ITALY. June 15th 2021. Fara Gerda d'Aadda (BERGAMO). In June 2021, Anna, 14, completes her final exams for the school year in her small village in the province of Bergamo, Italy.

"I chose to present the theme of Women Who Changed the System. My preferred one is Alfonsina Strada, who was the first woman to complete the "Giro d'Italia" in 1924."
Anna, 14, is one of the winning essayists of a literary competition launched by the Lombardy Regional Board of Psychologists, in collaboration with the Lombardy Guarantor Authority for Childhood and Adolescence. The competition invited secondary school students across the province to write about their pandemic experiences as a way of healing the mental health effects of social isolation during Italy’s nationwide lockdown. Anna wrote profoundly of the fear, helplessness and despair within the village in her entry, titled ‘I wish I had never been born.” In her essay, COVID-19 came to life as a phantom that could not understand why death and illness followed its trail".