Featured Story By: Tom White

Melanie Francesca, a captivating visionary artist and writer, has emerged in Europe as an innovative celebrity, bridging cultures and inspiring profound self-discovery. She is Swiss-Italian, and by splitting her time between Switzerland and the Middle East, where she has built a family with two beautiful kids, she represents the globalism of the modern world, the fusion of two distant universes united in harmony.

A former model, Francesca is now a radio and TV commentator who reports regularly on the major Italian radio and television circuits. She is also a weekly columnist for important Italian magazines and has established herself as a successful writer, with 13 books published by Rizzoli and Mondadori. And she is also a renowned artist who has exhibited her works throughout Europe and the Middle East.

Francesca is under the patronage of His Excellency Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, Minister of Tolerance and Coexistence, U.A.E., who believes in her exceptional talent, saying that it “skillfully combines her form of prayer to the universe and the omnipotence of nature as well as the grandeur of the human being. In a technological age like ours, it is a message of freedom, hope and undeniable modernity.”

In 2005, authoritative Italian newspaper La Stampa described Francesca as a rising writer, saying “Melanie Francesca is a blond and blue-eyed model with a supple voice. With her doll-like features, she could be just beautiful, but, instead, she writes a sombre novel with a good plot that overcomes her character’s prejudices. She whispers, like Jessica Rabbit, ‘They draw me like this’ and finds a godmother who sponsors and guides her—official Italian Hemingway translator, journalist and writer Fernanda Pivano.”

Now, in 2023, Francesca is still blond, beautiful and always smiling, like a Barbie who has conquered the internet and the European public with her intelligence. Having grown up in South Tyrol, where she says she was “born with skis on,” she was surrounded by nature and the Bible. “My father read [to] me every evening, instilling in me his love for the sacred,” she says.

Melanie Francesca in the Eyes of Literature and Art

The internet is overflowing with information about Francesca’s work in major European and Middle Eastern newspapers and television. She’s been described as “a versatile and circular artist who believes that beauty and harmony more than pain [are] the best path for our spiritual growth.”

At the heart of Francesca’s artistic journey lies her recent exhibition, entitled The Box, brought from Dubai to Europe and staged last May at the esteemed Primaticcio gallery in Rome. The installation was created to restore philosophical dignity to a figurative “today trampled on, reduced to craftsmanship [and needing] to be re-evaluated.” It’s the result of the same deliriant, dreamlike, poetic fantasy that Maria Rita Parsi, the great Italian psychologue, describes in Francesca: “[She’s] an author capable of making the imagination gallop a thousand, without borders. Melanie Francesca is a surprise, above all and first of all, for her extraordinary ability, melodiously and dreamily expressed, to build emotional scenarios that are rooted in every myth and every time. [She’s] a female James Joyce to sip [on] to open the doors beyond our unconscious.”

Famous art historian Vittorio Sgarbi, Undersecretary of State to the Italian Ministry of Culture, says: “Melanie’s language of poetry follows the line of sacred texts, prophets, the Divine Comedy and the great symbolist poetry, like [that of] Rimbaud and Baudelaire, that inaugurates modern lyric poetry. If not everything is understood, it may still be enough for it to be perceived; the important thing is that the solemn and the cryptic leave the listener with a clear and profound sign inside.”

The Story of The Angel

It is precisely on this path searching for the true, the beautiful and the sacred—to rise above the daily chaos to the orderly space of soul and love—that Francesca’s novel The Angel, recently translated by Europe Books, falls. The plot is indeed compelling. The book is set in Paris at the beginning of the 2000s. An angel falls in love with Dixi, a fragile girl who works as a model. Though she was born into a wealthy French family with bourgeois roots, Dixi has had to raise herself. She is a girl lost in a chaotic life with neither rules nor a future and is now at the mercy of a gypsy with whom she is hopelessly in love and who drags her down, playing with her feelings, into a series of dark events. The spirit, Alan, follows her everywhere until he reveals himself to her in church, a place where she finds refuge and comfort. “You have to observe yourself when you feel a painful emotion because that is the door to self-awareness,” the angel tells Dixi.

