A LETTER FOR LICANÌAS 2021

A Letter to the Citizens of Neoneli

Dear Neoneli,

It is I, Emilie Miller, your American writer from New York City. I am in Italy and once again hoping to find my way back to you. Hoping to once again find my way back to the center. To Sardegna’s and perhaps also to my own. To return to the heart of the heart. To climb the mountains and to get a renewed sense of perspective after this most difficult period of pandemic, lockdown, and perpetual uncertainty. The time we were all kept apart.

I came to Italy to perhaps heal some of the broken pieces, after a year and a half, spent mostly alone, in NYC.

After the beginning of COVID19’s devastation in Italy, it arrived without mercy in NYC. We were hit hard and fast. The sirens were loud and constant. Each one contained within its call, the understanding that someone was suffering.

People emptied out of New York City, the streets became empty and silent. It is estimated that over 200,000 people left NYC at the beginning of the pandemic. I only had one neighbor left in my apartment building.

We lost and we lost. The physical evidence of our loss grew. There was no time to honor our city’s grief. Mobile morgues lined the streets in my neighborhood. My city was under siege. By August 2020, more than 33,000 of my fellow New Yorkers had died.

This was a disorienting combination: our simultaneous inertia and rapid loss of precious life.

I walked one afternoon in Central Park in a light rain for 45 minutes and saw only two other people. It wasn’t relaxing, the way being alone in nature often is. The special electricity of NYC, comes from all of its people forced together—filling this city with our dreams and impatience. We are the restless heart of the city that never sleeps.

In New York, like Sardinia, we too are resilient and independent, but in my opinion, it will take more than reopening stores and museums to heal from our enormous loss. How do you repair after such collective grief?

Sometimes you can only see things clearly when you look from afar.

When I climb your mountains for perspective and return to Neoneli, there are a few reassuring constants that I know I will encounter:

Neoneli will be planning and planting, literally and metaphorically, for the future.  Seeds will be placed into the earth. There will be the patient expectation of growth. The prosciutto, coppa, and salami will be hanging, taking its time, becoming flavorful.  The grapes for the wine will be ripening—the alchemy of sun and water and earth and time. One day in the future they will become something that will fill glasses at the tables of family and friends and provide long nights of laughter and memories. Since my first trip to Neoneli in 2015, Cantine di Neoneli was born and their wines can now be found all over the world. As I was told in Neoneli, “Nothing is impossible.  With time and patience, truly anything can be done.”

Now you prepare for Licanias 2021. You are gathering many powerful elements: words and stories. Those who write the words and stories. Those who make the music. Those who, through art and culture, will let us IMAGINE a new future. And help us to reflect on our present. To make a record of who we are, who we were. Even while the fires burned and the virus continued to spread.  What else can we do, but tell the story? And plant for the future with patient expectation of growth.

A friend of mine told me that during Rome’s lockdown, without the presence of traffic and pedestrians, tiny green plants began to appear between the ancient cobblestones, in once busy intersections.

I recently saw another Roman friend of mine who lost her father to COVID19 this past April. He died two weeks before he was scheduled for his first vaccine appointment. My friend is still so young. Finishing her PhD in Art Restoration, she spends her days restoring and preserving significant Italian works of art so that they can be enjoyed for generations and centuries to come. I think of her walking the streets of Rome, a city where, on your way to get a coffee, you can casually pass by an ancient wall that is almost 2,000 years old. How can it be that in the same city, where some things still remain after thousands of years, your father–the very foundation of your heart, and family, and life—who you loved and needed to live a thousand years, can one day suddenly disappear. 

I have no answers. What else can we do, but also tell the stories of those who did not have time to tell their own? Stories matter because people matter. What else can we do, but care for one another and the places we call home? Hospitality.

For the people of Sardinia, gestures of hospitality are natural, normal, easy. In Neoneli, hospitality and making people feel like they matter, is as automatic and fundamental as breathing. More and more, I believe, especially during this most difficult time of pandemic, that these gestures of generosity and hospitality are the threads that hold all the broken pieces of the world together.

In my book about Neoneli, I recounted the following: “Often the young people leave… At first they want to leave, to experience something new. But once they are gone, all they want to do is come back.  It is as if they remain always connected to Neoneli with a spiritual umbilical cord.”

And so it is. I want to come back. And I hope I will see you soon, when it is safe for us to reunite. Until then I will Imagine:

Licanias Festival! Auguri! The power and magic of people coming together to dream.

Your stories told over glasses of excellent wine late into the night.

You planting for the future so that the next generations may have the chance to do the same.