened to them? I understood Andrea. Some bonds were worth more than freedom.

I finished “scuola elementare,” graduating with good grades. The intermediate school was only one block away from the old school. By then, everybody boasted about how intelligent I was for my age. However, going to intermediate school was a big change for me. That’s when I started to struggle, and my lack of mathematics fluency began to show. What do you expect? They literally beat the math out of me. Maybe I was detached from schoolwork—I’m sure I was applying myself, but somehow it wasn’t enough. It was tiring and painful to see the teachers praise the usual kids, the ones who excelled at everything, the good ones, while I was relegated to the bottom ranks of the class.

School was a good way to get out of the orphanage and experience the external world among “normal” people. It was nice to play, chat, and be around other kids. We were genuine in our relationships with others. I wanted to belong and feel normal among them, to be one of them. Still, it wasn’t the case because some of the other kids didn’t want to be associated with us. I remember when making teams to play volleyball or soccer, they didn’t want to join us. Under the compassionate looks there was a veil of unspoken discrimination that you might think of as preference, but I could see it in their faces and their behavior. I learned to watch what they did, not what they said.

Throughout intermediate school, I lagged behind in my academics—my average grade was a C.

School was how people determined your success in life—a shallow observation of the chances you had and how far you could go if you had good grades. It seemed like a superficial and hollow way to describe you as a person or even your value. A way to decide fates, to label you as a forever loser if you had bad grades and a successful genius if you were good academically. Nobody wanted to see beyond the grades. Not everyone was going to be great at sitting for hours completing mathematical operations. Nobody wanted to see what other talents we had.

What I’ve learned since then is that you must see what someone can become, envision them already achieving their potential. When you believe in someone that way, they will inevitably follow that path, believing they can achieve anything with hard work and consistency.

They explained the Italian system to us like we had real choices. After middle school, you take the “licenza media” exam—oral and written sections that determine whether you’re smart enough to move forward. Then comes the big decision: which path will you take?

Liceo was for the smart kids, the ones destined for university. They’d study literature, science, languages, the classics—subjects that sounded important and far away from anything I knew. Then there was Istituto Tecnico, the technical colleges, where you learned practical things like business or technology, still with a shot at university if you wanted it. And finally, Istituto Professionale—vocational training. Hands-on work. Learning a trade. A path to immediate employment, they said, which was just another way of saying it was for kids who weren’t going anywhere else.

All three paths led to the same diploma, the Diploma di Maturità, after five years and another round of exams. On paper, any of us could go to university. But we all knew which kids went where, and why.

Maybe I am restless. Maybe I am never fully at peace. Or maybe I am not at ease with myself enough to allow my body to finally feel at home.

I don’t know if this sounds like a mind game to you, but it is not an excuse, nor a reluctance to belong. I am not avoiding home, or the idea of being at home. It is simply something I have carried with me since childhood.

You probably have a dear place you remember—a place where you built your childhood memories with your parents. You might say with joy, “I grew up there. That was my house, the place of my childhood.” It is a place you call home, a place where you feel a deep sense of belonging.

It is not just a location; it is a part of you, woven into the very fabric of your memory. You could not imagine it any other way.

To this very day, I do not have that sense of belonging to a specific place. There is no place I can truly call home, other than the simple fact of where I was born. I am aware that people often say home is where the heart resides—something you build with the people you love. That is true, and to some extent, I have found that. Over time, I have come to believe that this may be the truest measure of a home—not a place, but the people you love. With them, you can feel at home anywhere, no matter the location.

When we first left the orphanage for a holiday, I remember feeling an unexpected sense of attachment to the place. The change itself was disruptive—almost destabilizing—in the same way a person can grow attached to a captor, not out of love, but as a fragile anchor to survival, a reminder of one’s humanity.

That same pattern repeated itself whenever I had to leave whichever house I was staying in—my father’s or my mother’s. In those moments, the pain was sharper. I had begun to adjust, to settle into the environment. That was the place I wanted to remain, perhaps because of my attachment to them, perhaps because of a child’s need for his parents.

Returning to the orphanage was always the hardest part.

Once, when I was about six years old, I was at my mother’s house and it was time to leave. As they prepared to go back, I ran and hid under a large wardrobe. There was just enough space for my small body. My mother and Mario searched for me for half an hour. When they finally found me, Mario pulled me out from underneath, and I cried.

Each return to the orphanage was met with overwhelming stress and anxiety. A deep nostalgia would take hold of me, heavy and suffocating. On my last day of staying with my “family,” fear always set in. I was scared to go back. It was an emotional swing that never dulled with time.

What followed was always the same: a hard, depressing first week back in the orphanage. I had to readjust—to the routine, to the rules, to the script. You conformed to the environment as long as you left behind any thoughts of resistance.

Our routine changed as I grew, or perhaps it was my perception that changed with me. Every day felt like a small negotiation between control and freedom.

A normal school day began around 6:30 a.m. One of the nuns would come storming in, shouting “Svegliaaa!” while flipping on the lights. If you didn’t wake up immediately, she would yank the blankets off. If you ignored the third call, a bucket of cold water in your face made sure you were awake. That sudden shock—the cold, the smell, the sting—was a ritual I wanted to avoid at all costs.

A few years after our arrival, the dormitory was remodeled. Instead of one large room where all of us slept together, we were divided into smaller rooms with three or four beds—rooms for boys and rooms for girls. Mornings remained chaotic. The bustle of dozens of children rushing, laughing, panicking left no room for lingering thoughts. Yet even in that disorder, the nuns’ lessons took root: discipline, cleanliness, responsibility.

We made our beds, washed our faces, dressed, swept our rooms and the hallways. Breakfast followed—white or cocoa milk, sometimes burned, paired with stale bread, our daily staple. There was a rhythm to it, a choreography designed to keep us moving and obedient. We washed bowls, wiped tables, replaced chairs, grabbed our “tease-for-your-taste-buds” snack, and off to school we went.

