For Nanda Pivano, the official Italian translator of Hemingway, and an established critic, Melanie was a pleasant surprise: “This beautiful book of American taste, based as it is on the action in the themes and on the dialogues in style, breathes an air of youth for the problems that are developed in it and cannot fail to interest young people.” That was at the very beginning of Melanie’s career, and Nanda Pivano believed in this young, immature talent, controverse and passionate. “Melanie is beautiful,” she wrote, “even more so than when she ran away from her wealthy family. The Meat of the Moon, her first novel, gave her notoriety and esteem; in Days of Sand, she continues her autobiography with very hard adventures, immersed in the ferocious absurdities of war, but also in the hopes and dreams that always end up making youth triumph. In an interview, she said, and I think she was right: “If you believe in something, you can do it. And you make it when you no longer count the mistakes you’ve made… Melanie made it.” The novel was set in Israel during Intifada.
Melanie has always been a contradiction, which adds more charm to her artistic personality. On one hand, she appears to be charismatic as a very sparkling and glamorous Barbie Doll, radiating beauty and charm. On the other hand, she reveals her other side as a revolutionary firebrand at the same time. She believes in self-expression religiously. Thanks to her gallant personality, she does not hesitate to highlight and fearlessly challenging the hypocrisy prevalent in various aspects of society. With her infectious smile dancing on her lips along with a hint of burning anger in her beautiful glistening eyes, she heroically speaks out against flaws that need to be addressed.
She pursued her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, one of the most prestigious art schools in Italy. She found herself immersed in a world of creativity and inspiration. While continuing her studies, she ventured into the world of modeling in Paris. Her glamorous lifestyle provides her with an exciting opportunity to travel more and add to her stacking experiences. As her career took her across the globe, she became known as a globetrotter. She traveled extensively throughout the middle-east which impacted her life decisions deeply. She became a sought-after figure, as described by the magazines of that era. She graced the front pages of prestigious and popular fashion magazines. Her appearance on television and photo shoots increased immeasurably and further introduced her to the new era of fame.
However, her crazy busy glamorous life took a dramatic turn and changed everything when she met an Emirati man. This fateful meeting led her to fall in love with him deeply. She decided to leave behind this alluring world of fashion and marry him. She embarked on a new chapter of her life, adapting this new lifestyle away from glitters and sparkles. From that moment on, her life has been changed and centered around her children and family. She embraced her motherhood with passion wholeheartedly. She cherished every moment spent with her kids. She created her loving home between Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Despite this, her thirst for creating art has never quenched. She remains deeply connected to her passion for writing and art. She believed the true driving force behind her existence was none except to bring out her true self in the form of art. She continued to nurture it with dedication and determination.
Melanie’s books have captivated readers with their captivating allure. Critics have drawn comparisons of her writing style to the works of Hemingway. It’s like a fascinating secret thread that links her to renowned authors like him. LA STAMPA, one of the largest influential Italian newspapers, recognized this connection. The famous publication praised the profound impact of her work on the literature world and described her books as being written at full speed and in a direct cinematographic style. Her dynamic story-telling style mirrors the acclaimed writer’s own approach. Her unique blend of pace and cinematic style displayed her infinite passion for art and literature.
Today, Google is overflowing with information about her work, articles, and interviews on the main European and Middle Eastern newspapers and television: “Melanie Francesca is a versatile and circular artist who believes that beauty and harmony, more than pain, is the best path for our spiritual growth.” She is still blonde and beautiful like Nanda Pivano defined her and always smiling like a doll, to quote the pink trend that is invading the web these days. A doll who, however, has conquered the web and the European public with her intelligence. The former model, now a radio and TV commentator, is regularly present on the major Italian radio and television circuits like RAI and Mediaset, as well as a weekly columnist in important Italian magazines. She is conquering the world. Since then, she has published 14 books, including nine novels, and she has also established herself as a successful writer. And now, thanks to the translation of one of his books, The Angel, we too can browse through it to find “the keys to the alchemical transformation of heavy and heavy feelings into the gold of awareness.”
