When love is “sick”

In 2021, five women from the Aurina Valley, in South Tyrol, near the border with Austria, were accused and imprisoned for physical and psychological violence against their children. The children, segregated on mountain farms, involved in rituals and deprived of sleep, were forced to pray at night and to suffer punishments and torture to comply with the precepts of an intransigent and fanatical morality. During the investigations, it emerged that the women were affiliated with a religious group, called "New Christians", which said it was unrelated to the coercive methods used on children, but which appears to have all the characteristics of a real sect.

It is precisely from this news story that Romina Casagrande started to construct her new novel I quattro inverni (Garzanti, 2025, pp. 369, also e-book) a story capable of touching the deepest chords of the soul thanks to its drama . Imagine, in fact, discovering that everything you know about your childhood is false. This is what happens to Maia: raised by adoptive parents, she has never asked herself too many questions about her origins. But Maia is pregnant and, to protect the future of the child she is carrying, she needs to know her past. In the attic of the house there is a trunk that she has always been careful not to open. Now, however, she decides to do so. Inside, she finds scribbled sheets of paper, articles and some photographs. These are the first clues that she must put together, the pieces of the great puzzle of her childhood. There are doors that, once opened, can no longer be closed. Those documents leave her with no doubts: she must leave. And so, without asking anyone's permission, she sets out on a journey to Trentino-Alto Adige. There, she gradually reconstructs her story. The story of her mother. The story of the women and children with whom she lived segregated on a farm hidden in the mountains. Maia thus learns that not all families are as safe and loving as the one she grew up in. Some can hide dark dangers.

We then asked Romina Casagrande what was the impetus for writing a novel that touches such intimate and painful chords:

"It all started with the news story in Valle Aurina and the testimonies that emerged, which had the force of stabs. I found something very powerful in the story of the accused women that remained in my head for days together with the words spoken by their children. Hence the idea for the novel. It seemed to me the most honest way, and closest to me, to tell them without falling into prejudices."

What drives Maia in her search for her roots?

"If every story is an act of reconstruction, an attempt to give meaning to time, here we follow a protagonist who faces the past not only as memory, but as necessity. The family relationships in which Maia grew up, the impositions of the sect, are elements that recall the news story on which the novel is based and from which many of the questions arise that I tried to find an answer to by questioning some of the protagonists of the story. A female friendship, between determined yet very fragile women, disappointed, angry, who believe in a narrative of good and evil that ends up shaping their world and that of the people they love most, their children: it is extreme, like the choice to isolate oneself, yet none of us can truly say we are safe from the deception of manipulation, from the ambiguity of feelings, from love as a force that can elevate but also possess."

In the novel you talk about love, especially maternal love...when does this love turn into something sick?

«When the fear of losing the other becomes greater than love itself, this can turn into obsession, into control. The accused women are both victims and supporters of an authoritarian system that manipulates the mind, the emotions, and that they were the first to suffer. Power is not only coercive, but also productive: it creates reality, identity and even beliefs. This tension between control and freedom, between fear and love, is very strong in the novel. And, above all, maternal love, a primordial force, capable of building worlds and destroying them. The question remains whether it is possible to truly free ourselves from what has formed us, or whether freedom is only an illusion that reorganizes old chains. Another question is linked to this: where does faith end - not only spiritual, but also towards others - and where does manipulation begin? And are we really able to notice it when we are inside?».

How would you define Maia, the novel's protagonist?

"Maia is a fictional character, even if, somewhere, she really exists. Growing up in an environment where love is conditioned by rigid rules and fear for Maia also means having to rebuild, piece by piece, the very concept of human bond as an adult. She must recognize this distortion and redefine what it means to love without possessing, without controlling or being controlled, without being afraid. Nothing is ever completely closed, nothing is ever told once and for all. Maia discovers this at her own expense, when she opens the door that reveals her past. But it will also be a liberation, because no life should be based on a lie, no matter how harsh the reality it serves to hide."

In your novels, see the previous I bambini di Svevia, you often deal with the theme of childhood forced to confront the difficulties and even the dangers of the adult world. Why so much interest in the world of the little ones?

"Because childhood is an age of absolutes, in which beliefs and traumas take root that influence adulthood in a way that, perhaps, we are not always fully aware of."