Whenever I go and visit my parents in Italy, I always manage to run into the same uninvited guest…

Time with its invasive personality ends up dominating my thoughts and many of the things I do.

I can’t open a drawer in my old bedroom without stumbling into an object whose life has been sucked dry by the passing of time… Take an old bottle of perfume… its content lost its soul long ago and no longer brings back memories from my last year in high school… 

The day I arrived, an old friend called. We had not talked in 27 years. After hearing my voice and a few minutes on the phone, she said she was overwhelmed… it had been too long and she needed… more time.

I had had enough… That’s when I decided to look for something that would help me tame time.

So I drove to Verona to visit my 102-year-old grandmother… who, I figured, might know one thing or two about keeping time at bay. I asked her if she could give me my grandfather’s watch, one he used to wear over 40 years ago.

May be I have fallen for the endless series of Swiss watch ads that embrace me every time I land at Geneva airport…

May be I am a sucker for their tag lines…  But something in me desperately wants to believe that my grandfather’s watch was built for the generations to come.

At the jewellery shop where I took it to be polished, they told me that normally watches of this brand last for 100 years.

Who knows… I might have finally found a way to bridge time!

I knew this would happen… it was just a matter of time.

I am talking about my father joining Facebook and commenting on my posts.

Over the weekend, he and a former high-school friend of mine were congratulating me on an article I wrote… and this is so surreal.

Interacting with my family and old friends in the same space as we used to do 27 years ago (before I left Italy) is just so strange.

It feels like continuing the conversations we were having every time my father would pick me up from school… on hot June days… before we would all part for the glorious Italian summer.

Is someone out there studying the space-time dimension of Facebook?

This social networking site is certainly doing something to the psyche of people like me… who, after being gone for years, all of a sudden, are invited to sit again at a table they thought no longer existed.

Reconnecting with my high-school friends has been like being washed by a wave of emotions. It’s like having my little private group of cheerleaders. The other day before giving a speech, I closed by eyes and thought of my friend Paola, who used to be my best friend back then and who wrote on my wall that she had always known I would do great things (whatever those might be…).

May be what’s happening to me is just one of the many examples behind the success of Facebook, which has now grown to 500 million users worldwide (up from 200 million 15 months ago).

70% of them are outside the United States. While the number of users in the US doubled in 09 (to 123 million), it more than quadrupled in Germany (to 19 million).

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg expects the company to reach one billion users. It is the stories behind this figure that I long to hear some day.

I have times like this… when my blogging streak seems to run dry.

May be it’s because it’s June. When I was growing up in Italy, June was the month when school would end and it would soon get too hot to think…

Or may be it is because the 5th anniversary of my move to London is coming up…

This city and I have a very intimate way of getting along. I have written before about the sheer anonymity London sometimes projects. Like a cold, unforgiving wind. The secret is to stay in the moment… long enough until you become stronger than this sensation.

London is like my British friends whom I love so much. Strong emotions don’t come natural to this city, but you can always rely on its reassuring presence. It can endure anything and it will go on for ever.

Sometimes I wonder just how local I have become, if at all…
I still detest the rain… so no hope there. However, I catch myself saying the word “lovely” a lot … and I am for ever apologizing…
You would agree… these must be clear signs.

My first day in Marrakesh last week I woke up at 4:00am to the chant of the muezzin.

I was drifting in and out of sleep. While he was chanting, I was dreaming of how to use social media to call the faithful to prayer…

That’s when I realised just how badly I needed a vacation….

From Marrakesh I travelled to the High Atlas. I took in the stunning views and visited a couple of Berber villages. The peace and silence are incredible. They make you wonder how we can all inhabit the same planet and yet live in such different dimensions.

I am happy to have left a small part of me there. I gave a pen to a pretty young Berber girl who was following us. She took it and held it close to her chest. If I close my eyes, I can still see her tan fingers clutching my black biro. I wish the pen were some kind of magical device that could link me to this girl. So that every time she writes, my dreams and hers would merge.

Writing is such a strange obsession. It drives you crazy. I have the feeling that if I don’t write, I don’t exist. At the same time, that’s what helps me to relive my memories. And blogging helps me to connect with people. I might have already discovered my magical device after all…

The closer I got to my birthday last week the more I felt like taking time out to think.

So I got on a plane and went to visit  the home of my memories

I flew to Innsbruck . That’s where I went to university and spent most of the 1980s.

There is something about being surrounded by mountains all the time. It’s like having a scaffolding that supports you and breaths life into your dreams.

During my years in Innsbruck, the mountains where always there… taller than any building in town.

And they were there for me when I landed on Friday. The Nordkette looks like an immaculate embrace of shining beauty. I know every peak. I would look at them every time I took a break from my books and stared out of the window of my studio.  I know they were looking after me.

On Saturday, I was skiing down a mountain with old friends, when one of them pointed out  in the distance what used to be a NATO listening station on the Italian side of the Alps.

That’s the Austria I used to live in. Sandwiched between the West and Eastern Europe. The East was a place we did not understand and we all feared to death.

I lived under the spell of Cold War mythology. Vienna had the highest concentration of spies in Europe and Czechoslovakia (where I worked in the 1990s… ) might as well have been a place near Vega…. 25 light-years from Earth.

