Ilaria La Commare
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© 2009 - Ben Heine
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My tribute to Ilaria La Commare. She was an Italian writer, editor of cafebabel.com (a most renowned multilingual European magazine) and an anti mafia activist. She commited suicide in Paris in March 2009. Rest in Peace. This is my tribute for this woman full of life.

This is what appeared on cafebabel.com a few days after her death:

Correspondent since autumn 2005, Ilaria has left us at the age of thirty. It happened the 17th of March in a blaze of desperation or courage, leaving her friends and family immersed in grief. Her life was full of activism, the latter being channelled predominantly through the medium of journalism. But Ilaria La Commare was not only a journalist. She was also an accomplished writer and a fine poet.

From her writing you can deduce a vein of nostalgia for her home region of Sicily. The simplicity of the words in her poetry bring us to regard her island just as she did. Colourful, with a maritime presence, lights, sounds and silence. These silences, graphically expressed in the spaces that she deliberately leaves at the beginning of some of her verses, are the most loaded.

She will be missed.
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