Today, if I'm not mistaken, "my" room is inhabited by a biology student. I don't know if it's still there, but behind the wardrobe, on the last day before leaving the Collegio Nuovo I engraved my name on a tile...
Born in Calabria, raised in Zurich, Maria arrived at Collegio Nuovo in 1981, with excellent technical-commercial high school diploma marks achieved at the Rosenberg Institute, Italian Section of St. Gallen. She enrolled in Foreign Languages and Literatures, choosing German, English, and outside the Faculty, Arabic. The year of Maria's entry into the College, the cultural season open to the public features, among other guests, the illustrious Italian scholar Dante Isella (photo), who recently moved to the Zurich Polytechnic from the University of Pavia (with him had gradauted also, among others, Rector Bernardi and Prof. Carla Riccardi, who would later lead many literary meetings in the College). With a view to maintaining relations between Italy and Switzerland, among the foreign guests in the College there was also a Swiss girl, studying Italian literature. To cultivate the study of the chosen languages, Maria can count on two German and two English readers, while from the rest of the world, her curious nature, an indispensable gift for the profession she will then choose, allows her to meet young women from France, Norway, beyond to Venezuela and Peru! In her third year of study, it's time to pack up her bags: she is awarded a grant from the College for a short study stay in Cambridge.
Among the first challenges
Having returned to Switzerland after graduating, Maria taught for a few years, until, in 1990, she embarked on the path of journalism, by collaborating to "Agorà", a magazine on migration of which she would also become editor-in-chief. At the birth of her daughter, a new change for her: she collaborates with the zyPRESSE agency, founded by her together with three other colleagues.
Today
In 2005 zyPRESSE merged with Pressebüro Index, for which Maria continues to work, also finding time to publish volumes on topics dear to her: health, migration, society. Among her books, “Die Asbestlüge” (The Lies of Asbestos), an essay on the asbestos tragedy: it appeared in German by the Zurich publisher Rotpunktverlag and was subsequently translated into French, Spanish and German. For 12 long years, always as a freelancer, Maria immersed herself in the world of development cooperation financed by the Swiss Confederation, as editor of the prestigious magazine "Un solo mondo". Not only that, with the transition to journalist of RSI - Swiss Radio and Television, she takes up a new challenge, learning to work with images. We have to believe in her tenacity in her changes when she says that, sitting at the television bar in Lugano, a colleague one day told her: "you are the sweetest mastiff I know". Or when in the middle of an interview with Nicola Gratteri, the prosecutor pleasantly digresses and she finds a way to ask the right questions. Because, as she says, asking "uncomfortable questions, without ever becoming insolent, this is the ability that distinguishes journalists who do not do gossip but information".
Her advice
Transforming nostalgia into an occasion; to know in order to change: “I had chosen not to go back to Collegio Nuovo. I was afraid of getting lost in nostalgia. Nostalgia for a place that had changed my life, a place that gave me four wonderful years of youth. Perhaps the most beautiful of my life, certainly the most carefree. Now that my daughter is twenty I think about it every now and then. I see in her my desire to understand the world, to interpret knowledge as an indispensable key to change." (Nuovità n. 24)
