the girl who threw herself into the Tiber

Two black and white photos. One about marriage, the other about identity. Meager loot to start an investigation. But that's already it, and it's even a lot since these two images offer Maria Grazia Calandrone two points of reference. Because, in her mid-fifties, the Italian journalist, novelist and poet, followed in the footsteps of Lucia Galante, daughter of Amelia and Luigi Galante, a couple of impoverished farmers in “the disorderly countryside” from Palata, in the Abruzzo region. Fourth daughter, Lucia “was expelled from her mother's body at 1:05 a.m. on Sunday February 16, 1936 (…) in the phase of the waning moon under the white and primitive light of Sirius..

Obviously, his parents would have preferred that this “little baby with tousled hair or male. But Lucia is “only” a girl. Not the most pleasant thing about pre-war rural Italy. To love it, to want to study there or to try to taste the breath of freedom that is beginning to awaken…