WRITING SOMETIMES BECOMES ART AND AN OPPORTUNITY FOR REDEMPTION IN LIFE: this is what emerged when Antonella Anniotti D’Isanto first told me about her idea to publish a book on Gepi Faranda, and her enthusiasm became mine. After the phone call ended, I was left with a certain curiosity about this character and, above all, about the man who, as she herself recalls, “decided to live according to his own truth, without bowing to the destinies written by others.”
I met Antonella when she was the President of the Tuscan delegation of the Women in Wine Association. She was a woman who put passion into her work among the rows of vines, a keen connoisseur of wine and the land. The wines produced by her winery had an extra weapon to wield: her vitality.
Then, as often happens in a woman’s life, there was a break, as she says, a need to process in order to be reborn. It is precisely the strongest who are faced with difficult trials in life, and Antonella, with Sicily in her heart and Tuscany in her hands, resumed her journey and did so through writing.
“Gepi Faranda, non solo per i tuoi occhi” (Gepi Faranda, not only for your eyes) is a book dedicated to a man who is still remembered in the streets and squares of Sicily, but for Antonella, writing this book was an act of reconciliation with her memory and her identity.
Antonella describes Gepi Faranda as follows:
“A Sicilian driver who pioneered organ donation at a time when the subject was almost unknown. His short life has become a symbol of courage: the ability to give everything, even oneself, for something one believes in. He died at the age of thirty-one in a horrific accident during a car race at the Modena racetrack. In addition to being a driver, he was also an inventor and race car tuner. Between 1952 and 1959, he tuned four cars; three are still visible today, and one of them, the “Junior Faranda”, continues to participate in vintage car races. Gepi lived his life as a free spirit, in contrast to his family’s plans for him, which included an academic degree and a career in politics, in keeping with family tradition. Instead, he chose to leave the comfortable and affluent family lifestyle behind to pursue his dreams: mechanics, speed, and innovation. In the morgue, in the pocket of his overalls, a will was found, written on December 24, 1957, in which he donated his body to science and his eyes to medicine, authorizing their transplantation. An extraordinary gesture for the time, and in 1960, after his tragic death, two people received the gift of sight.”
If the book about Gepi Faranda was a tribute that Antonella D’Isanto wanted to pay to a person who, like her, had decided not to give up and to remain true to who she felt she was, it was also her calling card for rebirth.
Today, this strong woman continues to pursue her training and writing. She does so with her characteristic moral integrity and commitment, so much so that her second work, “Ricordi ad alto contenuto alcolico” (High Alcohol Content Memories), was among the three winners of a prestigious literary award.
“Wine as a metaphor for experience, for time that refines, for pain that can become depth,” says Antonella. “Change is never a defeat. It is a different harvest, more internal, where every word is a grape that contains the memory of what we have been: we don’t give up, they squeeze us, and out comes the product of what we can still become.”
I haven’t read her second work yet, but I’m sure it won’t disappoint us, because those who write with the truth of their hearts carry a message that everyone, deep down, is looking for.