With The Angel, just translated into English and edited by Europa Books, Melanie Francesca helps us to wear a pair of magical lenses to see the world from a spiritual point of view to solve the problems of our existence. Through the narrative form of a novel, the author guides us to make contact with ourselves and our inner wounds by solving which we can change the course of our existence for the better. It’s an intense, passionate, sometimes carnal book that warns us about our wrong choices, trying to make us understand the reasons for certain toxic addictions, even emotional ones, in honor of a healthier life.
The plot is indeed compelling: It’s Paris at the beginning of the 2000s. An angel falls in love with Dixi, a fragile girl who works as a model. Born into a wealthy French family with bourgeois roots, Dixi has had to bring herself up, a girl lost in a chaotic life with neither rules nor a future and now at the mercy of a gypsy with whom she is hopelessly in love and who drags her, playing with her feelings, into a series of dark events. The spirit, Alan, follows her everywhere until he reveals himself to her in the churches where Dixi finds refuge and comfort. “You have to observe yourself when you feel a painful emotion because that is the door to self-awareness,” says Dixi to the Angel.
Melanie has also become a renowned artist who has exhibited her artwork throughout Europe and the Middle East, including a major exhibition of The Box in Dubai, under the patronage of Minister of Culture, now of Tolerance, H.H. Nahayan Bin Mubarak Al Nahyan. That defines the artist with words that explain why he believed so much in her: “The talent of Melanie Francesca consists in combining in her works, with extraordinary mastery and technical skills, her form of prayer to the universe and to the omnipotence of nature, as well as to the grandeur of the human being. In a technological age like ours, it is a message of freedom, hope, and indisputable modernity.”
“The Box” connects classical mythology with contemporary understanding. As luminous as a lightbox, it is an actual structure in fabric and metal weighing 400 kilos and measuring three by three meters – height 2.5 – which invites visitors to enter inside to experience an intimate journey through the history of ‘humanity. An installation created to restore philosophical dignity to a figurative “today trampled on, reduced to craftsmanship, to be re-evaluated” is the result of the same deliriant, dreamlike, poetic fantasy that Maria Rita Parsi, the great Italian psychologist, describes in Melanie, “an author capable of making the imagination gallop a thousand, without borders.” A compliment and a wish to free our mind and to fly high towards the stately spaces of the soul. She said: “Melanie Francesca is a surprise, above all and first of all, for her extraordinary ability, melodiously and dreamily expressed, to build emotional scenarios that are rooted in every myth and every time. A female James Joyce to sip to open the doors beyond our unconscious”.
For the famous art historian and Undersecretary of State at the Ministry of Culture VITTORIO SGARBI: «Melanie’s language of poetry follows the line of sacred texts, prophets, the Divine Comedy, and the great symbolist poetry like Rimbaud and Baudelaire that in fact inaugurates modern lyric poetry. If not, everything is understood; it may still be enough for it to be perceived; the important thing is that the solemn and the cryptic leave the listener with a clear and profound sign inside. »
The philosopher and professor STEFANO ZECCHI gives an intense and structured reading of visual and historical talent: «It is a very beautiful book from the point of view of literary fascination, and it is clear that Melanie manages the word and linguistic structure very well. »
It is precisely on this path of search for the true, the beautiful, and the sacred that the novel The Angel, just published in English by Europe Books, fits. To rise above the daily chaos to the orderly space of soul and love.
I sat down with her to discuss her latest literary work:
Is the invisible world so vast that it is often dismissed as non-existent?
Anyone who claims that the invisible world does not exist is right: for him, it does not exist. I, too, firmly believe only in the things I hear and see. We just see different things. For example, the bat sees by ultrasound; without science telling us that they exist, would we see or hear them too? No. Even the world of the spirit is physical, like an ultrasound, imperceptible even to the most sophisticated machines. One day, we will be able to perceive it because we will open new sensory doors in our bodies.
