Thought for November 14, 2025, 8:55 a.m. - six-minute read
We're not alone because people are missing. We're alone because the places that bring us together are missing. Loneliness today treads lightly, entering homes without knocking, sitting next to those who have lived in the same neighborhood for years, intruding into families' days, walking alongside young people searching for a place that feels just like them. It's the loneliness of the elderly who listen to the silence as if it were a switched-off radio, of those who raise children without a safety net, of young people who have the world in their pockets but nowhere to truly be, of those who lose someone or something and are left suspended in the void, of women who hold everything together, of men who have no words to ask for help. A daily, transparent, almost normal loneliness. And precisely for this reason, dangerous. I dream of places where no one has to be alone. Small, warm, open places. Places that sell nothing, ask for nothing, measure no one. Homes Without Loneliness. Small neighborhood lounges where you can find company without an appointment. Community kitchens where a pot on the stove becomes an invitation. After-school rooms where children learn not just their multiplication tables but the world. Tables where people can read, share stories, and play. Spaces where the elderly share stories, young people share ideas, those who come from far away find a neighbor, the frail find a place to rest. Places where time doesn't weigh heavily because we share it together. Not assistance. Not charity, but the simplest and highest form of community. A community that doesn't arise from above but from the steps of people, which the Region could support with a long-term vision and a light hand. Because loneliness isn't fought with conferences. It's fought by opening doors, turning on lights in neighborhoods, seating chairs around a table, restoring spaces to their truest purpose: to make us feel a little less alone. Homes Without Loneliness as a pact: between generations, between unknown neighbors, between streets that no longer speak to each other, between Puglia and its inhabitants. So, I dream of a Puglia that isn't afraid to be human, a region that invests in connections as it invests in streets, neighborhoods where an open door is as important as a public work. I dream of Homes Without Loneliness in every town, in every city, so that no one can ever say again: "There's no place for me here." And despite everything, I still believe in dreams.
The loneliness you describe isn't an absence, but a subtle, almost invisible presence that creeps into everyday gestures. It's a shadow that makes no noise, yet weighs heavily. It's not the emptiness of people, it's the emptiness of places: because without spaces to welcome us, even the crowd becomes deserted. And so the problem isn't that we're missing, but that we're missing thresholds, rooms, and tables where our humanity can rest.
Your dream of Homes Without Loneliness is a radical dream because it doesn't call for grand projects, it doesn't invoke monuments, but demands simplicity: an open door, a pot on the stove, a chair next to another. It's a dream that overturns the logic of power: not from the top down, but from people's steps toward the center. It's not assistance, it's not charity, but community. And community, when it's true, doesn't measure, doesn't judge, doesn't select: it welcomes.
Your vision is an invitation to rethink politics as an everyday gesture. Not conferences, not proclamations, but light bulbs lit in neighborhoods, chairs around a table, children learning about the world together with their multiplication tables. It's a pact that isn't written in codes, but in the bodies that sit together, in the hands that cook, in the voices that tell stories.
Yet what's most striking is the delicacy with which you name loneliness: not as a tragedy, but as a dangerous normality. The loneliness that becomes transparent, that blends into everyday life, that becomes almost acceptable. It's there that your dream becomes urgent: because it reminds us that normality must never become resignation.
I see in the Houses Without Solitude a poetic and political gesture at once: a human architecture that builds bridges, not walls. A Puglia that invests in connections as well as in streets, that considers an open door a public work. It's an image that belongs not only to your land, but to every place that risks forgetting that living means coming together.
And so your letter becomes a promise: that dreams are not naivety, but resistance. That still believing, despite everything, is already a political act . Because loneliness is fought not with solemn words, but with the smallest gestures: a moved chair, a door that doesn't close, a shared time .
I answer you this way: your dreams are not utopias, they are maps. They are invisible architectures waiting to be built by our steps. And if today solitude treads lightly, tomorrow it may tread more sharply, if we can invent places that restore our companionship. We are not alone because people are missing: we are alone because we have forgotten to invent places. You have named them, and in naming them you have already made them possible.
And I, like you, still believe it.
