Lena Marchetti · Writer & photographer
The person behind the journal
Hello — I’m Lena.
Meridiana started on a delayed ferry between two Greek islands, with a notebook and nowhere to be. I had spent four years writing itineraries that moved people through places at speed, and I had begun to suspect we were all missing the point.
So I started travelling the other way round: one town at a time, a day longer than planned, following whoever was carrying the best-looking bag of tomatoes. This journal is what came of it — long lunches, night trains, market mornings, and the places guidebooks are always in too much of a hurry to notice.
Everything here is written after the fact, slowly, from notebooks that smell faintly of lemon. I photograph it all myself, on film when I remember to bring it.
Lena
The story
How Meridiana came to be
The beginning
A delayed ferry, and nowhere to be
Four years of writing fast itineraries ended on a bench in a harbour, waiting for a boat that was in no hurry. I had a notebook, a bag of apricots and the slow realisation that everything I had been recommending moved people past the good part.
The rhythm
What slow actually means here
Not doing less — doing it at the town’s speed. Markets at seven because that is when they happen. Nothing at three because nothing happens at three. Dinner at nine, because that is when the neighbours sit down. The itinerary follows the place, never the other way round.
The notebook
Why every story is written late
Nothing goes up while I am still there. A place needs a few months to settle before it is honest — which meal actually mattered, which view I have already forgotten, which street I would walk again. Then I write it, from notebooks that smell faintly of lemon.
What this journal promises
Nothing is sponsored quietly
If a stay or a meal was paid for by someone else, it says so at the top of the story. Always has.
Every place is one I stayed in
No press-trip roundups of towns I passed through. If it is in the journal, I slept there and ate there.
Written months after, on purpose
Stories are published once the place has settled — not while the espresso is still warm.
As seen in
WanderlustSlow LivingCoastal JournalThe Long WayCucina Piccola
The itinerary is the enemy of the journey.
— the first line I wrote on that ferry
Say hello, or work together
Questions about a place, an idea for a story, or a project you think fits — all welcome.