Deracinées. That’s what my co-author Yang-May and I were called in a recent review of our book.

The word has always intrigued me. But it was only recently, during a vacation in the mountains, that I was able to understand where my true roots lie.

It’s people that define them not geography.

On a gorgeous Saturday morning in August, I took a chairlift up the Dolomites to accompany my old friend Thomas and his friend Norbert on a mountain walk with a purpose.

For the past 20 years, Thomas and Norbert have been fighting greedy developers for the preservation of this unique section of the Alps. Recently, they used the internet to collect signatures from all over the world to prevent the construction of a sky resort in a particularly vulnerable part of these mountains.

Thomas and Norbert looked happy that morning. The Dolomites were about to be declared a United Nations World Heritage Site by UNESCO. The ceremony would take place in the Italian region of Friuli a week later.

While hiking up, I couldn’t stop observing Norbert. I remembered him vaguely from my days at Innsbruck University where the three of us studied. And I must admit, my recollection was more than vague due to what he calls “excessive partying”.

Norbert is a force of nature. His way of fighting for the environment feels strangely familiar. It is too similar to the nagging feeling I have had for years that if you believe in something, you have to stand up for it.

I guess this is the story of how I discovered one of my roots in someone I barely know and had not seen for years.

In case you were wondering…. Cross-cultural communication is to me what the Dolomites are to Norbert.

I will be thinking of him on Wednesday when Yang-May and I will present International Communications Strategy in London.

I used to be terrified at the mere thought of travelling by train in Italy.

I hated the old carriages and the frequent delays.

My trip last week across Northern Italy was quite different though …. almost soothing.

I left from the southern shore of Lake Garda and travelled to Piedmont to visit friends.

On the way, I had to change trains in Tortona, in the heart of the Po valley. I arrived around noon when all Italians are at lunch. I was alone on the platform with the exception of a gentleman immersed in an animated conversation in Mandarin on his cell. He wore bright orange pants and T-shirt with a giant shamrock.

The situation was so pleasantly surreal. I felt suspended in time. The heat was turning the tracks into a Fata Morgana.

The train to Alessandria finally arrived and I got on. I was indulging in more day-dreaming when I was rudely brought back to reality by an agitated dialogue between the train conductor and a passenger sitting next to me. The poor guy had not stamped his ticket…. The machine at his station apparently did not work. So “what was he supposed to do?” The conductor was adamant. He would have to pay a fine.

Quickly, I realised that what I was observing was a typical power show by an Italian train conductor. It wasn’t the first time… I had forgotten all about them. What made the situation even more absurd was the fact that this particular conductor had a Piedmontese accent like a character in The Leopard. The one who tries to explain to the Sicilian prince the advantages of the reunification of Italy and ends up looking like a caricature.

I often wonder. Is it because Italy was invaded so many times over the centuries that its civil servants always behave like the country’s worst nightmare?

I drifted off further in my thoughts… my fellow passenger meanwhile was standing his ground and refusing to pay. The conductor had handed him his paperwork and had left with a proud sour face.

The train reached Alessandria. Time for the agitated passenger and me to get off. Before parting, we exchanged a last knowing smile…. Italy’s only weapon against train conductors on a power trip?!?

My co-author Yang-May and I talked to podcasting guru Neville Hobson on Friday about the story behind our book.

I was asked how I came up with the original idea behind International Communications Strategy. To answer that, I had to dig quite deep into my memory.

It all happened when I was living in Prague 20 years ago. What they used to call the Golden City was such a great cultural centre before WWII thanks of the different ethnic groups represented there. The war and the madness that followed did away with all that.

I could never understand this terrible loss. When I left Prague in the mid 1990s, I embarked on a quest. I wanted to find a way that would help people from different cultural backgrounds to communicate and bond.

After that came my passion for understanding emerging economies and their communication models.

If you’d like to find out more about how Yang-May and I got to write the book, you can listen to the podcast .

