The fragile strength of telling the world through lived experience
On Thursday morning I received the news of Marjane Satrapi’s death. It came suddenly, violently. Since then, I have kept returning in my mind to Ravenna, to 2003, to when Elettra Stamboulis and I curated what would remain the only major exhibition in the world to feature the original drawings of Persepolis.
At the time, almost no one in Italy knew who Marjane was. Many asked us why we would dedicate an exhibition to an unknown Iranian author. Some even said she could not draw. But we had understood that something important was happening. In those pages there was a new voice—capable of telling the story of revolution, war, and exile with a force I had never seen in contemporary comics.
Marjane came to Ravenna and stayed with us for several days. It immediately became clear that she was exactly as she appeared in her books: intelligent, ironic, unstoppable. She wanted to smoke everywhere. She always said exactly what she thought. If she disliked a drawing, she said so without hesitation. Some students were shocked, others adored her precisely for that. She was incapable of pretending.
From that exhibition, a friendship was born that lasted more than twenty years. She often told us that we were among the first to believe in her. In truth, I think she taught something to us. She showed us that comics could become a tool to narrate the complexity of the world without giving up humanity, humor, and self-criticism.
With Persepolis, she permanently changed the rules of autobiographical comics. She showed the West that behind the word “Iran” there were not only ayatollahs, propaganda, and television images, but millions of real lives—contradictory, fragile, and courageous.
One of the most joyful moments of my life came many years later. In 2023, during the opening ceremony of the Academic Year at the Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna, she was delivering her lecture to a packed auditorium. Suddenly she saw us at the back of the hall. She interrupted her speech, waved energetically from the stage to greet us, and then continued as if nothing had happened. In a solemn, almost ritual ceremony, she created a moment of pure humanity. I still remember the stunned faces of the academic authorities. We were laughing. So was she.
In recent years, I had seen her suffering and slowly fading away. The death of Mattias Ripa, her partner in life and work, had deeply shaken her. For those who live in exile, grief often has a different weight: when you lose the person you love, you also lose a refuge, an emotional home, a part of the world that anchors you to life. Marjane was an immensely strong woman, but even the strongest can be overwhelmed by suffering.
Today I return in my memory to those eighty original pages hanging in Ravenna, to endless conversations, to laughter, to cigarettes smoked in the most improbable places by her and Elettra. And I realize that the greatest privilege was not organizing an exhibition. It was knowing the woman behind those pages.
Among what remains is also a letter she wrote for me years later, when I was nominated for a fellowship at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute. I was not selected, but that letter now feels more important than ever. It was not just a recommendation—it was a portrait of what we had shared, and of what she saw in my work more clearly than I could see it myself.
In that letter she wrote, among other things:
“Gianluca is a cartoonist and graphic journalist who has skillfully transformed drawing into a powerful tool for raising awareness and advocating for human rights… I am convinced that the Radcliffe Fellowship would provide Gianluca with the ideal environment to continue his work…”
Reading it today, after her death, feels like listening to a voice speaking from a time that no longer exists. And precisely for that reason, it becomes even more real.
Marjane taught us that irony can be a form of resistance. That freedom must be defended even when it seems impossible. And that telling a personal story can change the way the world sees an entire country.
