The “Hope of the Angel” of Melanie Francesca, a Journey Into Spirituality with Her Intense, Passionate, Sometime Carnal Book

Back then in the early 2000, Melanie Francesca was a surprise for Fernanda Pivano, the official Italian translator of Hemingway and an established critic. She mentioned: «This beautiful book of American taste is based as it is on the actions, themes, and dialogues. It breathes an air of youth for the developed problems and cannot fail to interest young people.” 

This was at the very beginning of Melanie’s career, in the early twenties. Fernanda Pivano believed in this young, immature talent, controversial and passionate. “Melanie is beautiful,” Fernanda mentioned on the cover of her book. “Even more than when she ran away from her wealthy family. ‘The Meat of the Moon,’ her first novel, gave her notoriety and esteem. In ‘Days of Sand’ she continues her autobiography with arduous adventures, immersed in the ferocious absurdities of war and the hopes and dreams that always make youth triumph.»

Melanie Francesca’s Early Life

Melanie has always been a contradiction. She appears charismatic as a sparkling and glamorous Barbie Doll, radiating beauty and charm. On the other hand, she reveals her other side as a revolutionary firebrand at the same time. Thanks to her gallant personality, she does not hesitate to highlight and fearlessly challenge the hypocrisy prevalent in various aspects of society. With her infectious smile dancing on her lips and a hint of burning anger in her beautiful glistening eyes, she heroically speaks out against flaws that must be addressed.

Melanie pursued her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, one of Italy’s most prestigious art schools. She found herself immersed in a world of creativity and inspiration. While continuing her studies, she ventured into the world of modeling in Paris. Her glamorous lifestyle provides her with an exciting opportunity to travel more and add to her stacking experiences. As her career took her across the globe, she became known as a globetrotter. She traveled extensively throughout the middle-east which impacted her life decisions deeply. She became a sought-after figure, as the magazines of that era described. She graced the front pages of prestigious and popular fashion magazines. Her appearance on television and photo shoots increased immeasurably and introduced her to a new era of fame.

However, Melanie’s chaotic, busy glamorous life changed everything when she met an Emirati man with whom she fell in love deeply. She decided to leave behind this alluring fashion world to marry him, embarking on a new chapter and adapting this new lifestyle away from glitters and sparkles. From that moment on, her life has been changed and centered around her children and family. She embraced motherhood with passion wholeheartedly, cherishing every moment with her kids in a loving home between Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Despite this, her thirst for creating art has never quenched. She remains deeply connected to her passion for writing and art. The driving force behind her existence was to bring out her true self in art, and she continued to nurture it with dedication and determination.

Writer Melanie Francesca in the Eyes of Her Colleagues

Today, Google is overflowing with information about Melanie’s work, articles, and interviews in the leading European and Middle Eastern newspapers and television. However, she remains a versatile artist who believes that beauty and harmony, more than pain, are the best path for our spiritual growth. She is still blonde and beautiful like Nanda Pivano defined her and always smiling like a doll, to quote the pink trend invading the web these days—a beauty who, however, has conquered the web and the European public with her work.

Melanie has become an established writer and author of Cairo-Rizzoli, one of the prominent Italian publishing groups. The former model, now a radio and TV commentator, is regularly present on major Italian radio and television circuits like RAI and Mediaset. She is a weekly columnist in important Italian magazine and has written 14 books, including 12 novels. The flower of criticism has solidified her position in the Italian cultural panorama for her innovative writing, especially in the last volume of poetry, “The Books of the Secret.” Maria Rita Parsi, the great Italian psychologist, defines Melanie, “Melanie captures the meaning that lies beyond and within things to awaken the human being to the spiritual dimension to discover the truth. A female James Joyce to sip, Melanie opens the doors beyond people’s unconscious minds.”

Melanie Francesca and the Whispers of Angels: Between Art and Literature

Melanie has also become a renowned artist who has exhibited her artwork throughout Europe and the Middle East, including a major exhibition of “The Box” in Dubai, under the patronage of the Minister of Tolerance of the United Arabs Emirates H.H. Nahayan Bin Mubarak Al Nahayan. That defines the artist with words that explain why he believed so much in her: «The talent of Melanie Francesca consists in combining in her works, with extraordinary mastery and technical skills, her form of prayer to the universe and to the omnipotence of nature, as well as to the grandeur of the human being. In a technological age like ours, it is a message of freedom, hope and indisputable modernity.”

