Catherine's smile

Caterina is a wild girl born free as the wind. He rides on horseback across the Caucasus plateaus and listens to the voices of the trees, animals, gods and heroes. His is a people outside of time, his language is the oldest and most incomprehensible in the world. Then one day she is suddenly dragged violently into history. Captured at Tana, the last Venetian colony at the mouth of the Don begins an incredible journey to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. He sees the golden domes of Constantinople on the eve of the Turkish conquest, he sees Venice rising from the waters as if in a dream and finally Florence in the splendor of the Renaissance. But it is not a pleasure trip. Caterina is a slave one thing. Her existence is now intertwined with that of pirates, soldiers, prostitutes, other slaves like her, adventurers and merchants, men and women who bought her, resold her, rented her. Her story is as big and liquid and mobile as the sea she has crossed. The story of a girl whose whole body was stolen by someone, her dreams, her future, but she was stronger alone, she walked the streets of the world without being afraid, she suffered, she fought, she loved, she regained her freedom and the dignity of being human. One of the children she gave birth to when she was still a slave Caterina loved more than her life. And she knows he loved her the same even though he never got to tell her he never got to call her mom and she had to pretend he wasn't her son. His happiness was giving him everything he had: his infinite love for life, for creatures and for freedom. We all know that child's name. It was Leonardo. Caterina gives us joy and freedom too but asks a lot of us in return. Waking up as if from a long dreamless sleep. Open the eyes. Understand that his is not the story of a distant and fabulous past. It is today's story: of a foreigner on the lowest rung of the social and human ladder of a woman who got off a boat and came from who knows where without a voice or dignity. This is why it needs to be told. For Catherine. For her sisters who die in the sea she crossed and who suffer around us.