[WIP]
Type of work: Personal Project
Objectve: Explore environments design and storytelling.
“Nebbia” is a folklore-inspired fantasy journey through the Appennines and Po Valley, an ode to memory, identity, and the spirits who guard forgotten places.
CHARACTERS FL – ELIDE A \30 yo woman from a small riverside town. Quiet, sharp-eyed, emotionally numb after the loss of her grandmother who raised her. She feels stuck between youth and adulthood, land and river, reality and grief. • Symbol: A red ring from her grandmother, unravels throughout the story • Visual Cue: boots, cargo pants, raincoat • Arc: From emotionally frozen → grief → empowered to choose her path
DAIME (folkloric character) A siamese cat with light blue eyes and silver/coffee fur, appearing throughout the dream journey. She is created by a memory and old tales, cursed to wander the Po’s fog. She slowly reveals a conflicted desire: to help her return or keep her so she won’t be forgotten. • Visual Cue: almost transparent at times, doesn’t leave prints
Story Outline: Elide dozes off while painting in her house in Appennino and mist approaches omniously. Her ring shines and a thread slowly creates a path through mist, attracting Daime that starts to play with it. Right then, a mischievous MazapĂ©gul bursts through the window with a shriek of laughter startling Elide awake. She is no longer entirely in the real world. As the thread pulses and tightens, Elide realizes she’s being pulled along a dream-fog version of the world. In truth, Daime was born from a story her grandmother used to tell, a memory-form shaped by Elide’s grief, and lives because she remembers and fears being alone. Elide doesn’t follow the thread to bring anyone back, she goes to understand what it means to carry memory without being consumed by it. This journey will take her through some known places in the Appennino and Po Valley. Her journey ends near her hometown: a dreamlike memory of her grandmother making thread at the river’s edge. The final knot is in the red thread connecting to her ring: when she unties it, Daime disappears in the sun too.
Encounters:
- the Mazapegul in the Appennini forest
- the Giubiana, tall January witch, appears between a chapel and crosses at Castello del Dego.
- the Bargniff (bridge spirit) at Ponte Gobbo tests Elide with a riddle about memory. This spirit poses riddles and tosses trespassers into water if they fail
- the Omm Salvädag, a massive shaggy forest being, offers them a boat with which she reaches the wetlands (here Trebbia river meets Po).
- the Borda, a blindfolded swamp witch who drags wanderers into marshes.
Tool: Procreate