Pupi Avati

"Dante's relationship with women is very complex, because the range of real women in Dante's life and in Dante Alighieri's imagined life is very different. There is an idealization of women that occurs when he is nine years old. He lost his real mother when he was five years old, so he is the son of a father and a stepmother. The neighbors of the Portinari family had six daughters and one of these is Beatrice, a nine-year-old girl, her age. Dante meets her gaze and from that moment he becomes almost a prisoner of that gaze, which is why nine is Beatrice's magic number, because he meets her at nine years old. The Poet follows her to Florence for another nine years, without ever receiving encouragement from her, until at eighteen, before entering the church where the girl goes every evening in Santa Margherita dei Cerchi which is the Portinari church, suddenly he decides to stop, look at him and smile at him and says "I greet you" which is the only phrase Dante will hear from Beatrice. Dante remains completely satisfied by this smile and considers it the sealing of a relationship that has had no other type of concretization, nothing else, just this look and this greeting. He tells this story in this wonderful diary which is the Vita Nova, a set of poems and prose writings that he wrote in the aftermath of Beatrice's death."

"(Referring to the scoutism) I believe I have had, in that world, experiences that neither family nor school can offer you. Like the "campfires" before going to sleep. Those were also moments of socialization. Which could be playful, cheerful, with skits and jokes. But also very serious: moments in which we discussed each other, talked about each other, confided in each other, knowing that no one would ever make fun of what they felt. If I am a person who has a certain ease in talking about himself without hiding his own weaknesses and mistakes, I owe it to those moments there, to the "campfires"."

"In my life, right after my parents I put scoutism They taught me two things above all. The first is that we need to give meaning to each of our days. The second is the sacredness of life, one with the sacredness of nature."