Here we are. After ten years, I’m writing again, telling stories once more.
It’s been ten intense years, full of travel, activities, and experiences. Ten years also filled with silences and losses. A period that led me to live in Norway, especially in the Arctic, and in the Alps, in those places where water is still present, alive, free, not too disturbed—unlike in most other places.
Now, with the team from Eden Exit and other friends, we’ve decided to start again. To begin exactly where everything began: with the Italian rivers. It was 2008 when, with a journey called “Un altro Po”, we traveled up the great river starting from Venice, pushing ourselves as far as water and conditions allowed. And we returned to Venice. 1002 km of fresh, salty, and brackish water.
We were navigating on a boat built by Roland Poltock, a great friend and master shipwright who, unfortunately, is no longer with us—though who knows, maybe he’s still sailing somewhere. It was the boat that Roland built together with Silvio Lago, Niccolò Zen who made the masts, Michael Kierkegaard the oars, Attilia Cometti the sails, and, in a very small way, me too. That boat is now in the Koç Museum in Istanbul, where hundreds of thousands of people have seen it. And maybe, at least some of them, sensed what that journey was meant to tell.
Today we start again from that memory. From that network of waterways that connects Turin to Trieste. And we will do it once again with a boat: the same one that took us from London to Istanbul.
We’ve envisioned a new journey. A journey that speaks of water, sustainable economies, and slowness. A journey that allows us to observe the rivers, listen to them, and understand their current state—which is often dramatic. Because in many places, it seems we still haven’t learned the lesson that the Earth teaches us every day.
We call everything around us “nature,” but we often do so vaguely. In reality, we are talking about mountains, rivers, forests, and lakes. Concrete places, with specific names. As Paolo Cognetti writes in *The Eight Mountains*, they are not abstract entities but living parts of our history.
Today, between torrential rains and prolonged droughts, it seems urgent to meet again the people of the rivers—and also those who know little or nothing about rivers, like many of us.
We want to listen to different voices: those of people who live the river every day, the voices of experts and scientists, but also of those from more “mainstream” backgrounds, more linked to society and the economy, who know little about water. Wise voices, less wise voices… all with something to say, if we’re ready to listen.
Our journey will be a story in motion—better yet, a story in navigation. We’ll tell what we see, what we hear, what we experience. Our eyes, our ears, our words will be the true storytellers.
Alessandro Scillitani will film the journey.
The guests and I will tell it on the radio and social media.
As always in our journeys, we will leave only a wake behind us—we move by oar or sail, and what we wear and use is made by hands that think about the origin and the end of each object. In short: a circular economy.
This is just a small preview, a taste, an invitation to follow us, to take part. In the coming months, things will happen, and we’d love for you to be with us—even just with your attention.
We are looking for people to interview, travel companions, voices to collect. We’re also looking for support, as always, because these projects come from the desire to communicate, not from profit.
We want this journey to become an opportunity to learn how to look at the river again, at the water, at the ancient liquid routes that once connected our cities and towns.
Especially in Northern Italy, where water has never been lacking… but where it is by no means guaranteed forever. You only need to look at how things are going to realize that.
