{"id":7061,"date":"2025-08-29T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-08-29T03:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.papillon.center\/?p=7061"},"modified":"2025-08-25T20:28:03","modified_gmt":"2025-08-25T18:28:03","slug":"a-country-means-not-being-alone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.papillon.center\/en\/blog\/a-country-means-not-being-alone\/","title":{"rendered":"\u00a0A COUNTRY MEANS NOT BEING ALONE"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>\u201cYou need a town, if only for the pleasure of leaving. A town means not being alone, knowing that in the people, in the plants, in the land there is something of yours, that even when you are not there, it remains waiting for you.\u201d (S. Accorsi, final monologue of the film)<em>Radio Arrow<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Warm, moving words from the first time I heard them on the big screen and never so full of meaning for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Leaving always takes courage, but at first you don&#8217;t really realize it. You just do it, dragged by the explosive force of an opportunity, a pain, a hope of starting over. The house, the familiar places, the habits of a lifetime may have been too small for you, so yes, at first you enjoy leaving, a dive into the ocean of freedom. And yet, the landscapes, the spaces, the faces, your homeland, you carry them within you, they linger on your skin. You know they&#8217;re there, they&#8217;re your roots, the safe embrace to which you can return.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When I was little, I often caught my father, who immigrated to Latina from Calabria, listening to the songs of his homeland with tears in his eyes. I couldn&#8217;t understand it then, but today I know that &#8220;the land&#8221; isn&#8217;t just a geographical reality; it&#8217;s your history, everything you&#8217;ve experienced or thought, all the people you&#8217;ve met, the foods you&#8217;ve tasted, all the Christmases you played bingo, all the Easter holidays you spent hanging out with friends&#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Perhaps this is why, returning home for the summer holidays, I had the feeling of not just returning to a physical space but of rediscovering &#8220;my homeland,&#8221; the place where all the threads of my story come together, where I breathe in the people I love even when they&#8217;re not there. Ultimately, it&#8217;s like a great love story that you can separate from a thousand times without ever losing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I feel lucky. I am lucky, very lucky. It&#8217;s true, a country means not being alone, and if by chance you lose it or someone destroys it, it&#8217;s a heartbreaking wound. Then I think of Gaza, of the men, women, and children of Gaza who will no longer have a land to return to or take with them, I think of how alone they will be&#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Sara Lazzaro<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cYou need a town, if only for the pleasure of leaving. A town means not being alone, knowing that in the people, in the plants, in the land there is something of yours, that even when you are not there, it remains waiting for you.\u201d (S. Accorsi, final monologue of the film)Radio Arrow). Warm, moving [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":7059,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>\u00a0A COUNTRY MEANS NOT BEING ALONE - Papillon Center<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.papillon.center\/en\/blog\/a-country-means-not-being-alone\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"\u00a0A COUNTRY MEANS NOT BEING ALONE - Papillon Center\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"\u201cYou need a town, if only for the pleasure of leaving. 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