School ran from 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., Saturdays included. When we returned, I was always famished. Lunch was followed by chores—sweeping a three-floor staircase, a small but relentless exercise—before homework from 3:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. If we were obedient, we earned an hour of television—our only window to a world beyond the walls. After dinner, we washed up quickly at the bidet, a small basin for cleaning ourselves. Full baths came only on Saturday afternoons, just before church. Bedtime came like clockwork, around 8:00 p.m.

Just imagine trying to keep a bunch of rascals under control in church, where everyone was expected to be serious and solemn. It wasn’t uncommon for Suor Elisa to shoot us a terrible look whenever we whispered or chattered. And yet, as children, some things are impossible to control—like the body.

I remember one moment perfectly: the church was full, the silence heavy, the service at its most solemn. I thought I could hold it, but my body betrayed me with a loud fart. The sound echoed through the pews, and the kids around me burst into laughter, trying desperately to stifle it. Suor Elisa’s eyes locked on me, blazing with a kind of murderous intent that clearly signaled, “Later, you are going to pay for this.” And pay I did—a good, thorough spanking that left no doubt about the consequences.

Sundays gave us a little room to breathe. We slept an extra hour, cleaned more thoroughly, folded laundry, and played if the weather allowed. Playing outside meant gathering in the fenced courtyard, where we turned scraps into treasures. We improvised a soccer ball by crumpling paper, shaping it into a sphere, and wrapping it tightly in transparent tape. If the nuns found out, they would have killed us—it was an unforgivable waste of precious paper and tape in their eyes.

Still, there it was: our makeshift ball. Not bouncy like a real one, but solid enough to roll across the ground and give us hours of joy, kicking it around until it inevitably came apart, unraveling like our fleeting moments of fun.

There were hopscotch games, drawn with chalk on the cracked pavement, where we leapt from square to square, balancing on one foot, laughing at slips and cheering victories. Playing catch-up turned the courtyard into a whirlwind of chases, dodging and tagging, our shouts echoing off the walls. And “little statuettes”—the game where one child faced the wall, counting aloud, while the others advanced inch by inch, freezing into statues the moment the counter spun around, searching for any twitch, any breath, any hint of movement. The tension built with every step and every held pose, until someone cracked and giggles erupted.

These games were beautiful in their simplicity, liberating in the way they let us shed the weight of rules and routines. For those precious hours, we felt like real children—wild, inventive, free—forgetting the orphanage’s confines, the nuns’ watchful eyes, and the feeling of impermanence. It was pure escape, where imagination and laughter drowned out everything else.

Indoors, we improvised games or watched television. Cartoons and Disney films filled the afternoons. Aladdin was always my favorite. As I watched him fly over Agrabah, I escaped the feeling of walls pressing in. Maybe it was the magic flying carpet—something that left so much to our childish imagination.

Sometimes we would take long walks in Sopra Paola—the higher part of the city, built up on the hill—our hands clasped in pairs, the nuns watching our every step. I hated it—the embarrassment of being seen holding another child’s hand in public. It felt strange and humiliating, like I was still a baby when I already knew how to walk perfectly well by myself. I craved my independence. Yet even then, I noticed small things: the wind on my face, the birds skimming close to the ground, the smells of the streets and the sea. In those moments, I felt flickers of freedom, fleeting but real.

Fall and winter were the harshest. From our windows, I could see the gray sky and the violent sea. Waves smashed against the shore like an uncontained force, and when the wind howled through the building, I felt it as a presence, alive and wild. Nature, untamed, seemed the only thing beyond control, and in it I found a strange solace—a reminder that power existed beyond walls and rules.

Spring was my favorite season. I watched anxiously as trees and grass returned to life, waiting for the first blooms. The swallows’ return marked the moment of liberation: they shrieked and darted through the U-shaped courtyard, swift and fearless. I envied them. I often wished to be a bird, to lift off and leave everything behind. They flew so close to the windows I felt I could touch them, and for a few seconds, my imagination let me truly escape.

We were in the classroom one day, and we were asked to write a short poem about spring. Mine went like this:

A sparrow perches on a budding branch,
singing joyfully to the warming sun.
From afar, a hawk spies the fragile song,
dives, swift as a shadow through the air—
and the sparrow is no longer there.

After reading it, the teachers started reading too much into it.

“What do you mean the sparrow is no longer there?” they asked. “Did the hawk kill it? Did it fly away?”

I looked at them seriously and said, “It’s simply not there anymore.”

They stared at me, puzzled—almost shocked by the answer and by my indifference to their need for a conclusion. But that was the point. It was up to the reader to imagine what happened next, to finish the story of the singing sparrow for themselves.

Summer brought the privilege of the beach. Once I entered the Tyrrhenian Sea, I never wanted to leave. I loved the water, even when the waves terrified me. Its endless rhythm was mesmerizing, calming in a way nothing else in the orphanage ever was. Towels were scarce; sharing them was a lesson in patience and compromise. When fewer children came, I had the luxury of claiming one for myself—a small victory.

Once, with my friend Raffaele, we swam farther than we should have. The sea was agitated, and the waves were deep enough to cover us. Panic rose quickly. Grabbing at each other, we screamed, water choking us, hearts racing. I must have been twelve. We nearly drowned.

On another day, driven by recklessness, I invented a game where two boys threw rocks at me as I dodged. Adrenaline surged as I narrowly escaped the first few. Then—thump—a sharp rock struck my forehead. Blood dripped down my face, everyone stopped, my courage vanished. I cried, terrified. They rushed me to the emergency room, where a couple of stitches restored the outward wound, but not the memory of how dumb we really were.

There’s something interesting about those times. If you were prone to getting hurt—or even had a minor accident—the nuns or parents would say, “Attento, non farti male. Se ti fai male, ti do il resto.”

