Brilla sempre
Matteo de Mayda
24x30 cm
48 pages
Soft cover swiss binding
Design by Ilaria Miotto
Editing and art direction by Tommaso Parrillo
Published in Novemebr 2025
ISBN 979-12-80177-57-5
Witty #100
My mother passed away on March 28, 2023, after eighteen years of illness. Her name was Serenella.
Her identity card listed her as a “cleaner.” She earned a living cleaning buildings—stairs, courtyards, parking lots—in Treviso, our hometown in Northeast Italy. She would clean tirelessly, then come to pick me up from school on her Ciao moped, the kind you had to pedal to start. She rotated a series of identical tank tops, a sort of uniform. I remember her, glowing with sweat and happiness.
In the months after her death, I photographed the places where she had worked, places she had taken me to as a child. It felt like group therapy, the building managers were the therapists, the residents their patients. Each of them had a fond memory of her. Going back to those spaces, I tried to see them through her eyes, to notice the traces left behind by other lives, in that fleeing space and time. I pictured her worries in my mind. A swipe of the mop for every mortgage payment on our house in Santa Bona, a rolled-up doormat for every shared pang of guilt. The storage rooms smelled just like the early 2000s, when she would fume at me for smoking joints in front of her, countering my teenage rebellion with silence. Instead of scolding me, she would take a toothbrush and scrub the grout between the tiles, one by one. To keep me occupied, she once bought me a gas- powered leaf blower—and in some small way, it worked.
These past few months I’ve looked for her along staircases that never meet, in empty entrance halls. I found her in the echoing patterns of landings, each the same yet subtly different on every floor, until our timelines intertwined and blurred. Her admitted fragility as a mother became a steady voice when she spoke of work as care, as a definition of self. Perhaps it’s because we are from Veneto and raised with that belief. When I quit school, she took me to knock on every door in search of work: pubs, the fruit and vegetable market, the car wash, seasonal jobs in Jesolo, a seaside town. She would send me in alone, yet watch from across the street, or answer for me on the other end of the phone. The work ethic she instilled in me is the inheritance she left, unwritten in any will. I couldn’t enter those towering apartment blocks with a camera around my neck without permission, so for each place I sought a point of contact: a building manager, an old friend, a former classmate who lived there. I made a list, and like a pilgrim through sacred spaces, I visited them all. When my own resources ran dry, I turned to my aunts—and realized we knew almost exclusively the buildings where she had worked off the books, because those were the places, when illness struck, that offered no social security. Even there, I recognized traces of our regional roots: the meticulously cleaned landings, the dust tucked beneath rugs, behind armored doors. A fervent believer in the religion of doing, my mother transformed her illness into ceaseless inquiry. In her quiet restlessness, she sought to understand, always questioning herself: the helpline, the yoga, the books, the meditation. Eighteen years of lessons and stumbles, each imbued with meaning. Her boundless positivity endured, even in her final days, as did her constant gratitude—for us, for the oncologist, for the nurses, for her friends.
Before her final hospitalization, she had cooked and frozen enough meals to fill every compartment of her freezer, knowing I would spend long hours there alone. Plastic cups of ragù, tubs of ice cream, lasagna, minestrone, steaks, and mushrooms—countless mushrooms from her hometown of Possagno. After her death, I rationed those meals, making them last as long as possible. I carried on like that for months.
These photographs are, for me, that food—tools to hold still the space and time that shaped our lives, allowing me to continue feeding on what she left behind.
