Zeus who?

This article is published in Vanity Fair issue 29-30 on newsstands until July 13, 2021

Olympus today is female and is not ruled by Zeus, but by two women: Bebe and Faith. Athletes, mermaids, contemporary goddesses: you can call them whatever you want. You can also try to stop them, tell them “you can’t do this”. It is useless: praise or imprecations never touch them anymore. Because Beatrice Vio and Federica Pellegrini have learned not to listen to anyone but themselves.
«’You can’t do it’, ‘your body won’t let you’: these are phrases I have heard many times, but I have never been disheartened,” says Bebe.

“I have been used to transforming fear into something positive, to transforming it into anger, competitive malice and the desire to erase skepticisms”. And Fede is even more radical: “I did what I did, starting with the sacrifices, because I liked facing them”.
When the next Olympics, an edition that counts the largest number of women in the history of the Italian team, are now shortly away, we wanted to portray them on the cover with the help of one of the greatest Italian artists, Maurizio Cattelan, who imagined them suspended in ‘water, an apparently element of Federica, in reality a “non-place” where the gravity of life, fears and limits is zeroed and the strength, recklessness and audacity of dreams begin to really show themselves.
Do not mistake this vision of Cattelan for an obvious hyperbole of “if you want, you can”: sometimes trying hard is not enough and the rhetoric of “wanting is power” is often an illusion that is served up to make us feel calm, hopeful, for defuse the sense of defeat. But Bebe and Fede do not speak only of victory but above all of loneliness, of paths and horizons.
Loneliness is a necessary factor, a condition of silence far from the acclaim or hatred of social media, a private and precious moment in which we learn to be ourselves, whatever the cost, without listening to anyone. The path is the great adventure that each of us must write, no matter if it leads to a gold medal or a small goal, or even nowhere: it is the journey that counts, not the point of arrival.
Finally, the horizons. Bebe and Fede have that extraordinary quality of opening panoramas where everyone sees walls, of opening up sunrises and sunsets where every “self-respecting person” sees darkness and night. How much we need people like that! How much is there a need for those who know how to show us the immensity of the sky at a time when many, perhaps too many continue only to see the defects of the finger pointing to the Moon. Losing sight not only of the Moon, but all the greatness of the universe around it.

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