Basically, don’t get hurt. And if you did, you’d get the rest—by being beaten.

It sounds crazy now, but that was their way of deterring recklessness and misbehavior. We were afraid of falling or bruising ourselves. And yet, of course, we did it anyway. That was the mentality back then.

I wish someone had sat us down and explained that accidents are okay—that wounds heal, and things can be fixed or replaced. Breaking a plate, a glass, or anything at all was treated like a mortal sin. They made us feel like irredeemable failures. Of course we misbehaved; we were kids. Put enough children together, and trouble is inevitable.

Looking back, I realize how much that mindset shaped me. It taught me to fear the consequences of being human, to treat normal mistakes as failures to be punished. It instilled a caution, a hesitancy, and an underlying tension that I carried long after childhood. At the same time, it left me with a stubborn streak: the impulse to keep moving, keep experimenting, even when danger—or disapproval—loomed. Perhaps that was the one lesson that stuck—that life is lived fully only when you step forward, even knowing the “rest” might come.

Now, imagine this applied to a person—or to a child. With proper care, and unless nature has limited their capacity, anyone can be guided to unlock different types of gifts and propensities. Not from their looks, nor from a single sign, but from observing their mind, their curiosity, the sparks of thought and action that hint at what they could become. In those sparks lies the hidden potential waiting to be revealed.

Elia and I were exactly that: two unfortunate, innocent children, coming from a devastated family and terrible circumstances, yet with potential. And it didn’t take long for someone to notice.

I was only seven, and apparently the nuns were impressed by my reading level—they wondered how I could read so well at such a young age, well above my grade level. Someone had a wonderful idea: exactly a month later, in October, there was going to be a dinner event at a convention in the city of Cosenza, attended by many important people. They decided to have me read a speech—standing behind a lectern I could barely reach, propped up by a box, with a microphone in front of me.

From that day until the event, they trained me every day, hammering the speech into my head until I had memorized every line.

When the day finally came, they dressed me up nicely: a little suit, white shirt, bow tie. I remember people looking at me, smiling, and showering me with compliments. Suor Elisa came with me to the lectern, just to make sure I would get it right.

As I began, there was a silence so heavy it felt like time had stopped. From my vantage point, I could see all those people smiling, eager to hear what I had to say. I felt a different kind of anxiety, a small whirlwind in my chest. I started reading—the first paragraphs flowed normally, maybe even too fast, until Suor Elisa signaled me to slow down. Then it happened: I completely froze. For what felt like ten long seconds, I lost my place, my lines vanished. Fear, or maybe just nerves, had gotten the best of me.

Somehow, I caught up and continued to the end. When I finished, everyone erupted in applause. People cheered and smiled; it had been a tense, overwhelming experience. And in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help but wonder… was it Suor Elisa’s mustache that distracted me, or something else entirely?

One day, a music instructor named Maurizio came to the orphanage while we were trying to learn new songs. Suddenly, he stopped, looked at us, and said we had a bella voce—a beautiful voice.

That moment changed everything. We discovered we had a gift for singing, and soon we became soloists in the orphanage choir. Our voices carried beyond the walls of the orphanage, reaching the church, where we sang during services. It became a tradition to perform in concerts during the holidays or other celebrations, drawing people from outside just to hear us. In those moments, we felt, for the first time, that our lives might hold something more.

And it was during those same holidays, when our voices filled the church and the orphanage echoed with music, that we would get to leave the orphanage entirely—at least for a while. It was customary for the children to spend the holidays with their families, and those trips became a different kind of celebration, one filled with anticipation, small gifts, and the bittersweet knowledge that our time away would never last forever.

The nuns would pack two plastic bags with clothes—one for me, one for my sister—because luggage wasn’t really a thing back then. Our dad would come to pick us up. For two holidays, the nuns would do something small but special: a small panettone for Christmas, a chocolate egg for Easter. Those little treats became a highlight we could count on. We marked the days on the calendar, and somehow, time crawled ever slower as the holidays approached.

Going away for a while was a relief—but it was also painful, because we knew we would have to return. Still, deep down, we always fantasized about not going back. In reality, we always did. We split our time between my mother and my father. He didn’t have his own place yet, so we stayed at our grandmother’s house with him.

The days before the holidays dragged on endlessly, while time seemed to fly when we were back with our father. We always carried this sense of impermanence, aware that each passing day brought us closer to returning to the orphanage. Even in those fleeting days of freedom, anxiety clung to me. I knew it wouldn’t last. After weeks of counting down, after the thrill of anticipation, I still couldn’t live in the moment. I could never stop thinking. Never stop overthinking.

We would see old faces, faded in my memory, greeting us with, “Hi, I’m Uncle so-and-so. Do you remember me? I used to hold you when you were little.” I would smile and reply politely, “Yes,” though in my mind I had no idea who most of these people were.

There was one aunt I remember above all: Zia Rosalia, a fit brunette and the youngest of my father’s sisters. I was so emotionally attached to her that I often treated her like my mother. She was endlessly kind, though I’m sure my frequent tantrums tested her patience. “Come here, tesoro,” she’d say, wrapping me in a hug that made everything feel a little better, even if just for a second.

After seeing some of our family members for the first time in what felt like ages, a few of them would mock the way we spoke. “Listen to that accent—you sound like you’re from another planet,” one might laugh, making us shrink a bit inside.

You see, Italy is a linguistically fragmented nation: each region has its own dialect, and within each region, every area has its own variation. At some point, there was a national agreement to adopt Florentine as the standard, so that’s the version you hear today as the Italian language. We were living on the Tyrrhenian coast, in Paola, where the dialect was similar to Cosentino, while Corigliano had its own completely unrecognizable flair.

