On March 12th, 2026, at the Auditorium Comunale in Leonardo da Vinci Street in Pordenone, a meeting with Vittorio Russo, author of the novel “Myriam: the Secret of a Mother” and the essay “India in My Heart”, took place. Concluding this event, we talk with the writer about India and the new edition of his book dedicated to the most populous country in the world.
Vittorio, why did you have so much interest in India, publishing the first edition of the book dedicated to this country?
India wasn’t an editorial choice, but an inner necessity. I realized it wasn’t about visiting a country, but crossing a threshold of being. One cannot just travel across India: going through its land, one lives in it as if it were one’s soul. Writing about India was a way to convey that vertigo where the West ends and the dream begins.
What prompted you to return to India after so many years? What impression did you get from this more recent trip?
I returned to verify if India or my perspective had changed. Time shapes nations and consciences, but in India, it seems more a cycle rather than a line. I found a more globalized nation, certainly, but still rooted in an archaic foundation that resists. It was a restless return: everything had changed, yet everything was still recognizable.
What strikes you most about Indian culture, religion, and philosophy?
The idea of infinity as a human destiny touches me deeply. In India, philosophy isn’t a system, but a daily experience; it’s not theoretical construction, it’s discipline of the soul. Dharma, karma, moksha aren’t abstractions, but the very coordinates of existence. This thought may be untrue, but it is logic.
Did you find anything related to the cultural heritage of the Vedas, Upanishads, Ramayana, Bhagavad Gita, and Mahabharata in modern India?
This heritage isn’t relegated to books; it’s a living fabric perpetually woven for millennia. The Vedas and Upanishads remain an underground spring; the Mahabharata continues to shape collective imagination. Even in the noisiest modernity, India preserves a diffuse epic: myth isn’t past, it’s a mental structure.
In your opinion, are castes more a problem to solve or a fact to coexist with in today’s India and also in India’s future?
Castes are both a millennial stratification and an open wound. I don’t hide my pessimism about their real abolition. Contemporary India contests them, circumscribes them legally, xcludes them from public space; but it can’t dissolve them with a simple formal act. Castes (but in India, they’re called varnas) represent an evident ethical knot, a contradiction to the modern idea of equality, and, at the same time, a system of belongings rooted in customs, rituals, and social relations. They’re not just a norm: they’re a mentality, an invisible vocabulary that continues to manage the world. That’s why their elimination won’t be an event, but a process. More than a sudden cancellation, it’ll be a slow metamorphosis: the very transformation of castes, over time, in collective consciousness, in daily practices, will coincide with the struggle to overcome them.
In Uzbekistan, you followed Alexander the Great’s footsteps. Whose illustrious footsteps have you found in India?
In India, you always walk on geography inhabited by history. I found Alexander along the Punjab rivers, but also Ashoka, Akbar, Shah Jahan, Tagore, Gandhi, Nehru. Here, the past isn’t ever fully past: it’s layered in space, like a palimpsest where myth and chronicle coexist.
What can you say about Indian art and culture? About its traditional music?
Indian art is balance between opposites: ornament and asceticism, chaos and symmetry. In the Taj Mahal’s marbles or Khajuraho’s sculptures, matter seems to lighten until it becomes idea. Traditional music, with ragas and mridangam rhythm, doesn’t entertain: it transfigures time and makes it a spiritual experience.
What’s your perception of Indian cuisine?
Indian cuisine is an initiatory rite. It’s a kaleidoscope of colours before flavours, of spices, an alchemy that ignites senses and to which it’s worth educating oneself. Pleasure and – let’s admit – a pinch of suffering coexist in it, as in many other Indian experiences: taste isn’t just nourishment, it’s knowledge through the body.
And Ayurvedic medicine?
Ayurveda struck me with its integral vision of humans. It doesn’t cure an isolated organ, but an overall balance between body, mind, and cosmos. It’s medicine born from cosmology and spiritual vision: it considers humans part of a broader order, not a mechanism to repair.
In your opinion, what’s the best way to approach Indian culture?
Enter quietly, as into a temple. Without prejudices and hasty judgments, without the pretense of explaining everything with Western categories. India cannot be deciphered: it can just be allowed to happen. You must accept being questioned. Only then do you enrich yourself with its richness.
To visit India, do you need to prepare beforehand? What kind of preparation can be helpful?
Yes, but preparation with tourist guides won’t suffice. Inner preparation is needed: read the Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, maybe Schopenhauer or Hesse, but also Salgari, to understand you’re entering a symbolic universe. The journey to India isn’t just geographical, it’s historical, spiritual, and… a vast adventure!
And to study Hindi, the Hindi language, what can you advise?
I advise combining language study with deep cultural understanding. Hindi roots in Sanskrit, the “language of gods”. Without symbolic and historical context, language is just sound; with it, it becomes a worldview.
Tell us about Italians who lived in India over the centuries.
Figures like Nicolò Manucci testify to an ancient Italy-India dialogue. But even before, Marco Polo. They’re examples of fertile cultural contamination. India has always transformed those who traversed it: more than telling about it, many travelers have been told by it.
After Nicolò Manucci, the thread between Italy and India never broke. Already at the beginning of the 1500s, the Bolognese Ludovico de Varthema undertook one of the most extraordinary European explorations of Asia, moving between Egypt, Arabia, Persia, and then along the Indian coasts and the Indian Ocean islands, recounting customs, uses, and geographies in an Itinerary published at the beginning of the 1500s and quickly spread in many languages. I’ve talked about it in a work on Pigafetta and Magellan. In the 20th century, figures like Guido Gozzano, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alberto Moravia, and Tiziano Terzani went on making India not just a geographical destination, but a critical mirror and space for existential reflection. In all these paths – whether on ships, caravans, or through diary pages – the same dynamic is grasped: India is never just a place to describe, but a land that shapes the gaze of those who traverse it.
Have you ever visited Tibet?
Yes, but I didn’t explore it with the same depth as India. However, the Himalayan horizon has always been a symbolic presence in my travels. Tibet represents the extreme of spiritual verticality, almost an ascetic extension of India’s metaphysical tension.
What do you hold dear about Mahatma Gandhi’s message to humanity?
The principle of ahimsa, non-violence (but it’s a mistranslation) as active force and not weakness. Gandhi taught that civilization is measured in renouncing the unnecessary. It’s an ethics of subtraction in a world that accumulates, hard to adopt!
Why, for you, does a journey resemble infinity, and what journeys do you wish for your readers?
Every authentic journey doesn’t close an experience: it opens new ones. Arriving in a new city, you find a past you didn’t know you had. I wish journeys that transform gaze, teach silence, inspire new curiosity. And, above all, journeys that, like India, remain in the heart.
Thanking Vittorio Russo for the interview granted, we invite our readers to discover this essay and other works he wrote. Non-fiction or fiction, a work by this author is always a commitment to discover something new and make the discovery public. And it’s always the extreme depth of contents and a refined poetry of the unusual found in our everyday existence.
Olga Matsyna
