What do you want to become?

This article is published in Vanity Fair number 32-33 on newsstands until August 17, 2021

Alessia’s smile is the first word of each of her sentences. It is not flattery. It is not superficiality. It is not optimism flaunted at all costs. Alessia Marcuzzi’s smile is the always the same incipit of an always different story. He uses it on television, in this interview, while we talk to each other via Zoom. He probably also used it when he decided to go back and forth with his career.

We wanted both of them, Alessia and her smile, on this cover because in our opinion they tell the summer we are experiencing well: an unprecedented season, a month, August, suspended between an unprecedented year and a September that promises to be unprecedented. . Alessia, like all of us, found herself faced with the most difficult question: what do you want to become? This question, a warning that naturally crosses everyone’s life, has become even bigger, even more cumbersome, even more difficult to ignore after the pandemic.
Each of us is looking for our own answer. There are those who want to devote more time to the family, those who want to change jobs, move to another city, do more or less smart working, go to live in nature, return exactly to life before or totally change the life that was done first. There are also those who have suffered a lot, those who have lost loved ones, those who no longer have a job. But it is not a question of privileges, of who was more or less fortunate. And it’s not even a question of age.
We have all, in this year and a half, dealt with relationships, with outstanding issues, sometimes even with ghosts that we preferred not to see or that we could not see at all. Now they are there, in front of us, and they ask us: what do you want to become?
There is no one-size-fits-all answer. Alessia gave us hers. Many other exceptional women, in this issue, tell us theirs. Browse the next pages of Vanity Fair in search of inspirations, revolutions, possible paths. We are experiencing a period of radical and rapid change. Radical due to the ongoing cultural and environmental transformations. Fast for everything the pandemic has accelerated.
In this panorama filled with question marks, sometimes similar to threatening clouds, there is however a great light, an all-Italian sun: the exceptional season of Italian successes. The Måneskin and the Azzurri in Europe. Matteo Berrettini at Wimbledon.
The historic day at the Tokyo Olympics with the gold medals of Marcell Jacobs and Gianmarco Tamberi. Courage, effort, sense of duty and responsibility. And above all, the desire to never surrender to conformism but the desire to pursue, whatever the cost, the richness of one’s own diversity.
We have a lot, a lot to learn from these Italian heroes. The next time you ask yourself “what do you want to become?” Think of them.