Yet on occasions like these, we could not help but notice the difference in treatment compared to the other nephews—almost as if Elia and I were of a different stock, a lower one. “Those poor kids from the orphanage,” they’d whisper, treating us like we couldn’t hear or understand. From those moments began the age-long doubts about our intelligence and our abilities. We were always assumed to be less, to feel less—the “dumb” or “stupid” ones—for reasons we could never understand.

This created long term difficulties in our psyche giving a sense of insecurity. You somehow expect—and look to—your loved ones for validation, because they are supposed to love you and lift you up. But for us, it often felt as if they were adding insult to injury, as if our misfortunes were proof that we were somehow less than.

During the holidays at my grandmother’s house, mornings began early with my father. One of my clearest childhood memories is from those mornings, when I was around six or seven. We would get up earlier than anyone else and watch rented VHS tapes together—yes, renting movies was a real thing back then. He always picked action or adventure films, and it was during those early hours in front of the flickering screen, watching Bruce Lee, that my obsession began.

From that moment on, I couldn’t resist punching and kicking at anything in sight. Martial arts had taken root in me, and it was all I could think about. Even amid the strange faces, the small gifts, and the fleeting freedom of the holidays, a new passion had begun to shape my world.

Visiting our mother was never as festive as one might expect. By then, another little brother, Antonio, had been born, making two boys in total. Mario was always there, often appearing as his usual self. Yet the reality of that house was written on our mother’s face—especially in the black eyes she sometimes bore, quiet souvenirs from his drunken rampages. It didn’t take long for us to realize that she was not having a good time.

I still cannot fathom why my mother remained there, why she endured so much. Perhaps the fear of leaving was greater than the fear of staying. By that point, the lack of financial support mattered less than the absence of courage. I still struggle to understand whether any of it was worth enduring.

Mario was a dangerous man back then—perhaps more than ever—and yet we were allowed to spend time under that roof. During the day, he could play the role of the “good Mario.” At night, we learned to remain quiet and hold our breath, hoping he wouldn’t explode into violence.

I remember one moment clearly. Drunk, he looked at me and said, “You must call me Dad. From now on, I’m your dad.” That role was already taken, and I refused. I was stubborn. “No, you’re not,” I replied, my voice shaking but firm. The consequence came immediately—a kick that sent me flying several feet across the room. My mother rushed in, screaming, “Mario, stop! Don’t touch him!” It is never easy to watch your mother struggle to protect you from a drunk man, fighting to keep him from hurting you.

Whatever prosperity and pleasure had been promised when my mother first met Mario had long faded. Alcohol revealed what Mario truly was: violent, jealous, and unable to tolerate the fact that we were children from another man. Our very existence fed his resentment. Feelings of malice, jealousy, rage, and violence were magnified a hundredfold under its influence.

My mother endured the beatings and stayed. Within the confines of choices she had made, she found herself trapped in a cage of her own creation. At times, she shielded us from him.

She had two beautiful boys with Mario. They grew up marked by the scars of that relationship, yet somehow became kind and good. Even now, I wonder how a man capable of such cruelty could also be part of the creation of something so good. I cannot explain it, except to believe there must be something divine at work—even in the darkest places.

And so, while at home we were made to feel like losers and suckers, in the orphanage we felt as if we were worth something—perhaps even something more. Yet that recognition was never enough to fill the void or mend our broken hearts. They were two different worlds, and we were caught between them.

Then someone noticed it in us, and that was when talks of adoption began to fill the air around our days. With proper care, guidance, and attention, we could be shaped—our gifts nurtured, our propensities discovered. Not from appearances, but from the sparks of thought and curiosity that hinted at what we might become.

And so it happened that someone expressed a desire to adopt my sister and me. A doctor showed interest in me, while a teacher wished to bring my sister into their family. The thought of being separated was our greatest fear. Still, maybe—just maybe—being adopted would have been a better fate than enduring the ongoing suffering within the confines of the orphanage.

Adoption became a possibility because of the prolonged absence of any family visits, the longest period of abandonment we had ever endured. Nobody came for months. Nobody called. Our father was working in Turin. Somehow, someone had the decency to inform him. He vehemently opposed the decision and stopped the adoption.

I remember him telling the story later, as if he were a hero—a savior “I prevented them from taking you away from me” as though we should be grateful. You might wonder: did he come to pick us up? Did he take us out of the orphanage? Not really.

You know that feeling when you have a toy you never play with—a toy tossed into a corner, collecting dust—and the moment another child reaches for it, you erupt, kicking and screaming, yelling, “Hey! That’s mine!” That’s how we felt. Like playthings.

How could he be so selfish? He couldn’t be there for us. He couldn’t care for us. Yet the message was clear: I care so much about you that I won’t let anyone else take you away—but I will still leave you in misery.

And yet, even in neglect, confusion, and quiet cruelty, something essential remained untouched. Like a diamond still buried in stone, our potential endured beneath the rough surface of circumstance. It did not disappear because we were ignored, nor was it erased by abandonment or fear. Someone had seen it in us once—our voices, our curiosity, the faint spark of becoming—and that was enough to know it had always been there.

We were never worthless. We were never broken beyond repair. We were simply uncut—left waiting for the hands that would recognize what we were and shape us into what we might become.

Subsequent studies reinforced those findings, consistently associating corporal punishment with elevated anxiety, antisocial behavior, and long-term mental health problems.

If this was already known, why was it still done to children like me?

None of this was abstract theory where I grew up. In the orphanage, corporal punishment was routine, unquestioned, and delivered with a certainty that left no room for doubt or mercy.

With twenty-five or more children to manage, the nuns thought they had no better alternatives. physical punishment was presented as the simplest way to maintain order. Of course, there were twenty-five different personalities, each child responding and behaving differently. Beatings became the great equalizer; everyone understood pain.