The more I travel around the world the more I need to come back and look at Innsbruck’s mountains.

Before boarding the plane back to London today, I blew a kiss to the building where I had my last written exam and looked up… I know the mountains will stay with me for ever.

Words have always ruled my life.

While growing up I would spend hours at my desk next to a window looking out on the wintery Italian countryside memorising pages and pages of words in German and English…

During my years in journalism, it felt like my whole life was centered around the search for the right word.
But … this morning something happened which made me realise that I can no longer rely on  words…

A friend called to tell me about a member of her family who is seriously ill and was about to be taken to the hospital.
While she was crying and talking to me, I felt I did not want to use words. I thought of all those hours spent at my desk in my old bedroom in Italy…. All the words that came to my mind sounded inadequate and empty.
I decided to focus on the images I had in my mind. I tried to communicate these to her instead of using standard sentences… I thought of the time my mum was ill and of what had given me comfort… I concentrated on that feeling while I was listening to her. I chose the few words I spoke carefully and tried to wrap them in images of hope.

Did I succeed? I don’t really know… but she sounded better when we ended our conversation.

May be there is a lesson here for my work.

May be we should stop relying so much on words. Are powerful speeches the ones written while holding powerful images in your mind?

“Music is meant to exist in the moment and not to be recorded.”

I was listening to an interview with the Danish violinist Nikolaj Znaider on BBC Radio on Saturday. His words made me stop and think.

I met Znaider in 1997 when, as a young graduate of the Queen Elisabeth Competition, he performed at an event I was organising in Brussels.

I remember he made me feel very homesick…and not just because he spoke German with an Austrian  accent…actually because of his strong personality.

I have longed for the land of strong personalities all my life.

If you listen to Znaider playing the violin, you’ll know right away what I mean.

It’s the certainty you get by hearing his music. You feel a structure surrounding you and lifting you up.

Isn’t this the feeling we get from strong personalities in general? A feeling that they know the way through life and, if we follow them, we won’t get lost…

London welcomed me back with its unique embrace last night.

I love the sheer vastness and intense anonymity of this city. They are like a wave that washes over me every time I sit on the train from Gatwick staring out of the window into the night.

 
I spent the holidays with my family in Italy and went skiing in my beloved Dolomites with an old friend from university.

 
My 102-year-old grandmother made my new year on January 1st when she asked if I could explain to her….. what Facebook is!!!

She had read the word in several articles published in Verona’s daily, L’Arena, and had the feeling it was probably something important she should know about.

Good going, grandma!

If anyone needed any further prove that social media has entered the mainstream… here it is.

Harvey Nichols is the last place on earth where you would expect to run into the conversation you have been trying to avoid for the past 20 years.

But I managed to do just that a few weeks ago.

I was about to bite into a spring roll at a fundraiser organised by my favourite charity when I ran into an American lady.  She was leaving for Prague the next day to attend a conference and… to my horror… she gave me the standard spiel about Westerners bringing democracy to Eastern Europe.

I have heard this a million times before…. I find it not only extremely boring, but also patronising, offensive, colonial… (at this point I always run out of adjectives).

However this encounter got me thinking. Did my work in Prague have an impact on anybody’s life?

As I said before, I feel I learned more from my Czech friends and colleagues than they did from me.
But I would be extremely proud to know that the articles I wrote for the German business press during those years contributed to attract investment to the country and made a place I love so much more prosperous.
Every time I walk through the streets of Prague - which now look so different - I ask myself if I really did. And then one day… something happened that felt like an answer.
Remember how in the old days people would sit in the Prague Metro with long faces and not look at you….
I had this image in my mind when I boarded a train at Vysehrad. I was standing near the doors when I noticed a schoolgirl looking at me. She kept staring as if she knew me and all of a sudden… she gave me this enormous smile.

I don’t remember what I was doing the day my life changed.

On 17th November 1989 the Cold War ended in Czechoslovakia.

Eleven months later I moved to Prague to work as a journalist and embarked on an experience that would shape the very essence of who I am today.
I was sitting in my kitchen this morning listening to Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances on the radio and…. memories began to come back .
I saw the face of my former editor, Ian Brodie, who arrived on a bus from Scotland one day to set up a newspaper in Prague. Central European Business Weekly was for ever struggling to pay its bills. Ian had the patience to edit the articles written by a young journalist with English as third language and long sentences that always managed to sound too German.
I also saw the face of the doctor who came to rescue me the night I collapsed with kidney stones on the floor of my empty Prague apartment. I have told her story before. She is one of the people who changed my world for ever (and not only with an injection…)
There were others. They all tought me the two main lessons I learned in Eastern Europe. The first is about human dignity and the importance of relating to experiences that might contradict everything you have ever known and how you look at life.
No matter how hard ideologies try to separate us, we will always have the language of humanity. We can use it to build bridges. It works.
The second is about the power of forgiveness. This is a difficult one. It requires a lot of courage. I learned it from a friend and his incredible story. I believe forgiveness is probably the only thing able to perform the right alchemy and heal memories.
The sun is shining today in London. It makes me think of the sun light over the Moravian country side in the summer. Its beauty is so strong that you feel your heart might burst.

I am so grateful I was allowed to see it….I am so grateful that the Wall came down…I am so grateful I was there.