LAURA
ANNA: Tell me about a woman in your life who has been significant for your growth.
LAURA: I definitely think of my grandmother, her strength, and her beauty. She had this long white hair... I’ve taken so much from her: the care, the femininity, even mixed with some masculine traits. My grandmother took on what, in our family culture, was traditionally the man’s role: she worked, she did everything. That’s my vision of a woman, strong.
It would be wonderful to move beyond these distinctions between roles, wouldn’t it? To get to a place where the baseline standard of respect for a human being is universal—creating a society of people. In the South, in the environment where I grew up, the distinction between men and women was very clear.
A: What have you sought out in being a woman?
L: I’ve always wanted to be seen as intelligent, beautiful? I don’t know. Intelligence, the use of the mind as the driving force, this was always my priority. My dream was to win the Nobel Prize in Science, Marguerite Hack was an icon for me. Then, over time, my passion for wine and food emerged, both of which are deeply connected to my territory and to values that were often denied to me growing up.
A: How did you manage to break free from the distinctions, beyond the example your grandmother set?
L: I found my answers in the books of Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf, women who were very closed off in their own worlds. I didn’t feel at home in the environment I grew up in, and by reading Simone de Beauvoir, another solitary woman, I realized that women could achieve extraordinary things.
A: What else were you curious about?
L: I’ve always been incredibly curious and passionate about many things, that’s why I decided I wanted to go to university in Bologna, to discover something different. I pursued my dreams and continue to do so. I left with one of my grandmother’s teachings in mind:
“Comu a mia tutti mejju i mia nugliu”—“You are not better than anyone, but no one is better than you.”
I was craving a freedom of expression that I felt was missing.
A: And what did you study?
L: At first, I enrolled in Economics because in my family, one person was an architect, another was a lawyer, so I was expected to choose either Economics or Medicine. So I enrolled in Economics, and it was a total failure, I would have loved to study Philosophy, but in the end, I chose Communication Studies. I did an Erasmus in Paris, and it was incredible, you see me now, but I was so different back then, free of all these imposed structures.
A: And what has changed?
L: The transition from being a student to a working woman has definitely changed me a bit. There’s a different mental structure—you have to be more in control. When I came to Milan to work, I was afraid of losing everything I had built for myself, now I’ve decided to let go of those fears, by changing jobs and changing my way of living.
A: What is one of your greatest achievements?
L: I have so many achievements to be proud of like having done everything without ever compromising my truest self. I came from nothing, and I’ve done what I wanted. I’ve learned to say no and to give proper value to the important things: to wine, to the land, and to the fresh ricotta that the farmer brings me when I’m back home.
A: What scares you?
L: The ignorance of people who refuse to open themselves to change. Italy is very closed off; everything is divided into silos, I think we need more genuine connections.