Some lighter versions of punishment involved standing or kneeling in a corner, or lying face down on a table. I never fully understood the logic of it—if you raised your head, you were in trouble. A slap or a hit was about to land on you. Corporal punishment was their solution to any misbehavior.

Once, I knelt for so long that when they finally told me to stand, my legs would not respond. They felt locked and had a hard time standing, as if they no longer belonged to me.

It happened over the smallest things. It could be a word spoken wrong, a task left undone, a child stumbling over a multiplication table. Those tiny infractions were enough to unleash the storm.

They nuns were indeed human, with their own fears and frustrations—no doubt about that—but nothing could ever justify what I witnessed. Too many times, I watched two nuns corner a single child and beat him until they were gasping for breath.

I saw it in their eyes: it wasn’t discipline, wasn’t even correction. It was something rawer—a hunger for release, a sudden eruption of rage pouring out. They preached mercy and kindness, yet in reality they did the opposite.

Later you would see them in church: those same hands raised toward heaven in prayer, their voices soft and reverent, their faces calm and serene.

There was a child named Vincenzo, no more than seven years old. He was mischievous in the most creative ways, and he endured the harshest beatings with an equally inventive resilience. I saw them push him, slap him, punch him, kick him—the standard treatment. But Vincenzo took more of it than anyone. He was hyperactive, restless in a way that seemed to spill out of him uncontrollably, and I’ve always believed that many of us were already wounded long before we ever arrived there. Yet beatings were the least necessary, the least productive “educational tools” they relied on. Patience and understanding would have served us far better.

It was hard. It was painful. We were already broken, children carrying the weight of abandonment, neglect, and a hunger for affection we had no words to name. What we truly needed was nurturing and encouragement, not more punishment piled on top of fear and insecurity.

I still remember the spankings across the face. They did not know—or perhaps did not care—about concussions, about what repeated blows to a child’s head might do. We didn’t have the language for it then, but we were already being trained for combat. We were sparring partners.

After a while, I stopped feeling pain. I learned to leave my body, to detach, and return only when it was over.

It worked.

Other children were beaten for not knowing the lines of an assigned poem, as if pain were an effective tool for building memory.

Elia was not immune either. She was often “corrected” simply for smiling while chatting with her peers. “You better wipe that smile off your face, or you’ll see what happens to you!”

You may think me strange, but there was an ironic twist amid all the horror. Sometimes, while the nuns were beating someone else, they would match their words to the rhythm of the blows: “You!… Will!… Not!… Do!… That!… Ever!… Again!”

How many hits did you count? Seven—exactly. The intonation, the sweeping motion of their arms, made me picture an orchestra conductor in the throes of the most dramatic passage, waving violently through the climax.

Not that I enjoyed the idea of someone else being punished—far from it—but the whole scene was so absurdly comedic and tragic at the same time that I could not help myself. I had to bury my laughter deep, or I’d be next on the chopping block, dragged into that mad performance myself.

Physical mistreatment wasn’t the only cruelty we endured. Each of us was given a derogatory nickname—a small, deliberate cut meant to chip away at whatever fragile sense of self we had left. At times, it felt as though they were emptying their own frustrations into us.

They used to call me pagliaccio di mille lire—literally, a clown worth a thousand lire, a cheap clown. You should have seen their glee as they assigned those names, carefully choosing labels meant to belittle us, to replace our real identities with something smaller.

I don’t remember why they gave me that nickname. Perhaps it was because I was cheerful, because I smiled too easily. For some reason, that had to be erased.

Worse still, we began to use those names among ourselves, repeating them, weaponizing them against each other and against ourselves. We didn’t know any better. We were only children.

To keep watch over us, the nuns often recruited the oldest girls—le ragazze grandi, as they called them. Once enlisted, these girls became extensions of the nuns’ authority, almost like child Kapos. The power often went to their heads. They grew hostile toward the rest of us, showing favoritism only to those within their inner circle.

They acted as informants, reporting our every move to the nuns. In an environment like this, lying became part of the game. We learned to deceive the other children to protect ourselves, to avoid punishment, to survive another day. It wasn’t uncommon to be blamed for something you never did or said, the accuser denying it to the end and leaving you alone to bear the consequences—most often, a beating.

Lying had become an integral part of me—a reflex honed to perfection. It was never about malice; it was about showing no imperfections, hiding my mistakes before they could be exposed, and then guarding the lie itself with the same fierce instinct I used to protect my body from blows. All of it was armor against scorn, against the crushing weight of inadequacy, against failure—which was often treated as fatal.

We learned early that truth invited punishment, while a well-timed deception could buy safety, or at least delay the inevitable. Admitting a wrong meant opening yourself to correction; denying it, even when everyone knew better, sometimes scattered the blame just enough to spare you the worst. So, the lies grew layered, habitual, almost elegant in their construction.

This became a kind of conditioning that lingered long after the orphanage walls themselves had faded. And once the walls were left behind, the habit didn’t vanish. It followed me into the world outside, into adulthood, quieter now, more polished, but still there: a reflex to smooth edges, to deflect judgment, to present a version of myself that wouldn’t be struck down. A self-preservation mechanism born in fear, disguised as cleverness.

Only much later did I see how deeply it had shaped me—not just in words, but in the constant, quiet fear of being truly seen.

Nothing about it cultivated character or self-confidence. It damaged both body and spirit. These were not the Christian values meant to bring goodness into the world. In that environment, the gap between Scripture and behavior was impossible to ignore.

The outside help, the two ladies, the signorine, were hired to assist with homework and discipline. Sometimes they were kind, but other times they followed the nuns’ instructions without question, adhering to a predetermined script. They witnessed the harsh punishments and cruelty—and yet remained silent.

Like the signorine, the nuns themselves were not untouched by the world outside those walls. Their choices—or the choices made for them—were shaped by the same harsh realities of southern Italy in the 1950s and 1960s. Poverty dictated nearly every path: large families struggling to feed their children, dowries too expensive for most, and almost no opportunities for women beyond marriage or the convent. For many girls, religious life was less a calling than a practical necessity, a fragile promise of food, shelter, and security in a world that offered little else.

