A year ago, Irene Maiorino arrived in New York for the first time, carrying with her the weight of a story that didn’t belong to her alone. She was there to present the fourth season of My Brilliant Friend at the MoMA, during the Tribeca Film Festival — a story that had slipped into her voice and her body, that had changed the shape of her silences. 

After the screening, she boarded a train, alone, and rode it to the end — Coney Island. It was there, in that frayed corner of the American city, that something stirred. Not in the skyline or the buildings, but in the air: that same dense, electric stillness she knew from the Rione Luzzatti. The tension of things unsaid, unresolved. The sense of a place where life presses against the walls, looking for an exit.