Nicola Arnese

I waited a long time for someone to become what I hoped they would be. We have all been there. I believed it. I saw the good moments, I told myself patience was enough. I was waiting for a person who, I understood later, didn't exist. The one who existed was the one I imagined. For a while it works like that. Hope keeps you standing. It gives you a reason to stay. The problem comes later. It comes when you realise you're building everything on a person who isn't there. There's the one you...

He was the first of six. His father disappeared during the war. Prague, 1945, give or take. Joachim was eighteen years old and overnight became the father figure to his five younger siblings, helping his mother in a home that had almost nothing. He did not choose it. It happened, and he stayed. Then the decision to move to Milan. There was work at Piaggio. Night shifts, the factory floor, the smell of metal and engine oil. And somewhere inside the exhaustion of those shifts, almost by...

The first time you took the train alone, you held your ticket tight. You knew the platform, but you didn't know exactly what would happen once you stepped inside: who would sit beside you, if the train would be on time, or what you would find at the end of the line. You boarded anyway, with the look of someone thinking: it might just work out. That is trust . Entrusting is different. It’s when you hand the ticket to someone else. It’s when you say: "You lead the way this time." Because...