At the age of twelve, I had to memorise the first lines of the Iliad and, suprisingly, I still remember them now (unfortunately I learned them in Italian but I am committed to learn them in Ancient Greek). Back in Italy, the Iliad is almost a sacred text, something that will keep coming up during the course of our education. It must be because we are still attached to the idea of being related, in some way or in another, to Troy and its past glory (if you want to know more I would reccomend to look into Virgil and the Aeneid). While my classmates were horrified at the idea of reading those lines over and over again, I remember how fascinating they were for me. Achilles was my first fictional crush and it’s not a suprise that at the age of nineteen, I got a tattoo of his helmet (I do blame Brad Pitt as well who was the only good in Troy and will always be the real Achilles in my mind).
A few months after, I forced my mother to buy a certain magazine because they were selling a book about Greek mythology along with it. She then refused to buy the rest of the volumes because they were expensive and were not, according to her, suitable for a twelve years girl (There was a lot of sex in that book and in Greek mythology in general). I still own that book and I often go back to it and it almost feels like I am reading it for the first time.
However, I was able to convince my father, who didn’t really need that much convincing, to buy a book from a catalog which had been given to me at school. My mother was, of course mad at both of us. At my father for saying yes once again, at me for wanting something that I would discard few weeks later (she was terribly wrong, from that moment on I have never stopped buying books). The book in question was an illustrated edition of the story of Atalanta, an heroine from Greek mythology.
All of these moments, were breadcrumbs that lead me to my love and passion for Greek and Roman mythology. Over the years, I have found inspiration in many forms, but it was at the age of twelve that I started to write, inspired by those stories and characters.