It was like stepping inside her blog. Only even better.
I climbed the four flight of stairs to her shop, opened the door, and entered a scene that was perfectly familiar to me, from reading Rosa's words and looking at her photos over the last two years (hers was one of the first blogs I discovered).
Except that the scene was alive. Very alive.
Rosa was busy serving costumers, dealing with a supplier, looking after her daughters, answering phone calls, and checking her computer now and then: all orchestrated with such grace and warmth.
The rooms were vibrant with conversation and creativity, as Rosa cut fabrics and packaged several of her bonecos, and each of her daughters was busy teaching a small friend how to use the sewing machine and make a pin cushion (the elder daughter), and to cut up paper into tiny squares (the younger).
It was in this environment, talking with Rosa about her interests - her passion for Portuguese crafts and textiles, her quest for preserving them, and her nine years of blogging - that somehow helped me to find a new, unifying thread in the skein that is my life, and realize that certain things I've been drawn to - my studies in anthropology, my experience living in a rural, traditional village, and my love of crafts as well as of photography - could be combined into something embraces all these interests.
After the sleepy Italian summer is over, my new focus will be to discover what handicrafts are still alive in Italy, how they're connected to local traditions, and, maybe, how I can go about marketing them.
