"The museum of lost loves": Valentina Giuliani's therapeutic notebook for heart pains

A very special place has existed in Zagreb for some years. It is called the Museum of Broken Relationships and collects objects that testify to the end of a love. Each object contains a story that visitors practically do not know because only short anonymous messages accompany the testimonies of what has ended forever. The rest is left to the imagination, the fantasy, the desire to imagine that is in each of us. Each object, instead of being destroyed to forget, or jealously preserved to never free itself from pain, thus takes on life. Become the protagonist of the observer's imagination or find a narrator willing to make himself available.

Valentina Giuliani wanted to be this narrator and thus "The museum of lost loves" was born (Armando Dadò editore, 2021, pp. 112), a slender book of short stories focused not on the pains of the heart - or at least not only - as the title would suggest , but on how in the end love always knows how to renew itself and renew us.

We first ask Valentina Giuliani how she came to "build" her museum of lost loves:

“It all started in full lockdown, when you couldn't even move from home. In my library I found the catalog of the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb and I started to leaf through it. He kidnapped me. I have seen these objects accompanied by often hilarious short captions. There was a jar with 'love incense' written on it and the caption read: 'It doesn't work'. Or a pack of a men's cleaner and it said, 'My mom started using it to clean windows after we broke up. He says it's great! ' I realized that even though it was dedicated to broken relationships, that museum was anything but a sad place. And I found it the ideal setting for writing finished, suspended love stories ”.

Autobiographical stories?

“There are also autobiographical ideas because those of us who have not lost a love… indeed more than one! But I wanted to leave the autobiographical datum alone to tell stories in which each of us can recognize himself. Each story thus opens with an object, which is presented to us by Barbara Fässler's illustrations, and this becomes for me the starting point for a short story that I hope will involve as many people as possible ".

But don't we run the risk of becoming too sad in a museum of finished loves?

“But absolutely not! The fact that these objects are exhibited, become the protagonists of stories that I have tried to make light, sparkling is the signal that even the memory that appears heavier to us in the end is just ... a memory, something from the past that we can leave behind. There are new adventures that await us once we leave our object in the museum. You leave it there and life continues, so much so that the book is dedicated to 'rediscovered love'. In my opinion, the creators of the Zagreb museum had a brilliant idea, so much so that similar places, where to collect traces of interrupted loves, were also born elsewhere. Also in Sardinia there is a Museum of Lost Love, in Aggius, near Sassari ”.

A poster, a cradle, cups ... these are the objects from which his stories start. Is there one of these objects that you feel most attached to?

"One of the stories is entitled 'Love letter' and presents a letter-confession from a husband to his wife ... I had a lot of fun writing it identifying myself with a man, or rather in a kind of unrepentant and joyful Don Giovanni"

Why the choice of the story, a genre that has never had much luck in Italy?

“Because I wanted a liberating, almost spontaneous, impact writing. As Julio Cortázar, one of the greatest short story authors of the twentieth century, wrote: 'With a novel you can win on points. With a story you only win by KO '”.

Object after object, story after story, can we say that loves are lost, but love never ends?

“A good summary. Stories may end, but our desire and capacity to love does not run out. Basically, I believe that the affects do not subtract, but add up. What we have and what we are today is nothing other than the fruit of stories, including bankruptcy ones, lived in the past ”.