In The Angel, Francesca helps readers emotionally wear a pair of magical lenses so they can see the world from a spiritual point of view to encourage them to solve the problems of our existence. Through the narrative form of a novel, she guides readers to connect with themselves and their inner wounds. By solving things, they can change themselves for the better. The novel is an intense, passionate and sometimes carnal book. Dixi is warned about her wrong choices and encouraged to understand the reasons for her toxic addictions, especially the emotional ones, so she can have a healthier life. “Through The Angel, we can find the keys to the alchemical transformation of heavy feelings into the gold of awareness,” Francesca shares.

Corriere della Sera, an authoritative Italian newspaper, says: “The Angel is an intimate story that does not debase itself with saccharine feelings and a glamorous cover. [It is set] in today’s Paris, which is forever a timeless capital, with an angel that seems to have remained in a pre-enlightenment world. Dixi draws on legends and dreams…of life and the depths of souls that open wide to the breath of the world.” Philosopher and professor Stefano Zecchi gave an intense and structured reading of her work, saying “it is a very beautiful book from the point of view of literary fascination, and it is clear that Melanie manages the word and linguistic structure very well.”

A One-on-One With Melanie Francesca

You joyfully share with us your perspectives on angels and their presence. Is the invisible world so vast that it is often dismissed as being non-existent?

“Anyone who claims that the invisible world does not exist is right: For Him, it does not exist. I, too, firmly believe only in the things I hear and see. We just see different things. For example, the bat sees by ultrasound. Without science telling us that [angels] exist, would we see or hear them? Even the world of the spirit is physical, like an ultrasound. One day, we will be able to perceive it because we will open new sensory doors in our bodies.”

The Angel is automatically branded as fantasy, and when it comes to angels, a book would automatically be branded as fantasy, right?

“We are the gates of the angels; through us, they show their harmony. Music, books, songs…the human body, which becomes an instrument of beauty. So, what is fantasy if not the expression of love that you can’t see and you can’t touch but [that] exists?”

In this book, would you say that the angelic presences are in love with human fragility?

“Angels are in love with us because they see us like children. They are in love with our limitations but also with what they don’t have—a body. They are attracted by this materiality [that’s] so different from them, and when we enjoy the wonder of the world through our flesh, they vibrate with happiness. We are a bit like little animals to them, happy to rummage between food, sleep, love and fusion with the miracle of nature. The body has been given to us to live it fully without crippling it with ideas of sin. Everything is divine. The body is the temple of the spirit.”

Your book is a story of abandonment, betrayal and healing. Do you see yourself in this triple register?

“The story of betrayal is narrated through the life of Dixi, who, because of the initial wound of abandonment, recalls situations in which she was continually abandoned. Healing happens when we decide to break this chain of repetitions and errors, but it is a decision that must come from the heart, not from the head. Wanting something doesn’t mean getting it. We have to go through a radical transformation of being, and we only go through the heart.”

What inspired this story for you?

“I often went to the Père Lachaise cemetery or Gothic cathedrals—forests of stone steeped in history. They’ve stayed in my flesh like a song. Even the modelling, the bohemian life, the contact with a daily rawness that seemed like a house without walls, where the cold wind of poverty always seemed to bite [my] heart. Yet what comes out in the pages isn’t me; it’s something else, something truer than the truth that I express on my own. We are instruments of voices greater than us that speak through us. We are the voices of angels.”

In your book, at one point the angel talks about the door of awareness—a door that’s today too often closed, sealed.

“The awareness I speak of is the feeling that I am. When you say ‘I am’ and take a deep breath, the past and future disappear and you find yourself in the now. By entering the now—by acting in the now—you change the world and yourself. The mind kidnaps us and makes us live in yesterday and tomorrow by conditioning us. When you enter the now—the I am—you see who you are.”

How do you imagine your guardian angel?

“I can’t imagine it with my own eyes. I feel it. He has an intense vibration that mainly grips my right shoulder and runs all over my body like a kind of shiver. [It’s] very strong physically. I feel like he could touch me.” Would you like a movie to be made out of this book? If so, describe it. “It would look like Jim Morrison as a break in the mould, as a bearer of division—of confusion. The movie [would have] dark, rock and metallic tones. It [would] sound like the scream of a rock star transposed into a movie.”

Useful links:

www.melaniefrancesca.com

Instagram: @melaniefrancesca_

YouTube: Melanie Francesca on TV

 

 KO Media newsroom and editorial staff were not involved in the creation of this content.