There are things that defy immediate narration. They demand time. Silence. Rest. Days are needed to let them settle, to allow fermenting thoughts to quiet, to let the energy running through you find stillness. Only then can you truly sense what happened, grasp what remains, and find words that not only recount but carry the weight, the light, and the silence of our lived experience.
It happened again. This year too. Once more, in that suspended season when summer surrenders to autumn, when the air grows lighter, sharper, more alive. Again, we chose to inhabit this precise moment: the threshold. Each year, TEDx comes to Pollica at this exact point in the calendar. Not by chance, but by design. Because sometimes, we need time to pause, to listen, to reinhabit the present. Because this place, this village, these people have learned to treasure that ability as one treasures sacred things.
This year’s theme could only be time itself. Slow time as an act of gentle defiance in a world obsessed with haste, youth, lightness, and perfection. Time as subversion, a conscious choice to decelerate in order to feel. In a world that burns and forgets, fragments and consumes, we chose to leave a trace. To slow down, not to have more, but to become more. Time is more than a clock; it’s living memory, alert presence, a horizon we build together.
Amid a summer marred by inhuman wars, numbing scrolls, and guilty silence, we chose to restore humanity, rediscover belonging, and share thought, breath, and gaze. To nourish that fragile yet powerful rhythm called community. At TEDxPollica, we charted a manifesto: T.E.M.P.O. (in Italian) Trace, Experience, Movement, Presence, Horizon. An emotional, civic, poetic alphabet, an invitation to remember who we are, to navigate by our inner compass, to not let time slip through us without leaving a mark.
There is a time each year when the sky seems to descend and linger close by, a time when summer is lighter on our shoulders and souls, a nameless interval with its own rhythm and breath. In Pollica, that time is sacred — it calls us to pause, to listen, to choose. And today, gently, a new year begins.
We lived four intense days: days of care, of community, of presence — days rooted deep beneath the skin.
The first was for women, my rocks, silent, powerful presences who hold everything together, even while unseen. No stage or dream could exist without their quiet strength. Women who, through grace and resolve, patience and vision, stitch and safeguard the invisible fabric of this shared journey. Those who educate, nurture, heal, tend, and feed — often unnoticed, yet whose patient gestures have an enduring effect. Their essential, invisible acts sustain the world.
The second day, we sat down with children, looked them in the eyes, spoke of peace, of community, of crisis. We named injustice, war, and pain — without filters, but with gentleness. We listened to their gift for getting to the core, for asking questions and holding the door open for possibility. Children, humanity’s living gym, remind us that compassion is the root, not weakness. That listening is action. That sensitivity is revolutionary.
Then, hand in hand with friends from Daltrocanto, our piazza filled with music, notes, rhythms, and stories from the South that reminded us who we are. To be Southern is not mere geography, but a disposition — gentle resistance, collective memory, an ability to transform struggle into celebration, pain into song, scars into welcome.
The third day: TEDxPollica. Building, unbuilding, rebuilding — a generous stretch of time, filled with words that cut deep and linger. Preparation was not just manual, but heartfelt. We welcomed friends, mentors, and extraordinary voices whose humility and openness offered us vision, new questions, and fresh horizons, their true gift: not performance, but presence.