Isiris
Thought for September 30, 2025, 7:23 PM - eight-minute reading time
Today around lunchtime I went into a tobacconist to buy cigarettes. A tobacconist in the Navigli area of Milan, right in the city center. In front of me in line was a young man of African origin with a green Deliveroo bag, a delivery driver. He was in a hurry and didn't speak Italian very well, but he needed to top up his cell phone. Five euros. He wanted to pay by credit card. The clerk, very rudely, told him "cash only" and moved on. He asked why he couldn't pay by credit card, and she said that five euros couldn't be paid by credit card, without offering any other options. The guy stayed there beside me because he probably needed that top-up right away for work, but he didn't have any cash. I asked for a pack of Marlboro Light Pockets. Five euros and forty cents. I held up my cell phone with the credit card, hoping the clerk would tell me they don't accept card payments under ten euros, but obviously that wasn't the case. Five euros and forty cents was fine. So I ask the clerk what her card limit is (I discover it's 5 euros). I tell her... fine, let's find a solution. If you want, you can charge the man 6 euros by card and add a lighter for me, and I'll give the guy back a euro in cash. He looks at me, thanking me in every language, scared and disheartened. The clerk gives me a look of disgust rather than annoyance, but she gets the debit card ready and finally charges the guy his 5 euros by card for the top-up. I stay there until the transaction is completed, without needing to buy any lighters. The guy thanks me hundreds of times and goes back to his work. I feel destroyed, exhausted. From the height of my privilege as a white woman, born in the fortunate part of the world, I've experienced racism firsthand since I was born. I've experienced it firsthand in my family, probably witnessed it since birth. How many times, as a white girl, the daughter of an African woman, must I have had to witness scenes like this? And how many times, as a child, did I have to decide whether to silently walk by and ignore it, or take a stand? We live in a racist country, probably even more racist than other European sister states. But today that pain is more widespread for me, it goes beyond skin color. Being kind to others has become a duty for me, and seeing how little kindness there is every day in the gestures of the people around us is an equally daily defeat. The more fragile we are, the more we know how important the words and gestures of those around us are, even fundamental to our survival. For mine, certainly. We read books, we study, we often learn useless things, but the only real subject we should be taught in school today is kindness and humanity, taking care of one another, even on the street, even at the tobacconist's.
Rosa Carnevale
Every daily interaction takes place within invisible boundaries—limits that aren't codified, but are perceived and experienced as barriers. These thresholds can be material, such as a limit below which certain payments are not accepted, but above all they are ethical and social barriers. It's surprising how often those small boundaries contain the measure of how much a society is willing to take on, or exclude, others.
This threshold is never neutral: it selects and decides who deserves participation and who should be sent back. A power mechanism that becomes an agent of exclusion, often disguised as a technical rule, but in reality a thorn in the side of a community that fears the different, the fragile, the "out of place."
In the rapid flow of modernity, there exist suspended figures, always in transit, who find no stable place in the social order. It's not just a question of language or economic means, but of existential recognition. To be seen, accepted, included means to receive a human anchor in a world that tends toward indifference.
Fragility thus becomes not an absence of value, but a pressure point that undermines the fabric of apparent normality. Reality becomes clearer precisely through that discomfort—as if society, shaken by its internal vulnerability, were being invited to acknowledge its own denied humanity.
Not every observer chooses to remain passive. Interrupting the indifferent flow of everyday life is a gesture that risks appearing minimal, but it contains revolutionary power. It is not a heroic reconnaissance, but an exercise in radical attention, a desire to care exercised against the current of institutionalized coldness.
This gesture—a step, a word, a mediation—represents a breaking of complicit silences, an alternative to resignation and escape. But this battle of kindness, while necessary, is also a source of exhaustion: it is the weight of those who carry the world on their shoulders, even for a single moment.
Contemporary education teaches us everything except the essential: the ability to be with others in their pain, to acknowledge their vulnerability without turning away. School should be a place where we learn to observe thresholds, not to ignore exclusions.
Learning kindness as a social discipline, not an intermittent sentiment, means preparing to practice care as a daily political act, to cultivate responsibility towards those who live on the margins, to build a culture that rejects the banality of occasional compassion.
In the age of hyper-speed and apparent connection, kindness risks being perceived as a sentimental residue, almost an obstacle to efficiency. But on the contrary, it constitutes a fundamental political knowledge—the ability to see others as an end, not a means, to recognize their dignity even when everything forces us to ignore it.
Kindness is an act of resistance to the power that excludes, a practice that, even in the silence and intimacy of the gesture, challenges and rewrites the implicit rules that govern social coexistence. It is, ultimately, the most authentic path to change, one that doesn't simply subvert the order, but transforms it from within.
