How much of me is there in what I do?

I am a romantic. In the strictest sense of the word, that I cannot make the difference between what I do and what I am.

I am so much so that I decided to make my work my character. Of art my expression. This approach, which is so exciting, makes a criticism of my work as an artist often affect me as a person. I am terrible at accepting criticism.

A little while ago I wrote a page about making criticism a building point, a moment of opportunity to grow. But I actually have a hard time accepting them, because I take them personally. When I was visiting the United States to promote the video game company I helped found, and I was meeting with journalists for the video game we had developed, I realized that this characteristic is very common in Italians.

Even it is well known in the U.S. business world that Italians are creative, passionate and fun, but they have one big flaw: they take everything personally. The Americans, on the other hand, so pragmatic, are very clear about the demarcation between personal and work.

A work criticism is exclusively aimed at a certain aspect of life, that of work precisely. Over here, a work critique is likely to end up with mothers' quotes and insults that would make our ancestors turn in their graves in no time.

So to the question how much of me is there in what I do as an artist, I would have to say "everything." What I do is what I am. There is no distinction. The characters I write are fragments of me, like pieces of a broken mirror, reflecting a more or less buried part of my self.

Every time I am crossed by a feeling or an idea, an agent inside me remembers it, takes note of it. It is an unconscious process, to which I no longer even pay attention. But it is as if buried beneath my self, there is a suitcase of memories, emotions, feelings, which at the right moment, while I am in the descriptive fury of a scene, take over and begin to spill out onto the pages. Sometimes I am amazed by what I have written, not because it is transcendental or amazing in itself, but because it did not seem to me to be ideas or emotions that were present at the moment I laid my fingers on the keyboard.

For example, it happens to me that in acting out a scene, I am overwhelmed by something that emerges in me at that moment because of the words spoken. As if there is a side of me hidden from myself, which through my artistic work manifests itself. I remember when I shot Cinderella, my grandfather had recently passed away. Some scenes, which were not related to the theme of mourning, were instead escape valves during which I was able to go into deep contact with this wounded part of me.

Today I wrote a scene between two characters in my next book. Two women in their 60s, Rosa and Flora. Both with lifelong baggage of hatred and unspoken towards each other. I expected a nervous, almost violent energy to emerge from the scene. An argument at least. Instead, the two women found common ground in their pain, something that then united them the time of a silence. And the scene ended with an invitation to drink tea and talk. I didn't expect that at all. Who knows, maybe it means that I too need to make peace?

Personally, I don't think an artist can distance himself so much from his work as to say "it's all technical." At least, I wouldn't want to be that artist. I think technique, as I have said many times, is necessary, but not sufficient. You have to yield something in this continuous exchange with the reader, with the viewer. The human being recognizes authenticity. We are built to be the most skillful and superficial analyzers of reality. We are not easily fooled, at least, not deep down. For those who are searching for meaning, for poetry, who have trained their hearts to attend to authenticity, there is no way to fool them: the artist must give something of himself. Even in conceptual art.

For me, art is basically a romantic process, the empirical manifestation of an ineffable inner feeling. Mystical, but real. And for you, what is art? Why is there this need to enjoy and make art in our world?