When it comes to angels, a book is automatically branded as fantasy. Is it right?
When I enter a church and see a sky full of Renaissance angels, I see that God exists. If nothing else, in the magnificence and splendor that art, believing in the beyond has managed to produce. We are the gates of the angels: through us, they show their harmony. A music, a book, a song, a dance… the human body that becomes an instrument of beauty. Again, the words are a catch: fantasy is simply a more subtle reality.
In this book of yours, are the angelic presences very anthropic, human, in love with human finiteness?
Angels are in love with us because they see us as small, fragile, like children. They are in love with our awkwardness but also with what they don’t have: a body. They are attracted by this materiality of ours so different, and when we enjoy the wonder of the world through our flesh, they vibrate with happiness. We are a bit like little animals to them, happy to rummage between food, sleep, love, and fusion with the miracle of nature. Let’s make them tender. The body has been given to us to live it fully without crippling it with ideas of sin. Live it with innocence; everything is divine. The body is the temple of the spirit. It is our mind that cripples and brands our body as evil, and this generates a sense of sin and, therefore, perversion, humiliation, frustration, and violence.
THE ANGEL has been defined yours as a story of abandonment, betrayal, and healing. Do you find yourself in this triple register?
This is a story of abandonment, betrayal, and healing. The betrayal is told through the life of Dixi, who, precisely because of the initial wound of abandonment with which she came into the world, recalls situations in which she is continually abandoned. Healing happens when we decide to break this chain of repetitions and errors, but it is a decision that must come from the heart, not from the head. Wanting something doesn’t mean getting it. We have to go through a radical transformation of being, and we only go through the heart.
What inspired this story for you?
Dixi, I could be younger in Paris; I often went to the Pere Lachaise cemetery or Gothic cathedrals, forests of stone steeped in history; they are in my flesh like a song. Even the model, even the bohemian life, the contact with a daily rawness that seemed like a house without walls, where the cold wind of poverty always seemed to bite your heart. Yet what comes out in the pages isn’t me; it’s something else, something truer than the truth I could express on my own. We are instruments of voices greater than us that pass through us and speak through us. We are the gates of angels…
It is a book that might seem difficult to read to a world that seems to believe only in the evidence. Yet the response from readers demonstrates the opposite, that there is a desire to confront the supernatural…
The world has changed a lot; people open up. Ever since the days of the new age and the trend of yoga and Buddhist beliefs, that of esotericism, of alternative medicine… people are fed up with how they forced us to see the world; they know there is something else. Everyone feels, more or less, that something is boiling in the air…
In your book, at one point, the angel talks about the door of awareness. A door today too often closed, sealed?
The awareness I speak of is the feeling that ‘I am.’ When you say I am and take a deep breath, the past and future disappear, and you are now. By entering the now, by acting in the now, you change the world and yourself. The mind kidnaps us and makes us live in yesterday and tomorrow by conditioning us. When you enter the now, the I am, you see who you are. You have to read the book to understand what it means, so it’s just a concept. In the book, one is taken by the hand and, through the story of Dixi, understands, like in a fairy tale, what it means to live in the now.
How do you imagine your guardian angel?
I don’t imagine it with my eyes; I feel it. He has an intense vibration that mainly grips my right shoulder and runs all over my body like a kind of Vibro massage. He was very strong physically; it felt like he was touching me.
Will there be a sequel to the book?
I’m already writing it, and it’s also the sequel to the last two novels, The Westerner and The Perfect Woman. Everything converges.
Would you like a movie to be made out of it? If so, how should it be?
It should be done by David Lynch. And look like Jim Morrison as a break in the mold, as a bearer of division, of confusion. The novel has dark, rock, and metallic tones. It sounds like the scream of a rock star transposed into a book. Jim Morrison is very similar to the novel…
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