Italians turn to love letters to revive affection

In the age of internet and rushed communication Italians are turning to an old fashioned method to express their affections paying Micol Graziano to pen their love letters.

Domitilla Stefanini and her husband first declared their love for each other in letters 18 years ago, but this time they entrusted the responsibility to their very own ghost-writer.

Seated at the dining table in central Rome where she penned the letter Graziano dictated as Stefanini wrote the love letter that she hoped to be a catalyst to re-ignite their love after their relationship had hit a bad patch.

“Like all couples, me and my husband had a bad patch. I said to myself, I need to find a different way to reinforce the relationship. I know a lot of people who, according to me, are not able to talk to their partners and who are not able to express their feelings or anger or any other kind of problem. In my opinion they are not able to make it clear. Dialogue in a couple is fundamental “, Stefanini said.

For 70 euros ($85.90) Graziano, a 39 year-old journalist, finds the words for men and women, gay and straight, some married and some in secret relationships, interviewing them before composing the missives.

“Today, to write a love letter is revolutionary,” she said.

“We write a great deal, but we are careless about it, we write quickly on smartphones without paying attention to detail. We use abbreviations and lose that poetry, that elegance.”

After Stefanini pressed the letter into the hand of her husband, Stefano Carli, and left him to read it, he was visibly moved.

“Today we write but with modern technology we do not write hand-written letters anymore. Today if you want to say I care for you, I love you, I always think about you, you write it on Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger so we lost handwriting. This is a good thing because what you express is written directly by you. This is much more real” , Carli said.

Graziano, who produces some five or six letters a month, is unsure of whether her clients tell the recipients that there is a professional imagination behind the hand-written notes.