Allegra arrived to Albania like a meteor, a small burning flame that generates positive energy.
Her name is the perfect match between her tiny body and her flexible movements; she reminds me of those small sticks that people light up during New Year’s Eve, generating sparkles of joy.
Allegra is a lady with the face of a girl, she smiles gently and preserves endless supplies of love.
Her story is painful, but she knows how to tell it without rhetoric, by turning it into a meaningful and powerful tool.
Allegra enjoys the exchange while she meets others, she’s not afraid of being judged and makes her way in the jungle of rage and pain of the other people. And the others find shelter in her fruitful words.
Indeed Allegra does magic.

When she arrived to Albania she was completely voiceless, she only whispered. Maybe the destiny just wanted us to be silent and listen to this feeble subtle voice that whispered good words.
Each day Allegra’s voice became stronger and stronger, more ringing, like a call that starts quietly and turns into a resonant announcement.
She also agrees on saying that she used to be scared by the encounters where her words were the center of the scene, so her voice, cowardly, hid between her vocal cords; but gradually it found its own place, becoming clear in all its relevance, polite but solid. A major voice that pronounces hugs made out of words.
Allegra spent in Albania a few but intense days, full of tales and words.
The first meeting happened with twenty women, each of which keeps inside her a particular pain: the loss of a son, the absence  a husband: a loneliness typical of the victims of a blood feud, the consequence of which mostly falls on women shoulders.
Allegra’s personal story immediately created an expectant silence in which each woman could see herself; they were all sitting in a circle, with their body jut towards the young-looking woman. They realised her spirit even though they didn’t understand all the words she spoke in Italian. And every translated word reawakened the compassion for all those stories they could relate to.
Some of them cried, some of them smiled, many experienced empathy, as if they were seeing their other self in the mirror. One lady recalled that every night she dreams her parents, protective deity of her everyday life, and her three kids, who grew up without a father.
A young mother recognised in her little girl’s eyes the sister she lost years ago, victim of a blind rage that put an end to her short life.
It has been a sort of catharsis, where the pain left a tiny place to melancholy, for the memory of someone who’s not there anymore.
The second meeting Allegra attended has been short and completely coincidental. For the first anniversary of the death of a young boy, killed because of blood revenge, the family decided to organise a memorial Mass in their village. Allegra wanted to take part to it, in order to share with the family this anniversary, in a spirit of proximity and love aimed at of fering care to all the members of the mourning family.
Even more meaningful was her last encounter with Flutura, a young lady who was mourning the loss of her sister because of a revenge among families.
We sat on the veranda of a café in the exact point where the river Drin merges the Buna and together they flow into the Lake Scutari, vanishing. It’s a place where the waters blend, like the words, in order to plot somewhere else and dissolve. It’s here that Allegra did her magic.
She confided at first, asking for an advice to her young friend: how can you support a son while he’s hurting for the loss of her sister, and while you still have to process your own pain for the loss of a daughter?
Their stories look alike, but their roles don’t: one is a mother, the other is a sister, different points of view affected by the same grief.
The girl took a moment to think about it, sitting on that tiny space she occupied on the edge of the couch.
Flutura counterposes a calm external behaviour to a deeply restless soul, which shows in the way she sits: as if she is always on the verge to fly away. And it was her actual desire when once she said that if she had a car, she would have fled far away, she would have vanished, and wouldn’t come back anymore.
When she felt ready she answered that a mother is not necessarily the right person to confide such a pain to. In that way she pointed out her detachment from the family, typical of adulthood, in a culture in which of ten the daughter becomes independent only when she gets married.
While talking about herself she got to communicate to Allegra the need of distance. Children are unique, they feel in a different way and they have answers.
In a blink Flutura opened a glimmer and allowed us to see a glimpse of serenity in a family where the grief is the absolute protagonist.
Allegra and Flutura look alike in fact: both have a discreet presence and a resilient personality, and both are attracted by the beauty. Both decided that will let the beauty they treasure flourish.
Flutura wants to plant a garden full of scented flowers, as a memory of her passion sister’s favourite activity. Allegra will continue to spread her words, like a fairy who will fly where she’s needed.
And will do tiny magic every now and then!

Sara