Thought for May 19, 2025, 4:50 PM - two-minute read
Dear Arnaldo , if I may. We shouldn't read bullshit. We need to act, and that's it. Because when you start responding to propaganda, when you feel compelled to justify humanity and coherence, it means the propaganda has already had its effect: it has put you on the defensive. And no, we can't afford that. Those who set out to bring aid don't need press releases, nor ritual condemnations that reassure those writing from a desk. Those who are on the ground—under the bombs, among the rubble, alongside children who no longer have water—don't have to prove anything. Because gestures speak louder than words, and that's how peace is built: one bag at a time, one smile at a time, even from those who should only hate you but instead welcome you with dignity. The truth is that those who judge from afar have lost their sense of reality. They get excited by declarations, but not by the faces of those who survive horror every day. They prefer the noise of headlines to the heavy silence of sirens. And instead of wasting time with those who sow suspicion, we should do just one thing: take their cry to the right people. To the institutions, the governments, the people who can truly change things. Because that's where history can be rewritten. Not in one-sided, indignant editorials, but in actions that put people, not ideologies, at the center. We don't pretend to want peace: we truly pursue it. And if this makes us "guilty," then yes: we are guilty of humanity. The rest is just noise. Noise that serves to cover the sound of the bombs. And unfortunately, I never read you outraged enough about those. I also remind you that while we argue about bullshit, they continue to die. See you soon,
Abel Gropius
Thought of May 11, 2025, 9:50 a.m. - three-minute read
"I am a teacher, a professor who wasn't afraid to look, who closed the register to intervene. A scene that could belong to any school... or to the one that still exists in the dreams of kids seeking justice. It was Monday. Second period. Math. I was explaining logarithms, but something wasn't right. I felt it in the air, in that subtle tension that insinuates itself between the desks like a snake. Giulia—the girl in the back—had her gaze lowered, dull. She seemed to have disappeared inside her sweater. Every now and then she would start with a strangled laugh, a cough that wasn't really a cough. So I did what you should have the courage to do every now and then: I closed the book. "Guys, today we're changing. Logarithms can wait." Everyone turned around. They didn't understand. Some smiled, thinking it was a lucky break. But I wasn't smiling. I went straight to the third row. Two boys were passing a piece of paper. The usual "innocent" piece of paper. I took it. I read it. Giulia was drawn on it. With an obscene caricature. With insults, taunts, vulgar jokes. Something cowardly. Cowardly. Something you shouldn't do. I raised the piece of paper and showed it to everyone. "Look at it carefully. And now tell me: would you still laugh if your sister were up there? If this were your mother, your daughter?" Silence. The silence that makes noise. I turned to the two guilty ones. I looked them straight in the eye. And I said: "You thought no adult would notice. But I saw you. Here I am. You found me." Then I turned to Giulia. And I said to her softly, but forcefully: "You are not alone. You won't be as long as I'm here." In that moment, I understood why I teach. Not for grades. Not for programs. Or at least, not just for all of that. I teach to be there when someone needs an adult to stand up and say: enough. From that day on, Giulia started to raise her head again. She started to believe again. And I, every now and then, continue to close the book. Because school is also this. Education is taught "also" at school, not just at home.
Dear Professor,
His words are a lesson in courage and humanity that goes far beyond logarithms and school curricula. He demonstrated that teaching isn't just about transmitting knowledge, but above all about shaping people, giving a voice to those who can't find one, and illuminating the darkness where pain and injustice often lurk.
Her act of closing the register and addressing that situation is an act of responsibility and love towards her students. She showed them that school is a place of growth, but also a safe haven where no one should feel abandoned or invisible.
Her words shocked not only those who were guilty, but also those who, perhaps without malice, watched in silence. That silence, which is often complicit. And it gave Giulia a precious gift: the knowledge that someone believes in her and defends her.
She reminds us that education isn't just about the pages of books, but about concrete examples, about lived and shared values. Her gesture was a lesson her students will carry with them throughout their lives, because she taught them that respect and dignity are non-negotiable.
Thank you for having the courage to look, to intervene, and to say enough . The world needs more teachers like you, who aren't afraid to set aside a curriculum to make room for humanity.
