Lullaby and last goodbye

In the summer of 1978, a few months after I was born, my father planted a Hibiscus tree in the garden of our house. He loved to tell me that it would grow as strong and lush as I did and that he would accompany me in my growth like a brother. When my father fell ill, I was nine years old. My mother had sent me to spend the summer with my grandparents in the Sicilian countryside and I remember well my impatience to see him again. When I returned to the city, he was waiting for me on the terrace of my house, from which I could see Mount Pellegrino and the sea of Palermo. Shortly afterwards, the illness would take him away, leaving an enormous void inside me as a child. Some cardboard boxes in my study hold the memories of my childhood before his death. I owe it to my father to be able to relive them. He loved to capture with his camera the happy and carefree moments of our family. Through the photographs he took in the early years of my life, I had the opportunity to remember a joyful and carefree time, the feeling of being loved, the beauty and serenity on my mother's face, a happiness in the air that all too soon vanished. When my daughters were born, I saw myself in him again. I understood his desire, indeed his need, to preserve the memory of those moments. So, I started to photograph them every day, rediscovering with them the magical purity of childhood. I wanted to preserve those moments, to make them live forever. Little girls grow up and discover a world that is uncontaminated in their eyes, and they do it with the freedom of those who unveil enormous mysteries without schemes and conjectures, with the instinctive ingenuity of childish curiosity, involving you in their fairy-tale reality. Telling their view of the world and, at the same time, laying bare my inner search and the process of reconciliation with my past are the motivations behind my photographic project. Embarking on this process has allowed me to retrace my history and my emotions and has led me to re-elaborate the trauma I have experienced, finally seeing it through different eyes. The discoveries, the simplicity, the light-heartedness of childhood, in my case, abruptly gave way to great fears, loneliness, deterioration of relationships with the people closest to me, starting with my mother. I took refuge in my inner world, protected and fantastic, to defend myself from reality and to alleviate the discomfort. But no fantasy could withstand the impact of reality. And the fear that the past will come back to haunt me gives rise to anguished thoughts. Could my daughters experience the same negative emotions that I did as a child? Maybe so, who knows. But by photographing them daily, I have discovered the strength of their character and the depth of the bond between them. The lens of my camera has brought to light personal and family dynamics that will make their journey unique and certainly different from mine. They will be three women free to write their own future.