In many cases, parents quietly encouraged, or outright urged daughters to take vows, seeing the convent as a solution to economic hardship and a way to bring honor to the family. The Church carried social prestige; a daughter in religious orders safeguarded her reputation in a culture obsessed with chastity. It provided structure, rare access to education, and, for the more ambitious or intelligent, a narrow path to influence—even if that influence came wrapped in strict obedience.

Recruitment often began early. Boarding schools, parish programs, and even orphanages like ours introduced girls to convent life, sometimes leaving little room for genuine choice. Once inside, leaving meant shame, uncertainty, and often nowhere to go. Faith and circumstance intertwined so tightly that a true spiritual vocation could feel both chosen and imposed.

For others, the convent was a refuge—a way to escape abuse, unwanted marriages, or social vulnerability. Paradoxically, it offered safety within a rigid, often authoritarian environment. Obedience was praised above compassion, discipline often confused with morality, and questioning authority was discouraged. It was a culture that would later influence how nuns like Suor Elisa and Suor Diomira treated the children in their care, carrying forward cycles of control and cruelty under the guise of virtue.

In a rare moment of vulnerability, I asked Suor Diomira what had inspired her to become a nun. To my surprise, she spoke of a genuine vocation, a desire to serve the Church and Christ. She said clearly, almost proudly, “We are the brides of Christ.” Her words gave me pause. For a moment, I saw her not as an enforcer of pain, but as someone who had once believed in a higher calling.

In quiet moments, I’ve often wondered the same thing.

They were women, after all—most of them young when they entered, some barely out of girlhood. In a world where marriage was the only acceptable path to physical intimacy, and where love (even the innocent kind) was watched and judged so closely, how could desire not have touched them at some point?

Perhaps some had felt the stirrings of first love: a glance held too long at a village festival, a boy’s hand brushing theirs while passing bread at a family table, the ache of a letter never sent. Maybe others had known deeper attachments—promises whispered in the olive groves, plans half-formed before poverty or family duty closed the door. For a few, the convent might have been refuge from a love that went wrong, or from the threat of a marriage they dreaded.

And then there were those who may never have had the chance to find out. Life was so constrained for girls in those villages: chaperoned, warned, taught that even the thought of physical closeness was dangerous. Desire could be buried before it ever fully surfaced, redirected into devotion, obedience, service.

“We are the brides of Christ,” for a moment, sounded like consolation rather than triumph. As if she were reminding herself as much as me. I wondered then if, in the silence of her room at night, she ever felt the absence of human touch, or if memory ever brought back the warmth of someone’s hand that was not divine.

We never spoke of such things, of course. The vows demanded silence on the body’s longings; to admit them would have been failure. Yet frustration has to go somewhere. Perhaps that’s part of what spilled out in the sudden rages, the need to control, the sharp hands on our small bodies. That displaced energy from lives where physical tenderness was forbidden, then denied, then punished if it dared resurface even as memory.

I don’t know their private stories. They took those secrets to their graves, or confessed them only in the dark to a God who already knew. But I believe some of them must have loved, or wanted to love, or grieved the love they could not have. How could they not? They were human, long before they were brides of anyone.

The nuns belonged to the Suore Minime della Passione in Paola, a small religious order founded in the 18th century with a focus on prayer, charity, and devotion to Christ’s Passion. Their mission was to educate children, care for the poor, and maintain strict religious discipline. While their spiritual goals were noble in theory, life inside the orphanage often prioritized obedience and control over compassion, shaping the harsh environment we experienced.

Their names, like their roles, marked a renunciation of a former life. With their vows came new identities, a new name, new rules, and a rigid presentation: hair cut short, bodies covered, individuality flattened into uniformity. They wore white habits in the summer and black ones in the winter. As a child, that change signaled the passing of the seasons more clearly than any calendar.

There were about twenty nuns in the orphanage, all from different parts of southern Italy, ranging in age from their forties into their seventies. At the top of the hierarchy stood the Mother Superior, Suor Eugenia.

She was our favorite, always smiling, always festive whenever she appeared. Her voice would ring out first “Eeeeee, bambiniiiiii! Come state?” Long before we caught sight of her sweeping into the courtyard or the refectory, habits fluttering like she was arriving at a celebration rather than an orphanage.

Hey, children! How are you?

The cheer always arrived before she did.

We loved those visits. For a few minutes, the air felt lighter; her warmth was genuine, or at least it seemed so. She’d ask about our lessons, pat a head here, distribute a sweet there, and then vanish again, leaving the daily grind to the others.

I came to suspect that the other nuns didn’t much like her for exactly that reason. Suor Eugenia was the face of kindness, the one who appeared only when there was joy to hand out, never when the real, grinding work needed doing: the early mornings, the endless laundry, the enforcement of rules, the punishments. Those tasks fell to the rest of them, day in and day out.

She was the good one out front, the Mother Superior who issued smiles and blessings in public, while quietly giving orders from behind the scenes. To us children, she felt like a visitor from a gentler world. To the nuns who bore the weight of the routine, she must have seemed like someone who escaped the hardest parts—arriving for the applause, departing before the tears.

Perhaps that distance protected her. Or perhaps it was deliberate: one cheerful figure to keep us hopeful, while the others maintained order through stricter means. Either way, her absences spoke as loudly as her arrivals. We adored her for the light she brought, but I’ve often wondered if the others quietly resented her for never having to stay in the shadows where the real discipline happened.

Other nuns were openly harsh, harsh in everything they did. Some nuns were rarely seen, always working in the background; others took themselves far too seriously, their faces perpetually stern. On the rare occasions when you saw them laugh, they seemed almost like entirely different people.

