Do not look for them in the living room
with Silvia Ugolotti, journalist and travel writer
“Do not look for them in the living room” is an atlas of stories of women who have never remained still, an invitation to move, to disobey gracefully, to rediscover travel as a force of personal and collective transformation. They have crossed deserts, climbed mountains, challenged empires and conventions. Alone, disguised as men, they have made nomadism a political act, walking a new grammar. Yet history has often left them on the margins, relegating them to oblivion. Almost mythological beings, archetypes of courage and female strength, between the 18th and 20th centuries these travelers, explorers, and adventurers overturned cultural and social norms, choosing the road rather than waiting, the unknown rather than the imposed script. The author, a solitary traveler herself, with years of reporting for some of the most authoritative travel publications in Italy behind her, recognizes in these figures her “wild mothers, the unstable ancestors, the inconvenient sisters”: a personal genealogy that intertwines their routes with her own experience, their choices with the questions she too has carried in her suitcase.
