SEVEN AMAZONIAS The story of a journey I never lived

I asked myself this evening, as the photographs and videos of a journey taken by others flowed before my eyes, whether, as an Odissey author, I truly had the right to write about a place I have not seen, do not know, have not lived.

It all begins here: at the Embassy of Brazil in Rome, seated in the hall watching Amazônia, Travel Diaries, the TAP initiative presented by Davide Calicchia and made possible thanks to the work of the entire TAP staff, with the Ambassador of Brazil to Italy Renato Mosca, Counselor Raphael Nascimento, and Flaminia Mantegazza.
The moment I begin to write comes from a simple gesture: my friend Mary Bruni, sitting beside me, points out a few words, and from that minimal underline my journey begins. The presentation is already well underway: the Ambassador has introduced the region, Davide Calicchia has illustrated Brazil’s 14 destinations and the TAP fleet with the Airbus A321neo, and the words of Massimo Filippi, DMC of the Amazzonia group, have, so to speak, already made me land in Manaus.

I find myself carried by Paolo’s voice as he describes the Amazon as a place of friendship and sharing (Paolo Zocconali, Marketing Manager TAP, the driving force of the entire project), on a canoe gliding silently along the world’s largest river, my gaze fixed on an horizon so vast it hides the opposite shore, while I wonder why I should write about a journey I have not lived.

Sir John Mandeville, author of the Book of Marvels (14th century), in fact, never left home and yet described distant places; Emily Brontë, with the Cartography of Gondal (19th century), created an imaginary empire of continents, wars, movements; Jorge Luis Borges, traveler of the infinite (20th century), built worlds that, though invented, possess the precision of truth: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. And naturally the South Seas, the Malaysia of Sandokan, the Far West, the desert, the India of the Thugs by Emilio Salgari, all journeys never taken. I could continue with Italo Calvino, Jonathan Swift, and many others.

So what is happening to me as I listen to each account of this journey into the Amazon?

Carolina Saporiti, journalist for Vanity Fair, described an encounter with nature she had never experienced so completely. A sensory impact that destabilizes and opens a new threshold.
Federico Geremei, journalist and former director of Lonely Planet Magazine, defined the experience as “something I cannot describe.” A phrase which, in its paradox, says so much: the Amazon is often what escapes words.
Daniele Petruccioli, expert in cultural marketing, portrayed an Amazon made of languages, symbols, ancient vocabularies interwoven with myth, nature, and imagination. His is the Amazon of words, of stories that open worlds—and that has also become a book.

Tino Mantarro, journalist for Touring Club Italiano and a long-time observer of territories and their deep stories, brought an Amazon of slow time, observation, and attentive listening.
Matteo Rainisio, founder of The Flight Club, showed videos shot with a 360-degree action camera: enveloping images, resonant sounds, an immersive dimension capable of transporting you into the heart of the forest. He spoke of the road that exists one day and disappears the next, swallowed by the shifting morphology of the great river: a silent lesson in impermanence.
Emilio Pappagallo, station manager and co-publisher of Radio Rock and Radio Rock Italia, brought reels conceived as a visual dialogue with music. His shots follow an inner rhythm, an imaginary score that remains when the music fades and only the breath of the river and the pulse of the forest endure.

If at times one may write about a place never visited, the Amazon seems to be something else. From every account I hear, an intimate, visceral experience emerges, a place that changes face depending on who is looking, offering each person a unique encounter.
I understand that the Amazon does not exist as a single stable geographical entity: it manifests as a fan of perceptions, a prism refracting the same journey inwardly. Seven Amazonias, seven ways of perceiving that define the tension between imagination and testimony, between what is lived and what is narrated; a continuous oscillation between direct experience and shared experience.

A green wall that seems impenetrable and instead slowly reveals subtle details. A myriad of shades, a vocabulary of green the eye had never known. An intricate forest, crossed by canoes that follow invisible passages, secret routes linking the bends of the great river. A perfect interlacing, where everything flows and shifts. Where a road may exist at dawn and dissolve at dusk.

The Amazon is a river. It is the great river that carries with it the vital sap of the world. It is a living organism that breathes, changes, transforms. It is the place where things happen that cannot happen elsewhere; where nature is archetypal, primeval, exuberant; where contact with the forest becomes contact with oneself, with ancient questions from which arises a forgotten belonging to this earth, to this world.

And so, one after another, seven different Amazons of the same journey appear, and through these accounts my own Amazon takes shape, the one I have not lived and already imagine.

The Amazon with the scent of fish cooked on leaves as wide as sails. The feeling of tropical rain arriving suddenly, water running across the skin and through you, because to reach you it has fallen five meters from the sky. Before evening, the mirror of the sky on the motionless surface of the river, sliced by the slow prow of the canoe.
The humid heat of the forest, the endless creatures inhabiting it, the iridescent colors of the birds’ feathers with which local populations adorn themselves, the woven straw details of their costumes.

My story is already a reflection of theirs: listening and imagining is already a way of traveling. Every story, when it precedes experience, shapes it, anticipates it, and then, when the journey truly happens, transforms it again.

This is exactly what the TAP project has built around the Amazon: storytelling as a generator of desire.
Even before departing, narration opens an elsewhere. Seven Amazons as seven invitations. Every image seen, every voice heard, every shared detail creates a pull toward what has not yet been lived.

We at Odissey know this well: often our stories do not describe places, they anticipate them as promises.

The emotions that emerge are not yet tied to reality, but to possibility: imagination is free, wide, elastic, and the desire to travel is born precisely in this fertile distance.

When desire becomes movement and the journey happens, a complex phenomenon occurs: the experience is never “untouched.”
Perception of the place is already crossed by what we knew, by the stories heard, by the footage watched, by matured expectations.
What we live is not the place in itself, but the place filtered through the imagination that preceded it.

The real journey does not erase the story: it completes it.
It integrates it, corrects it, shatters it and recomposes it.
Your Amazon, the one imagined while watching others’ images, will become another Amazon when you live it. And neither will be more “true”: they will be two chapters of the same story, an imaginary plot dotted with real experiences.
When the journey is completed, no single version of the place will remain, but a polyptych of perceptions.

Travel belongs to human narration since the beginning.
Every culture, from ancient myths to folktales, preserves this sequence because it reflects the natural movement of life: one leaves a safe place, enters uncertain territories, undergoes trials, and returns transformed. For this reason, beyond geography, travel is a universal narrative form: an essential model through which humanity interprets growth, discovery, transformation.

I breathe deeply: the scent of wet wood… of vegetation in ferment, of warm mud envelops me like an ancient breath.
In the filtered light, sudden flashes of color explode: multicolored birds crossing the air with sharp calls, a secret choir rising from the forest. Hidden monkeys watch the boat pass. Water trembles in silver shivers over its dark surface.

The unease grows, pulses, yet mingles with a wonder that dissolves every defense. This place welcomes and tests at the same time.
The boat continues down the river, and I with it, suspended between what I see and what I do not yet know how to understand.

My journey is this: transforming an unlived experience into a desire that grows, takes shape, and roots itself.

Some places can enter within us long before we reach them.
And the Amazon, this evening, has become one of these.

 

The Borromini Gallery in Palazzo Pamphilj (Embassy of Brazil in Rome) receives these reflections of mine with the triumph of wonder of its frescoes, shining in their restored beauty.

Daniele Di Stefano