There's a thread that connects memory to pain, and Chiara Tramontano has decided to follow it with pen in hand, digging into the darkness to bring light back to her sister Giulia's face.
He did it with a book "I will never stop looking for you" and an act of love, a rebellion against oblivion, an urgent message addressed to those who remain.
Giulia Tramontano was 29 years old, seven months pregnant, and her name has become a tragic symbol in Italian crime news. Killed in 2023 in Senago, just outside Milan, by her partner Alessandro Impagnatiello, it was a case that shook Italy. But behind the media hype, the headlines, and the sentences, there was—and still is—a sister who never stopped searching for Giulia. In silence, in anger, in the daily struggle of remembering.
Chiara, now a researcher in the Netherlands, took the stage at the "Il Libro Possibile" festival in Polignano a Mare to tell this story. A private story that became a collective one.
"Writing was a journey that left me feeling slapped," she confesses. Because digging into memory isn't easy. Especially when the images of those days come back to you different from what you always believed to be real. "My brother confronted me with a truth I had repressed. It was a self-defense mechanism."
Writing, therefore, as an act of justice, but also of resistance. "I was afraid the world would forget who Giulia was. Before she became 'one of many,' I wanted people to know who she was: a woman who listened, who reflected, who loved."
And on that journey, Chiara discovered a new version of herself: "I saw myself in the Chiara who was looking for Giulia in Senago, but I also learned to recognize the Chiara who came after. More thoughtful, more capable of listening, like she was."
In Giulia, today, Chiara sees herself reflected every day, trying to make her voice resonate in her own actions, in her own thoughts. "So she will never completely go away."
But there's also anger, inevitable. Two weeks ago, the Court of Appeal upheld Impagnatiello's life sentence, but ruled out the aggravating circumstance of premeditation. "I'm angry. Giulia had been poisoned for months. It's an injustice," says Chiara. "Being a collateral victim of femicide means fighting every day. You have to testify, speak out, become a symbol. But in court, you never emerge victorious. We all lost."
(Unioneonline/Fr.Me.)