In the summer of 1978, a few months after I was born, my father planted a Hibiscus tree in the garden of our house. He loved to tell me that it would grow as strong and lush as I did and that it would accompany me in my growth, like a brother.

When my father fell ill, I was nine years old. My mother had sent me to spend the summer with my grandparents in the Sicilian countryside and I remember my impatience to see him again well. When I returned to the city, he was waiting for me on the terrace of my house, from which I could see Mount Pellegrino and the Palermo sea . Shortly afterwards, the illness would take him away, leaving an enormous void inside me as a child.

Some cardboard boxes in my study hold the memories of my childhood before his death. I owe it to my father that I am able to relive them. He loved to capture our family’ys happy and carefree moments with his camera. Through the photographs he took in the early years of my life, I have the opportunity to remember a joyful and carefree time, the feeling of being loved, the beauty and serenity on my mother’s face, a happiness in the air that vanished all too soon. When my daughters were born, I saw him in myself again. I understood his desire, his need, to preserve the memory of those moments. So, I started to photograph them every day, rediscovering the magical purity of childhood with them. I wanted to preserve those moments, to make them live forever. Little girls grow up and discover a world that is uncontaminated in their eyes, and they do it with the freedom of those who unveil enormous mysteries without schemes and conjectures, with the instinctive ingenuity of childish curiosity, involving you in their fairy-tale reality. Recounting their view of the world and, at the same time, laying bare my inner search and the process of reconciliation with my past are the motivations behind my photographic project.

Embarking on this journey has allowed me to retrace my history and my emotions and has led me to re-elaborate the trauma I have experienced, finally seeing it through different eyes. The discoveries, the simplicity, the lightheartedness of childhood, in my case, abruptly gave way to great fears, loneliness, deterioration of my relationships with the people closest to me, starting with my mother. I took refuge in my inner world, protected and fantastical, to defend myself from reality and to alleviate the discomfort.

But no fantasy could withstand the impact of reality. And the fear that the past will come back to haunt me leads to anguished thoughts. Could my daughters experience the same negative emotions that I did as a child? Maybe so, who knows. But by photographing them daily, I have discovered the strength of their character and the depth of the bond between them. The lens of my camera has brought to light personal and family dynamics that will make their journey unique and certainly different from mine.

They will be three women free to write their own future.