The breath of God’s spirit and the voices of an afterlife when people read The Angel, are not far away. The plot of “The Angel” is compelling: it’s Paris at the beginning of the 2000s. An angel falls in love with Dixi, a fragile girl who works as a model. Born into a wealthy French family with bourgeois roots, Dixi has had to bring herself up, a girl lost in a chaotic life with neither rules nor a future and now at the mercy of a gypsy with whom she is hopelessly in love and who drags her, playing with her feelings, into a series of dark events.

It is infused with magic precisely because it speaks of a spirit, Alan, who falls in love with a girl and follows her everywhere to tell her the secrets of existence: Why people are in the world, why they suffer, why they were born from the parents they have chosen, and the reason for the pain.

Alan follows her everywhere until he reveals himself to her in the churches where Dixi finds refuge and comfort. “You have to observe yourself when you feel a painful emotion because that is the door to self-awareness,” Alan says to Dixi, the Angel.

Everything starts from that wound people are born with, inherited from previous lives or generations. Every mistake people make, every hesitation, every sadness, and even every illness all stem from this initial wound. And the trick to healing her is to uncover and look her in the face. Healing the wound changes people’s lives in an alchemical transformation.

The spirit teaches Dixi how to find the wound, free herself from the chains it causes, and keep her tied to the same repeated mistakes that punctuate her existence. Dixi, the protagonist, suffers, but there is a way forward to eliminate this malaise: wrong companies, a malicious uncle, and an arrogant boyfriend. Everyone abuses her, and she is the first to abuse herself.

The angel becomes Dixi’s company. She listen to him as an authoritative voice not tied to this world’s materiality. This spirit can only be encountered in the rarefied transparency of beauty and inner harmony. A feat, especially today, because people have been at war for centuries; the war did not begin a year and a half ago. It started with the wound in the heart of the human being that drives even Dixi to evil.

Melanie, with her angel and her art, wants to bring beauty and hope. Today more than ever, this is an important message that people can no longer give up. As stated by Corriere della Sera, the most authoritative Italian newspaper, it is about: “An intimate story that does not debase itself with saccharine feelings and a glamorous cover. In today’s Paris that is forever a timeless capital, with an angel that seems to have remained in a pre-enlightenment world. For Dixi drawn of legend and of dreams… Of life and the depths of souls that open wide to the breath of the world. “(…)

A Novel that Opens the Door of Awareness

With “The Angel,” Melanie helps the reader to wear a pair of magical lenses to see the world from a spiritual point of view and solve the problems of their existence. Through the narrative form of a novel, the author guides people to make contact with themselves and their inner wounds by solving what they can change in the course of their existence. It’s an intense, passionate, sometimes carnal book that warns people about their wrong choices, trying to make them understand the reasons for certain toxic addictions, over all the emotional ones, in honor of a healthier life.

The book leads people to forgiveness in its truest and deepest sense. No one does anything to other people; they just put a finger in the wound they already have, allowing them to see it. If we are humble enough to stop pointing outward and blaming the world, we can find that the wound is inside us. We can heal it, and healing changes everything around us.

As it is mentioned: “Seek the kingdom of heaven, and the rest will be given to…” The kingdom of heaven is within people. So paradoxically, people should thank their enemies because they lead them to inner awakening.

A ONE-ON-ONE WITH MELANIE FRANCESCA

Melanie shares with us her perspectives about the meaning of the book. What are  THE WOUNDS YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT IN THE BOOK?