A few left particularly strong impressions. Suor Anna, for example, was strange even by the already strict and peculiar standards of the other nuns. She struck me as a kind of free spirit—a hippie nun—perpetually “high,” with dark round glasses hiding her expressions. I saw her eyes once, just for a moment. Nothing there. Soulless. Empty. Shark eyes.

Her personality felt unstable, so odd that even among the others she stood out. The most peculiar moments were when she sang Christian rock songs in the middle of the night.

It was during one of those nights that the older girls were chatting while we were supposed to be asleep. At the time, we all slept together in a large room, two long rows of beds. The whispering carried down the hallway and disturbed Suor Anna, whose room was set apart from the others, closer to the children’s dormitory.

She burst in, furious. “Who dares to be talking and disturbing me at this hour of the night?”

One of the girls answered from her bed, calm and quick: “It was Elia. Elia was the one talking.”

Suor Anna disappeared for a moment vanishing into the darkness, then returned, gliding silently between the two long rows of beds like a Nazgûl slipping out from the shadows.

She moved without hurry, the rustle of her habit was the only sound in the sleeping dormitory. She stopped at Elia’s bed. Elia was fast asleep. Paused for a moment and without hesitation, Suor Anna brought the stick down on her legs.

Elia woke with a startled cry, half scream, half sob, her legs jerking in pain and confusion, not knowing what was happening or why. The rest of us woke up, eyes wide in the dark, breathing shallow.

All of it happened because of another child’s lie, and of Suor Anna’s instability. Elia was left sobbing in the silence of the night.

Elia’s night of terror was just one example of the extremes within those walls. Each nun had her own way of asserting authority, a unique mix of quirks, strictness, and unpredictability. In their own ways, they came in all sizes and temperaments, each trying to coexist within the rigid structure of the orphanage.

The next morning, word of what Suor Anna had done reached the Mother Superior, Suor Eugenia. She summoned Suor Anna and, in front of several of us, scolded her sharply. Her voice, usually so cheerful when greeting us, turned firm and unyielding. She made it clear: Suor Anna was never again to lay hands on the children; it was not her role, not her responsibility. Discipline belonged to those specifically assigned to it.

I remember watching Suor Anna stand there, head lowered, silent. Whether the reprimand truly changed her behavior, I cannot say; the walls held many secrets, and punishments often continued behind closed doors. But in that moment, there was a glimmer of something like justice. Or at least the appearance of boundaries within the hierarchy. It was rare to see one nun corrected by another publicly. For a fleeting second, it almost felt as though someone in authority had noticed our pain.

Yet even that small intervention did little to alter the larger pattern. The system remained intact; the routines unchanged. We were still children under their care, and the line between guidance and cruelty stayed blurred—as it did for the two nuns who spent the most time with us: Suor Elisa and Suor Diomira.

Suor Elisa had a visible mustache, so pronounced that behind her back we whispered “suora con i baffi”—the nun with the mustache. Trouble followed if she ever overheard us; a sharp glance or a sudden slap would remind us to hold our tongues.

Yet it was impossible not to notice. When she stood over you, explaining a sum or correcting your handwriting, your eyes betrayed you. You tried to focus on the page, on anything else, but they drifted upward to that dark line above her lip, really extraordinary. Maintaining eye contact meant staring straight at it; looking away felt like defiance.

Suor Diomira, by contrast, had a large mouth and a deep, unmistakable tenor-like voice and striking blue eyes. She was particularly adept at leading what I came to think of as an orchestra, matching words to blows, rhythms to beatings.

They were not gentle educators. Correction often arrived in the form of shouting, striking, and humiliation. At the time, corporal punishment was considered an acceptable way to raise children. I sometimes tell myself they were simply repeating what they had known, teaching as they themselves had been taught.

Even so, when anger and frustration hardened into routine violence, it became impossible to reconcile their actions with the faith they claimed to embody.

They spoke constantly of a merciful God—of turning the other cheek. Those teachings filled our mornings in catechism, rang out in the chapel during Mass, shaped the prayers we murmured before every meal and every night’s sleep. Yet in the narrow space between those words and the reality of our days, something broke.

How could the same hands that traced the sign of the cross over our foreheads in blessing rise so easily to strike? How could those voices sing hymns of joy and later become shouts of accusation?

Two different worlds that never seemed to touch each other.

The contradiction was caught in my child’s mind, too heavy to name, too constant to ignore. I suppose they believed—had to believe—that severity was itself a form of love, a hard path toward salvation. Perhaps some carried their own old wounds, repeating what had been done to them under the banner of building character. But to us it felt like a fracture running through the heart of everything sacred.

Thinking back, maybe the nuns were struggling too, in their own walled-off way—struggling to live a pious life amid exhaustion, isolation, and the weight of vows they may not have fully chosen. There must have been moments when they truly convinced themselves they were doing God’s work, shaping us with the only tools they knew.

To us children, though, it seemed impossible that a merciful God would allow corporal punishment as the way to keep us in line, to make us behave “properly.”

Still, they did raise us—fed us, clothed us, taught us letters and prayers and how to survive. For that, I can carry a quiet gratitude.

Today, I choose to forgive them—not to erase or minimize what happened, but because I believe many of them never truly understood how much damage they were doing. I want to remember clearly what we endured, and at the same time give forgiveness, the way I hope someone, someday, might extend it to me.

Perhaps, in the end, we were all living the same purgatory—nuns and children alike, trapped within those high walls. They with their solemn purpose, their vision of service and discipline in the name of the highest moral standards; we with the impossible task of growing up under rigid rules, expected to absorb proper religious values while navigating fear, pain, and unquestioning obedience.

They may have seen themselves as the quiet victors of a holy mission. We grew up feeling like the unaware victims of an unjust plot.

Sharp.