Thanks, Neville. And we hope we’ll get to meet your cat some day…

I believe that if you live long enough in a place, it becomes part of you.

This is why I was really excited to hear about an interesting experiment with citizen journalism in the Czech Republic.

I spent the first half of the 1990s in Prague working as a reporter. What made the job so interesting was not only the historic time (only two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall) but also the stories ordinary people would tell me when I was researching my articles.

Czechs have a unique way to relay facts. A fascinating mixture of magical realism and sobering analysis.

These are ideal components for the new venture launched by PPF Media. The group has set up a network of cafés in a number of Czech towns where people can go to surf the web, drink coffee and chat about local events with journalists who work there. The product is new type of reporting, which mixes the skills of professional journalists with those of the readers.

The network is coordinated by the “Futuroom” based in Prague, where seasoned editors work, adding national and international content to the local stories. The “Futuroom” also serves as a multi-media training centre and has already attracted the support of partners like Google and the World Association of Newspapers.

If I close my eyes and think back of the days when I was working at the English desk of a Czech news agency, I can see myself typing on a keyboard in the early morning in a semi-dark room with the snow silently falling outside.

Were we all working at an experiment? Did we contribute a least a little to the amazing progress that Czech journalism has made in the past 20 years?

I am humbly hoping for the answer to be “yes”….

Don’t get me wrong. I am not writing this because I think I am special.

It is just an obsession of mine. I want to find out what living abroad for the past 26 years has done to my brain.

Apparently, I am more likely than other people to be able to use a box of tacks as a candle holder.

According to studies conducted by William Maddux, Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD and Adam Galinsky, Professor of Ethics and Management at the Kellogg School, living abroad and creativity are tightly connected.

MBA students at the Kellogg School were asked to solve the famous Duncker candle problem. Results showed that the longer students had spent living abroad the more likely they were to find a creative solution.

The university also ran a second test on them involving the mock sale of a gas station. Again, those students who had lived abroad were more likely to reach a deal that demanded a creative approach.

Vacations don’t count. Only living abroad leads to creativity.

Maddux and Galinsky found out that the more students had adapted to foreign cultures when they lived abroad, the more creative they turned out to be.

So, you see, it is worth enduring being called a foreigner a million times or having to eat the worst food ever (this was in Eastern Europe a long time ago).

Pay-back time eventually comes.

Tacks and candles are high on my shopping list for the weekend.

When I was growing up in Italy, I would always get excited at this time of the year.

Only one more month of nun school to go and…. spring near Lake Garda is so beautiful.

This year, for the first time since high school, I can’t sit still. It is as if I had a whole series of graduation parties ahead of me and the prospect of once again walking into the lake at night with my patent leather shoes on….

Our book is coming out on July 3rd.

Today, for the first time, I saw a picture of whole book and not just the cover.

Courtesy of Neville who got an advance finished copy for his interview with us on FIR.

I had tears in my eyes…. Such a strange feeling to see hours of your life condensed in a book now sitting on Neville’s desk.

This week, the book got on the list of 44 social media titles recommended by the Diva Marketing Blog.

Thanks to all of you who congratulated us on LinkedIn. And thanks to my 101-year-old grandma in Italy who got really excited about this. Who says that older people don’t get new media?

I had been dreading going back to the beach ever since my mother nearly drowned in the sea last summer.

I didn’t know what to expect.

However, my encounter with the ocean at La Serena, Chile was far from traumatic.

I have never experienced anything like it…

This powerful body of water has its own personality. It is unlike any other sea I have ever been at.

You feel this mighty presence all around you.

And just in case you forgot, La Serena has a system of tsunami alerts. You feel the ocean alive next to you. Like a giant lung, it breaths energy into the surrounding nature.

Is it a benign presence? How can this mesmerising beauty have the cruelty of producing the periodic tsunamis the people of La Serena are so afraid of?

I was pondering over this question in my hotel room before falling asleep, when an earthquake shook my bed.

Was that the answer? Is nature too powerful to subject itself to the laws of good and bad?

