10-14 October 2025 | Casa Verdi, Casa Verdi Catania, via Giuseppe Verdi, 67, 95131 Catania CT, Italy

Catania received me the way Sicily receives the sea, wide open. I arrived for the European Youth Energy Forum as one of the top 100 selected, and stayed on to show pieces from Drishya Kala Klima, “Montaggi Franti: Emotions of a Changing Earth” at Casa Verdi (10–14 October 2025). Santo and Gaby welcomed me into their transcultural home, a high-ceilinged refuge from the early ’900 where stucco remembers, floors hum with footsteps, and conversation travels faster than time. The house became a frame; the city lava stone streets, Sicilian Baroque façades, Bellini’s echoes, became a soundtrack.

We opened with Verdi Talks on 14 October: lemon cake on the table, tea warm in our hands, ideas warmer still. I spoke about Drishya Kala Klima—my art-and-policy initiative—and how the montages trace the emotional weather of the climate crisis: displacement, resilience, the fragile ordinary. In that living room the present braided with the past: a ceiling born at the start of the twentieth century holding work about the twenty-first. Italy teaches this constantly, how to carry centuries lightly. Dante’s question of “where we are in the middle of our path,” Verdi’s chorus rising from the crowd, Vivaldi’s seasons turning, art as memory, rhythm, and renewal.

People drifted in from everywhere, Argentina, across South America, Italy, Brazil, each with a different compass and the same north. We began with “my climate story” and left with “our climate story,” discovering what Italy has long practiced: a commons of culture. Here, sculpture and street market, opera and everyday life coexisted without hierarchy. That felt like the right model for climate action too, no single author, a chorus instead.

For four days I gave small, improvised tours, between get-together for dinner, after sharing a cup of chai with everyone, before leaving to Berlin. Backpackers, students, neighbours, travellers wandered in and took something you can’t pack neatly: a prompt, a question, a sentence that refuses to leave especially after looking themselves in the “self reflection mirror”. The space made it possible. History held us long enough to feel; conversation held us long enough to choose.

What we made together

• A living room turned participatory studio where everyone could discuss and share their thoughts

• Verdi Talks—an open, multilingual conversation where arts and policy met practice over tea and lemon cake.

• Four days of mini-tours that stitched forum energy to neighbourhood pace.

• A weave of past and future—the early-900s room cradling a very contemporary urgency.

Grazie, Casa Verdi. Grazie, Catania, città di Bellini, for reminding me that art can be both aria and street, high note and hand on the door. If the work stayed with you, let it move you too. Add your voice, keep your promise, and #ActInTime.