Vera. Risi

Being born in Naples is a fortune because you learn to appreciate the beauty of contrasts.

After I lived my first twenty years in the land of sensory disorientation, to say it with Jean-Paul Sartre, I was ready to face the world and life with the ironic and bitter lightness of every Neapolitan.

This is how, after graduating in Political Science, I moved to Rome to absorb, ecstatic, all its monumental and decadent beauty. Here I did things, I saw people, paraphrasing the filmmaker Nanni Moretti: I started writing about music, trends and art as a freelance journalist for the major national newspapers of the moment, La Repubblica, L'Unità, il Fatto Quotidiano, Glamor, Cosmopolitan, Time Out, wandering around the Roman nights in search of those ideas, those ferments and movements to be grasped before they become fashions to be able to anticipate the story.

A master's degree and a long experience of collaborations and university teaching in the field of communication have enriched me on a professional and human level.

Then, with my husband, the exploration of the territory in search of something else, of new borders, even if just outside Rome. Because, sometimes, what is alien to us must be sought very close. And in fact, a few kilometres from Rome we discover a mysterious and fascinating land, Lake Bolsena. I will never know if it was my Neapolitan origins that made me return to a volcanic territory. Perhaps a Neapolitan cannot stay too long away from its porous tuff, from those hot lands, from those disturbing geysers, from those bubbling thermal waters. The fact is that here I find another dimension, which although it seems new to me is absolutely congenial to me: the dimension of a wild and indomitable nature. Here it is nature to mark time, to organize my days, to establish priorities. And I like all of this.So I also become a tour guide, to lead people to discover how much magic and seductive is hidden in this so ancient territory in which every civilization, from the Etruscans to the Renaissance, has left indelible traces.

And it is here that I find inspiration for my stories, which I write letting myself be lulled by the slow rhythm of the nature that surrounds me and by the now livid and now clear shades of Lake Bolsena.

Since June 2020 I have also been Co-Director, together with Eugenia Romanelli, of the newspaper Rewriters (https://rewriters.it/) which is also a cultural movement and an association, born with the aim of rewriting the imagination of contemporaneity.