After all, the sea gave me back my mum. I should stop asking questions.

The earthquake in Abruzzi has brought back childhood memories.

Italy is crisscrossed by seismic lines. The earthquake of 1976, which destroyed several towns in the north-eastern region of Friuli, stands out clearly in my memory.

It was an early evening in May. It had been unseasonably warm. I was in bed reading to my mother a story I had just written. Out of the blue came a loud roar like an angry thunder and the house started shaking. Mother grabbed me and we ran out. The aftershocks continued for months. I once woke up in the early morning and the bed was moving.

I also remember my school collecting clothes for the survivors of the earthquake of the region around Naples in 1980.

It is memories like these that bring the human side of natural disasters home to us.

This morning, tired of the sterilised reporting on CNN, I began scanning the Facebook pages of my Italian friends for stories.

I stumbled into an incredible one.

Giampaolo Giuliani, an expert at the Gran Sasso national laboratory, had apparently warned the authorities a week before the earthquake about some seismic activity he had been detecting. He was denounced for spreading false news!

If you read Italian, it is worth checking out the comments on Dazebao about the incident.

They embody the power of social media… and make you think that the days of TV reporting, as we know it, are counted.

Photo: thanks to itn.co.uk

Whenever I tell people than my mentor was a city not a person, I get funny looks.

From now on, I will be able to use the speech Obama gave last weekend in Prague to prove that I am right.

I was amazed that the US president and his speechwriter understood it so well … that feeling that makes Prague a very special experience:

“For over 1,000 years Prague has set itself apart from any other city or any other place. You have known war and peace. You have seen empires rise and fall. Through it all, the people of Prague have persisted in pursuing their own path and defining their own destiny”.

That’s exactly how it is. I don’t know how it works.

But after you have lived in Prague for a number of years, you get this feeling that, no matter what comes at you, you will always make it.

It is like an aura surrounding you (I don’t know how else to describe it). And you know you will always be able to face any audience or any vicious committee meeting because of this certainty that has come down to you.

Does it happen by osmosis? Do you get it by walking through the streets of the Old Town at night as I loved to do?

I don’t know but I was certainly thrilled to hear Obama call Prague the “golden city which is both ancient and youthful and stands as a living monument to an unconquerable spirit”.

Like most writers, I get inspired by the people I observe and the stories I hear. Nothing strange there. This is what most writers do.

What spooks me is the way in which I seem to attract the people who tell me these stories.

I was at a social gathering the other day sitting next to a gentleman I had never met before. We were chatting and after a few minutes he began telling me about his childhood in post-war Vienna.

I could not believe my ears. How could he have known about my obsession with what went on in Vienna during that time?

I know this might have been nothing more than civilised pre-theatre chit-chat. But you have to admit…it is a little strange.

The gentleman kept talking and I began seeing him in my mind…I was there… following him through the streets of what looked like an endless repetition of a scene from The Third Man.

This English boy in short pants (were boys still wearing short pants in those days..?) was not afraid of the horrible destruction surrounding him… Every house in ruins contained unlimited potential for adventure (as a young girl, I was insanely drawn to deserted buildings).

The house in the centre of Vienna where the boy lived had a concierge whose husband had been badly traumatised by the war. At night, the poor man would run out and disappear into the night. The wife would run upstairs and beg the boy’s father (“the only can-do person in the building”) to help her look for him.

I could picture some of the horrible memories that were chasing the concierge’s husband though the darkness of gutted Vienna.
The gentleman sitting next to me read my mind: “Everybody had a story in those days…”.

Would I have had the courage to listen to those stories? I know from my years in Czechoslovakia just how difficult it is. You have to be able to marshal strength and compassion from the deepest corners of your character.

And would I have had the courage to write them down? For what purpose? I cannot stand war voyeurism. I would only have done it to help heal memories. But how do you heal memories?

I was back in the foyer of a London theatre…and could not wait for the performance to start….

Photo: thanks to criterioncollection.blogspot.com