I never set out to reclaim citizenship. I set out to understand something—something unspoken, inherited, and quietly persistent. It began with a question about origin and quickly became something more: a journey into memory, into law, into loss, into place. I thought I was tracing a legal right. What I discovered was an entire architecture of belonging—built not just from documents or bloodlines, but from mercy, silence, and survival.

This is a story about Italy—but also about inheritance, identity, and what it means to belong. It’s about a wheel that once turned to save a life. A name once given to a girl without parents. A law that extended across oceans and generations—and the moment it was withdrawn. It’s about how the past doesn’t disappear just because it isn’t recognized. And how some of us carry forward what the state forgets.