Yes, that was the perfect word. I sharpened the pencil obsessively, turning it again and again until the tip was needle-thin. I don’t know what came over me. A strange, mischievous smile crossed my face, and before I could think, I grabbed it and stabbed my first-grade classmate, Giovanni, in the buttock.

He screamed — terror, pain, surprise all at once — and burst into tears. To me, it played out like a hilarious scene from one of those classic old cartoons.

He then pulled the pencil out and, without hesitation, plunged it into the palm of my right hand in revenge. I can still see the exact spot to this day. The graphite tip is still there, buried under my skin after all these years.

Then I cried.

Looking back, that was one of my earliest and most basic lessons in the law of fuck around and find out.

When I started school, the nuns gave us a small packaged snack for midmorning recess. It might be a tiny brioche, a piece of bread with cheese, or an improvised sandwich—two slices of old bread with a piece of deli meat in between, wrapped in a paper towel. Even then, I felt ashamed to eat it in front of my classmates. I was so hungry that I ate it on the way to school and went without food for the rest of the day.

Recess was usually the most interesting part of school. While other children enjoyed homemade sandwiches, I had often already eaten my modest snack. I watched the parade of delicious foods around me, my stomach growling. The school sometimes arranged for someone from a local bakery to bring small pizzas or succulent sandwiches. Each one would have cost mille lire—a thousand lire, or about a dollar or so in 1990s money. On rare occasions, kind teachers would buy me one, or the owner would give me one of the last remaining sandwiches at the end of recess. My sister and I would sometimes share a sandwich. Though we were in the same school but in separate grades, we always looked out for each other, sharing whatever little bounty we had.

When I had nothing to eat, I watched as kids discarded half-eaten sandwiches into the trash. What a waste. Food was important to me, so someone had to rescue those unfinished sandwiches. When no one was looking, I would grab them quietly. They were still perfectly good; I just had to be careful not to get caught.

We had three teachers during the first years of elementary school, all women in their mid-fifties. One taught Italian literature, another history and geography, and the third mathematics. I can still recall our history teacher explaining, with glee and vivid detail, how the barbarians rode their horses with slabs of meat tucked beneath their saddles, tenderizing it as they traveled before eating it.

History became a way to disappear into stories, and those lessons had a lasting effect on me. My imagination ran wild. I couldn’t stop picturing those barbarians savoring their warm, marinated meat, flavored by horse sweat after a long ride.

Once you began the first year of elementary school, you stayed with the same classmates through fifth grade. It was comforting to grow up alongside the same people, to watch familiar faces change over those five years.

Two of my closest friends were Giovanni and Samuele. With Samuele, I still remember drawing stick figures and inventing elaborate stories: a massive cargo ship, a lone hero climbing through its levels, defeating enemies one by one, until the final battle with a boss guarding a precious stone deep in the ship’s heart. The hero would escape unscathed as the ship exploded behind him.

To us, it was pure entertainment, like living inside a movie, our imagination had no limits.

During those years, I would sometimes go to a friend’s house after school to do homework and play. Seeing family life up close for the first time was beautiful. It revealed a world beyond the orphanage—warm, ordinary, and quietly extraordinary all at once. It felt like living life in color. Yet I was anxious, aware that time was slipping too fast. Those moments passed in a blink.

Watching a quiet family for the first time made me uneasy. I didn’t know there could be a life without shouting and fighting. I had never seen calm conversations or simple acts of kindness—another way to be. Then I returned to my black-and-white life at the orphanage, where every second stretched like minutes and each minute dragged on like hours.

Once back from school, after lunch, we were back under the watchful eyes of the nuns, they inspected our notebooks. If they had ears, you were in trouble — every mistake invited punishment. It may seem strange now, but physical pain was the only language they used to teach discipline. At first, it was slaps with their hands. But as we grew harder to hurt, tolerance growing alongside us, they escalated to wooden sticks. That usually did the trick. A relationship built on fear — not exactly a long-term teaching strategy.

And this is when I began my complicated, enduring relationship with numbers and the subject of math.

They would ask a question, and poor me, whether from ignorance or laziness, I would get it wrong. Every wrong answer brought a sharp “bam!” — then another. On the verge of tears, I started to see numbers differently: more fluid, more elusive, yet every misstep met with another strike. I can still remember the moments of panic when the nun asked a question. My mind scrambled, not for the solution, but for a way to avoid punishment. I would second-guess every step, imagining the sting before it came. I learned quickly that numbers weren’t just abstract symbols; they were tests of obedience, of fear, of endurance.

Occasionally, my stubbornness was stronger than the stick itself, and on a few occasions, I managed to break it. From that moment on, I associated math with pain. It’s easy to imagine why my grades reflected my disdain.

By the end of those early years, my fear was internalized. It wasn’t just about the slaps or the sticks — it was about shame, about believing I was incapable, about the creeping certainty that no amount of effort could save me. Math had become a symbol of my limitations. My grades, predictably, reflected it. And I carried that belief with me, unquestioned, for years.

It wasn’t until adulthood, facing college algebra alone, that the pattern finally broke. Without fear, without punishment, with nothing but patience and effort, I discovered something I had never believed possible: I was capable. Numbers no longer carried pain. The battlefield had disappeared, leaving only the quiet satisfaction of understanding and mastery.

Looking back, I see how deeply those early lessons stayed with me — the fear, the shame, the sense of failure. It wasn’t just wrong answers or unfinished exercises; it was the imprint of flawed practices from those who were meant to guide us, the very people charged with teaching patience, love, and understanding. They tried to sharpen us like pencils, but often the pressure and pain splintered what was tender instead of shaping it.

And yet, over time and into adulthood, even those splinters left patterns of helplessness — the belief that I was stupid, incapable, and irredeemably flawed. But I could also learn from them. Away from punishment and fear, I discovered that I could sharpen myself, reshape what had been dulled, and finally write my life with clarity, on my own terms.