There are books that you read. And then there are books that ferment.
Ermione. Vite&Vite. Fermenti femminili belongs to the second category: it does not demand attention, it claims it slowly. Like wine resting in the dark, like a myth that never stops speaking even when we think we have forgotten it.
Ermione, a secondary figure in the tragedy, a neglected daughter, a body left on the margins of history, finds her voice and becomes a gaze. She does not shout, she does not accuse: she observes. And by observing, she understands. Her ancient wound becomes a lens through which to read the present, a present that is only modern in appearance, still riddled with violence, jealousy, loneliness, and blame heaped on those who dared to feel too much.
In these pages, mythology is neither refuge nor ornament. It is a dark mirror. It reflects back what we have become, what we continue to repeat. Hermione moves between past and present like a silent witness, a chronicler of humanity who recognizes in ancient passions the same shadows that inhabit the present.
And then there is wine.
Not as embellishment, but as a profound language. The vineyards, the vines, the glasses become narrative flesh, liquid archetypes. Wine unites and unmasks, consoles and disarms, like love, like desire, like memory. It is life fermenting, which can nourish or overwhelm. It is Dionysus pulsing beneath the page.
The preface by Attilio Scienza opens up a further dimension: Dionysus as a dual deity, generous and terrible, capable of bestowing oblivion and unleashing destruction. Person and Demon. Gift and torment. Wine as the perfect metaphor for humanity, which is never pure, never simple, never completely innocent.
Attilio Scienza, one of the leading scholars of vine and wine culture, places the work in a broader and deeper reflection:
“With wine, man has received a gift of great joy, but also of great torment. Person and Demon, wine has played a central role in the history of humanity”.
Scienza also recalls the value of archetypes as necessary tools for finding one’s way in a society that has lost family, listening, and human contact, emphasizing how myth and culture can still offer examples, balance, and awareness.
Within this intertwining, women emerge. Those whom history has asked to atone. Those who have paid for passions not granted, for jealousies not forgiven, for an intensity judged to be guilt.
“Ermione. Vite&Vite” is a quiet but tenacious song for them. An act of resistance that needs no slogans, because it speaks the ancient language of truth.
Elvia Gregorace‘s writing is cultured and sensitive, never ostentatious. It smells of earth, books, listening. It has the slow pace of those who know the value of time and the responsibility of words. Each page invites us to pause, to reconnect, to remember that not everything that matters can be rushed.
This book does not console.
But it accompanies.
And like certain fine wines, it lingers long after the last page.
In the body.
In the memory.
In that fragile place where we understand that myth does not speak of the past,
but of what we are, still.
Part of the feminine ferment, Ermione. Vite&Vite is a book that gives voice to women “destined to atone for sins not their own,” transforming mythological narrative into an act of cultural and civil resistance.
THE AUTHOR
Elvia Gregorace is a freelance journalist, food blogger, and teacher of classical literature at a high school in Rome. She teaches wine and chocolate sommelier courses at the Italian Sommelier School. She writes on the blog Il Tritagonista and for La Gazzetta del Gusto, describing food territories and cultures as places of the soul. She has collaborated with Bibenda and, through writing, theater, and teaching, she weaves ancient and contemporary knowledge into a feminine vision that is memory, denunciation, and project.