«Each of us is born with a wound inside, a kind of mark that determines our existence. Like Dixi: her anger, her tattoos and mystical attitude towards the world, all derive from this wound with which she came into the world, in her case that of abandonment, the same as her mother, father, grandmother , of the great-grandfather: an entire family of souls linked by the same chain of suffering that each generation has the task of breaking, thus freeing their ancestors. Dixi hopes to break this chain that binds her to continuous suffering, always tending to recreate the same situation that confirms her situation of abandonment and loneliness. Instead Alan tries to explain to her that our present shouldn’t be linked to the past but to the future, in a new interpretation of life: we are not the product of the past, of memories, we are our wound. Paradoxically, even if we lose our memory, we would act in the same way, we would recreate the same situations and realities. What happens to us is only the manifestation of who we are, it doesn’t shape us but is shaped by us.»

This makes us extremely responsible and creators of the reality that seems to happen to us.

«The wound is like a radio: we only pick up the frequencies on which we are programmed. By changing the programming we change our frequency. At this point the secret lies in raising our frequency in love. How do you do? We intervene in the only area to which we are given access: not the past, not the future but the present. By entering the now, we are able to transform our lives because we stop lying to ourselves and start just being. We live. By living we discover our wound, where is it hidden: in the pit of the stomach with a sense of nausea? In the heart with a sense of oppression, in the legs with a sense of paralysis? Our wound speaks to us with pain, it is enough to contemplate it with love to heal it. That’s what Alan does with Dixi: he loves her, it would be enough for Dixi to look at herself with the eyes of an angel like him to heal… we are so perfect and wonderful with our frailties that we don’t realize we have all the angels at our side. our feet…»

 WHY DO BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO US?

«Life is love, love heals and heals. Every misfortune, accident, illness, depression… are nothing but manifestations of the lack of love.»

JIM MORRISON WHO RUNS THROUGH THE BOOK LIKE A LEADING THREAD…

«Jim Morrison is like the invisible thread that binds each chapter with a quote. He is the surrogate father of Dixi, who Jim Morrison was friends with and kept a picture of both of them on his desk. On Jim Morrison’s grave she goes to place flowers, to cry and to open her heart as if she were opening it to her father. It is there that her spirit awakens in an eighteenth-century tomb a few meters nearby, she looks at her so beautiful and innocent, she falls in love with him. But Jim Morrison was also a great esotericist, and I’m not talking about drug hallucinations. I’m talking about its otherworldly thrust, its destructive force of patterns and disintegrated everyday life in the face of the mystical call of a less obvious afterlife than concreteness. I speak of Jim Morrison as breaking the mold, as a bearer of division, of confusion. The novel has dark, rock, metallic tones. It sounds like the scream of a rock star transposed into a book. Jim Morrison is very similar to the novel…»

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE WEST AND THE MIDDLE EAST?

«To explain this question I wrote two books, the Occidental and The perfect woman, the adventures of a western girl in a world as different as the Emirates, married to a man of completely different culture and religion. Yet the comparison enriches, when the pain threshold is exceeded. Anna, the protagonist of the two books on the United Arab Emirates, sometimes borders on hysteria, even if it is a brilliant comedy with comic traits, you laugh all the time. Everything is seen in a humorous way and the truth is revealed with laughter. This is how I approached my twelve-year experience in Dubai, this city that seems avant-garde, an oriental Las Vegas, and yet is almost suffocating if you are not satisfied with luxurious shopping and sunbathing on a yacht. You miss nature, the mountains, the truth of human relationships… there everything is transitory, temporary, like the visas that are given to those who work there, if you lose your job you lose your permit and foreigners will never have passports. I, on the other hand, also became an Emirate, straddling two worlds, I began to get the best out of each, now I’m reconciled with this exotic country, my children are half from there, they know Arabic, they sing the national anthem Emirati… I am the new generation, the product of two worlds…»

WOULD YOU EVER LIKE TO HEAD A TV PROGRAM?

«TV fascinates me from time to time and no, I don’t want to host a programme, it’s not my way. I prefer to write and dedicate myself to my children, to my family, in life you have to choose what is most important to you, what brings you joy. I love waking up in the morning with my kids, I love writing and drawing… I wouldn’t change that for anything in the world. I am happy.

Then I find the time to talk about my books which are a mission for me, even if it seems ambitious, I would like to change the world for the better. This is my purpose in life: to carry messages from an afterlife that is not too far from our physical world. Transforming people’s souls…»