5th Year of Blog: Birth of Veritas 🌊

📸 Birth of Veritas (Elena Bascone, 2026)

👉🏻 In honor of the year of Venus, you can download "The Venus Triptych" (including the one above) in the art section of the website: because beauty should be free for all.

🌊 Introduction: V for Venus and 5th Year of Blog in 5 songs 🎶

I have decided that the time has come for me to explained what moved me to start a blog in 2022 and to create a 5-year-plan alongside the blog, which inspired my researches and other ventures such as the book or the consulting activity.

When I opened this blog in 2022, at the age of 25, I had just learned how to code and I was leaving the European Commission. Inside those walls, I wasn’t allowed to speak freely. This site was meant to be my digital "bedroom"—a hybrid space, welcoming yet fiercely protected. I thought to myself: “If I own the domain, if I build the website from scratch, and write just like I did in Berlin when I was completely on my own, then nobody can shut me down again.”

Irony of fate, the very ideas I wanted to keep safe became the blueprint that inspired public figures, inevitably embedding themselves into the historical zeitgeist. In the book commissioned by Mondadori—written in five months between February and June 2025—I created a character in my exact image and likeness: Lia. The most surreal part is that Lia experienced the invasion of her intellectual spaces, the feeling of encirclement, and the profound isolation before it actually happened to me in real life.

💦 Let's dive into the year of Venus and what it really means, using 5 songs I love as a fil rouge. 🧶

🪞 Part I: "Is my reflection someone else's I stole? But if it's mine can I still keep it?" (Hilary Duff)

🇮🇹 What it is Autofiction and how I used

There is this this simple yet catchy definition of the literary genre autofiction: "“This is indeed ‘the effort of those who write autofiction’: to pack a story with meticulous fake details just to draw something universal out of it, just to ‘find an underground pattern capable of telling one's own private business’.” It was created by Serge Doubrovsky in 1977 and I mixed it with two of my favourite book: "La Storia di Italia" and "I ritratti", both by Indro Mondanelli who was not just a journalist, but also a free speech hero.

As my past experiences in Brussels were often tough and shared one common denominator - censorship - I decided that I needed to cope in a way that was constructive. Having my own online space was not enough, I needed to tell my story. However, I did not want my story to be unidimensional: I wanted to bare it all, my work, my fears and even my love life. My blogs and website are like a little bedroom to me and in your bedroom your walls see everything: they see you cry, they see you in love and they see you working to achieve your goals. I wanted to show all of it, not just in my blog, but also in my book which was its paper extention.

But how do you do something like that, without being censored again and without making it all about yourself? As I used to ice skate when I was 5 (though not professionally at all) I started thinking: I want my character to be so strong, graceful and free, like an ice-skater. Then it occurred to me: this character can be called Italia, she is my reflection, but also the reflection of a generation.

A part of her lives in me, but she it's the part that can be generalized and makes other people relate: it's not just about me, it's about making certain feelings universal. I thought that autofiction should be the book genre, though in my mind it was a new type of it: a meta-storytelling, meaning that not just the book is autofiction but there is a whole world next to it, the blog, my art and my entire life that keeps going surviving the book. In fact, the book to me is a snapshot of my 2025, an instant in time which keeps flying.

There is one more thing to be said: my book is not purely autofiction as the protagonist has different name, to make sure every young Italian person can reflect in it. A lot of things that happen to her are also purely invented. Furthermore, the true divergence from pure autofiction lies in the purpose of my writing: while autofiction often deconstructs the self through cynicism and deception, I chose to use my lived experiences not to deceive, but to empower our generation, turning personal memory into a collective pinkprint for looking at the future.

I wanted everyone to see their reflection in Lia, almost as if I stole their dreams and nightmare and made it part of my journey. I wanted young people to see themselves in me and in Italy, our nation.

📸 Created with AI

🧊 Part II: "It was freezing in the tower" (Taylor Swift)

🇪🇺 How the ivory tower of academia and the Brussels bubble really can make you detached

One thing which is not invented in the book is the immense isolation and abuse the protagonist goes through when she faces online bullying and the aftermath of the incident on ice. Sometimes life can be really isolating for many reasons: one can feel low in energy physically or mentally or simply misunderstood by society due to difficult circumstances that others in their immediate circle can't relate to. Nonetheless, I think that someone needs to always lend a hand when they feel that others are drowning.

It's never healthy to remain closed in a tower, not even out of self-defence: inclusion an collaboration are the two things that can really make a difference in this world. However, for some reason, the same institutions that should lend a hand to their citizens, like European institutions, have grown detached from citizens. In particular after the economic crisis, there is an enormous divide not just between the North and South of Europe but even between Brussels and the rest of Europe. I felt very useless when in Brussels I found myself working on policies that did not benefit almost anyone in Europe and for sure not its citizens. Similarly, many academics work for years on researches with not real impact or purpose other than boosting their own image and ego.