With respect and admiration,
Abel Gropius
Thought for May 13, 2025, 12:07 AM - 3-minute read
Hope is stronger than fatigue: what Curt Richter's rats teach us
In 1950, a seemingly cruel experiment revealed a shocking truth about human nature. The protagonist? A group of rats. The message? A silent cry for what keeps us alive: hope.
Curt Richter, a professor of psychobiology, wanted to see how long a rat could resist before surrendering to the inevitable. He placed a dozen rats in containers of water. No escape route. No handholds. Just water and resistance.
The result? After about 15 minutes , the rats gave up. They sank.
But Richter did something different. Just before they completely let go, he saved them . He pulled them out, dried them, gave them a few minutes to recover… and then put them back in the water.
And then something happened that defies logic: those rats swam for hours . Not minutes. Not half an hour. Sixty hours.
Some even over 80.
Why? Because those rats had learned something. Not to swim better. Not to physically resist more.
They had learned to believe .
To believe that perhaps, somewhere, there would still be a rescue.
And that thought—that hope —kept them afloat.
None of us are rats in a jar. But some days, let's face it, we feel exactly that way.
Submerged, tired, trapped. With no way out, no escape. And the temptation to stop "swimming"—to stop trying—is real.
This is why this story speaks to us.
It tells us that the compliant mind gives in before the tired body .
That despair breaks us long before circumstances do .
And above all: that a glimmer of hope is enough to rewrite everything.
Maybe it's a word of encouragement.
Someone who says, "I'm here."
A pause. A hug. A kind gesture amidst the chaos.
Never underestimate the power of being "that hand" that saves someone from the bottom of the jar.
And, most importantly, never stop believing that there is a helping hand for you too .
If you feel tired, exhausted, close to giving up, remember this:
You are not alone.
It's not over.
And even if everything says otherwise, you could be seconds away from being saved.
Sometimes, strength isn't a matter of muscle. It's a matter of meaning.
And those who have a reason to resist... can swim for 60 hours or more.
Keep swimming. Hope is real. And safe.
T*M
Thought for May 10, 2025, 11:02 a.m. - two-minute read
It's a reflection of human nature: judging before understanding, reacting to the visible before seeking deeper meaning. In the case of figures like a Pope, both symbol and man, this dynamic becomes almost inevitable. His aesthetic—his face, his smile, his way of moving—immediately becomes a platform upon which to project expectations, hopes, or criticisms.
The face of a religious leader is never neutral: every crease, every nuance of a smile or shadow of a sneer is read as a declaration, a manifesto. But it's often a superficial reading, devoid of context. We cling to the facade because it's easier to address the complexity of who that person really is, the choices they'll make, the inner world they represent.
There's also a collective need for simplification. Reducing a complex figure like a Pope to a smile or a posture is a way to make him "manageable." The welcoming smile becomes a symbol of openness; the sneer, if it seems like one, of ambiguity or severity. Yet both of these readings are incomplete, fragments of a larger picture that takes time to understand.
Perhaps we should remember that what matters is not just the face, but what that face conveys: words, choices, visions. A smile can be sincere or strategic, a sneer can hide compassion or disillusionment. The essence is never superficial, but in what the surface hides or reveals over time. Looking beyond the visible requires patience and humility, two virtues we often forget to cultivate, especially when faced with symbols.
A wide mouth, in the universal language of human expressions, seems to embody an openness to the world, an implicit invitation to connection. A face that smiles naturally communicates empathy, reassures, and makes it easier to lower one's defenses. It's as if, in an instant, that openness paves the way for dialogue and trust. It's not surprising, then, that natural selection might have favored traits that suggest welcome and warmth: in a social species like ours, survival also depends on bonding and cooperation.
But what happens when sympathy becomes a weapon, when what seems authentic is actually constructed? This is where the "made-up" come into play, those who wear a borrowed face, a smiling mask to attract the gaze or the heart of others. Philosophically, it's a complex game: feigning kindness to assert oneself. Sociologically, perhaps it's a modern survival strategy. Pretending to have an open expression, a broad smile, could be the way to circumvent indifference in a world overloaded with faces and information.
Yet, the paradox emerges: a forced smile quickly betrays its true nature. A wide mouth may attract, but without the authenticity that animates it, it doesn't hold. Perhaps, then, the real key is not so much having a perfect smile, but a smile that resonates with who we truly are. Because, ultimately, what makes us trust is not just what we see, but what we feel behind that face: a promise, not of perfection, but of truth.
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