Vanessa Tomassini

I'm an Italian journalist based in North Africa. I started writing at the most crucial moment of my life, when, unconsciously, I had to decide who I would become. It was 2015.

I was born in a small town in the Marches region, in middle Italy. I don't live there anymore. I was born on March 15, 1988. I grew up with my grandparents, who taught me compassion, and to respect others. I grew up reading books, often coloring my hair, and always sighing for the wrong boy.

My childhood smells like cherries, green meadows, and bare feet in the summer sea. I am a happy and lonely girl. Then I'm a teenager, and I don't have relationship with my father, I break all the rules, and I disdain university studies. I keep reading, though. I have been traveling since my 17 years.

I am twenty one years old and I start studying again, Law in Brescia. Meanwhile, I work in perfumeries and luxury department stores that lead me to discover that life is something else. What I want for me was something else. My suitcase is always ready and I never refuse travel.

I live in Tunisia, with my mind in Libya. There I rediscovered the authenticity of ancient values, the hospitality and the family's importance. I have seen the beauty of uncontaminated places, the remains of ancient Rome and ancient Greece, but also a lot of resentment, and anger, some times hypocrisy.

I have seen women in prison, guilty only of love. Barefoot children in prisons, and men, and brothers, and children, kill each other. I have seen that terrorism exists and really kills, that life continues and that love wins. In Libya I discovered that the law is not always fair, as for some international institutions.

I traveled to Lebanon, visiting the Syrian and Palestinian refugee camps. I set with migrants listening their trips, with homeless to drink a coffee.

I have seen poverty in the shade of the Gulf countries greatness, that reminded me of the homeless in the light of the luxury boutiques of Milan, the contradictions of our world.

In Tunisia I discovered the purity of Islam, the scents of the souqs, the beauty of being a migrant in the opposite direction and the desire of the jasmine to be free.

I love to listen people's stories directly from protagonists, their hope and their dreams as well. This what I write along with facts, always trying to show the truth that someone else wants to hide.

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