I was in Brussels for many years and did research, it was one of the most detached and cold places I've ever been to. This is not the Europe I want. Unfortunately, saying this is not very popular at the moment, so my voice was not liked by many who openly or covertly tried to shut me up.

I lived for a long time feeling the water was entering my lungs, like those kind of nightmares where you scream but you have no voice because you are drowning in freezing ice.

📸 Found on Pinterest

✨ Part III: "Keep it one hundred on the land, the sea the sky" (Taylor Swift)

🌿 Dante's inferno, purgatory and heaven

The ivory tower is a way to indicate a state of privileged seclusion or detachment from the real world, but it is also the place where in Dante's "Divine Comedy" souls go to purge themselves from sins. The comedy is indeed divided in 3 parts:

1) The land or Inferno

2) The sea where Purgatory's tower is found

3) They sky or Heaven where Beatrice resides

In my book, I wanted to have an angel-like figure they way Beatrice is in the Divine Comedy. I don't think I am Dante of course, but I thought that it would have been cool to have someone who represented the end of the journey. I also wanted this person not to be Lia's love interest, like Leo or Giulio, but instead someone that helps her finding her voice. As I love pop music and I have been listening to Taylor Swift since I was 13 I thought that she could represent the light at the end of the tunnel. She is not only an angel-like woman, but she is a poet too.

In the past the plant tied to poetry was Laurel, which is linked to Ovid's metamorphosis story where Daphne turns into Laurel after the rape. This is why I wanted Prof. Enea's wife to be called Laura and why I thought having a poet like Taylor, who made a career singing about love, the best way to describe the light at the end of the book. Dante often described love as the force that moves the stars, so having Taylor singing about love at the end of the book made perfect sense.

📸 From my book "Italian dream" (Istantanea 18)

📸 Found on Pinterest

💓 Part IV: "So Samson blamed Delilah" (Maisie Peters)

📘 The hidden meaning in the book cover

As I was writing the book in the first 5 months of 2025, I started encountering censorship again. The publishing industry in Italy, despite very wise female managers like Marina Berlusconi, is often made of low-level male intellectuals who think that they can talk down to you and strip you of your dreams. It wasn't very nice, I saw people that to me were icons, like a person who worked on tech policy for Clinton and Obama, taking my ideas without consent and I saw my publisher telling me it was ok, that I had already had to be thankful for them asking me to write a book.

The reality is that, to write that book, I had compromised months of my work: without the book, I could have started consulting in 2025 already, making my financial situation much easier. Instead, though I worked until 2 and 3AM almost each day in 2025, most industry professionals still tried (unsuccessfully) to make me feel worthless and inadequate.

Turned out, instead, that they were inadequate at doing their job: they did not realize that, by using my picture titled "Italian dream" without my consent (as I own the rights), they created a dangerous situation of them. They even changed the title of the book which, by contract, had to be ITALIA XXV, into Italian dream which was the title of my artwork all of this with no authorization in the contract. Then, they agreed with another big group for the title to be used by another person, someone who prides themselves in being pro-women while also publishing 6 months later a book with the same name of a girl who was silenced by industry bullies.

To make this Samson against Delilah story worse, in that moment, things in my love life (which I keep separate from business) were going downhill. In the book Leonardo stays on Lia's side in the bad times but, in that case, Leonardo protected Lia in a distorted way: by keeping her hidden, while still loving her from afar (and watching her with ghost-like maybe violating methods), which made me feel like everyone wanted me to be in the dark. So I eclipsed and, in that eclipse year, I felt powerful: I didn't do it because others wanted me in the dark, I did it because it was my chance at being powerful behind scenes and I loved it.

I had the time of my life knowing a book was out there with me having the power to stop its sales anytime, as the cover was only mine, and knowing that the people who tried to block me had just released a product which had in its cover an artwork about a young woman being stripped of her rights. In those months, the syndicate of writers stood next to me and even proposed me for the Campiello Prize in May 2025.

📸 Italian dream - The original (Elena Bascone, 2025)

🪽 Part V: "You're looking like an angel on the walls of Versailles" (Olivia Rodrigo)

🌎 How beauty can save the world

There is this wonderful quote by John Keats, who died in Rome and can still be found in the acatholic cemetery there: "Beauty is truth, truth is beauty" (Ode on a grecian urn). I remember that, when I was in school my teacher told us about Keats and was like "I have no idea of what this means". In my mind I thought: it's so obvious, he's saying that light can never be hidden in the dark. He's indicating us that truth will always find a way because it's so simple to recognize: it's harmonious, it's beautiful. No videogame or human manufactured can ever replace the harmony that holds the universe together and created us. If you look at the human body, is more perfect that any technology will ever be because it was created by an higher power.

This is why no Matrix is more perfect than the world we live in it which can never be a videogame, as the simulation theory suggests. This is why, I wanted to hide the Venus Italica behind code in my book cover: to say that truth and beauty will always find their way.

📸 Picture taken in Verona

PS: Venus Italica, Venus Victrix

Love,

Elena

📸 Fight for my Leo Neon Heart (Elena Bascone, 2026)