Artist Alessandra (Ale) Barocci

We first met Ale through Instagram. Her work, shared under visions of alba, caught our attention immediately, bright, playful, and full of light. The kind of illustrations that feel soft at first, but hold something deeper underneath.

Not long after, she joined one of our artist gatherings and arrived with a gift, a small illustration of team Fritto Misto Comune sitting on the back step of the garden. We were completely moved by it. It now hangs framed in the old kitchen, a constant reminder of the people and energy that shape this place.

So when we sat down together at Casa Renata, it already felt like a continuation.

That evening, we shared a slightly French-leaning meal of simple fish, spring vegetables, and a bottle of champagne. Conversation moved easily between art, study, memory, and the long road back to doing what you love.

Ale is a true Fabriano native, born and raised here, and only in the past year has she been able to fully dedicate herself to illustration, something she had wanted for much longer.

Her path into art hasn’t been direct. After a classical high school education, she began studying Oriental Languages and Civilisations in Rome before realising it wasn’t the right direction. She later followed her instinct and enrolled at the InternationalSchool of Comics in Jesi, where her practice began to take shape through drawing, storytelling, and visual narrative.

“I had to wait twenty years,” she tells us. “I felt empty before… now I feel like myself again.”

Her work today focuses on illustration, often for children, shaped by a love of fantasy, mythology, and storytelling. Books, films, and nature all play a role — but it’s the emotional world behind them that seems to matter most.

“Listening to my inner child,” she says, “that’s what keeps me creative.”

For Ale, Fabriano holds something more than just familiarity.

“The craft, the paper, the history… it’s beautiful,” she says. “But it also has to be the future. We Fabrianese need to fall in love with Fabriano again.”

That sense of rediscovery carries into her connection with Fritto Misto Comune.

“It feels like fresh air,” she says. “Something Fabrianese, but seen through different eyes.”

And then, the garden.

It was immediate.

“As soon as I saw it, I knew,” she says. “It’s like a secret garden.”

She speaks about it with a kind of quiet wonder — the river, the bridge, the trees, the symbols left behind by the previous owner.

“It feels like a place without time,” she says. “Magical. Like something is alive there.”

That feeling became the starting point for her postcard.

Rather than something literal, her work holds a sense of atmosphere — something poetic, nostalgic, and slightly mysterious. A space that feels safe, calm, and full of possibility.

Like childhood, remembered softly.

If her postcard had a title?

“Cheers,” she says. “Not just for the wine… but as a way of saying thank you.”

A small toast. A shared moment.

When we ask who she would send a postcard to, she smiles.

“Maybe David Tennant,” she says, laughing. “My Doctor!”

But more often, it’s friends — small illustrated cards, sent like little fragments of memory.

“Postcards make me happy,” she says. “They let you share a moment with someone who isn’t there.”

Like much of her work, Ale’s contribution to the project feels open, warm, and quietly imaginative — rooted in Fabriano, but reaching somewhere beyond it.

A place where stories still exist.
And where, for a moment, anything feels possible.