Modern Travellers, Eternal Poets: Martina Sciotto

Modern Travellers, Eternal Poets: Martina Sciotto

Some people collect places. Others, like Martina Sciotto, collect moments.

Martina is a classical ballerina based in Rome. She spends her days in discipline and movement, but it’s the in-between that interests her. The time she takes to write, to observe, to walk and most importantly to feel. She has a presence that catches your attention, while remaining quiet, deliberate and curious.

We invited her to be the first voice in our series Modern Poets, Eternal Travellers, a portrait project dedicated to individuals whose sense of travel isn’t performative, but personal.

 

“A souvenir holds the soul of the place you’ve been.”

 

For Martina, travel begins not with departure but with memory. When asked what a souvenir means to her, she answered without hesitation: “It is something evocative and contemplative. A single object that condenses a place, a sensation, an encounter — and brings you back to it, instantly.”

It might be a photo. A scent. A postcard. “Something that gathers the essence of what I felt and saw,” she says, “and allows me to revisit it just by holding it in my hand.”

There’s nothing random in what she brings back, nor in what she carries when she leaves.


What Martina brings in her bag when she travels

 

A pearl necklace that belonged to her mother, a small notebook for writing, a sleep mask, chocolate and liquorice pastilles, a lavender vial from Provence, a rose oud perfume from Saudi Arabia, Lipstick, matches, hairpins, sunglasses and some Des Épigraphes postcards.

“Every object I carry,” she tells us, “has a reason. A weight. A place in my story.”


“Rome allows me to slow down.”

 

Though she has travelled far, Martina always returns to Rome. She describes the city not as a destination, but as a rhythm. “Rome is a force,” she says. “It is constant, strong, and protective. It holds a beauty that never fades and never tries to impress you.”

She compares the city to a jewel box left open to the sky: full of treasures, full of silence. “Even when I walk the same streets, they never feel the same. The light shifts. The silence speaks. It’s always new.”

 

Rome by Martina Sciotto

 

Her Rome was never about novelty or trendy places, but rather nuance. Her rituals are small but meaningful: A coffee at Forno Monteforte, walking slowly down Via Margutta, pausing among the roses of Hotel de Russie, browsing through Chez Dédé.
She dines at Checco er Carettiere in Trastevere, and stops for dark chocolate at Moriondo & Gariglio.

 

“Travel is an emotional, artistic and aesthetic fusion.”

 

When Martina speaks about travel, it’s never about ticking boxes or chasing scenes. It’s about how the outside world interacts with her inner one.

“I have the chance to travel thanks to my work,” she says, “and every journey becomes a fusion between art and beauty. I don’t just visit places, I try to feel their social, cultural, and aesthetic vibrations. I believe that seeking beauty (even if it’s ephemeral) is a form of care. A way to preserve it. To reinvent it through our eyes and thoughts.”

Her memories aren’t the ones of a regular tourist. They are sensory and vivid:

— The salt on her skin aboard her grandfather’s fishing boat in Sicily
— The wind on the sand dunes of Oman
— The overwhelming beauty of the Pacific in Enoshima, Japan, where she cried without knowing why


“Writing is the only thing that keeps me grounded.”

 

In her spare moments, Martina writes. Sometimes fragments. Sometimes stories. “They’re halfway between real and imaginary,” she says. “A mix of memory and dream, of daily life and fiction. Often delirious. Often unfiltered.”

When she travels, she writes even more. “Traveling opens something up in me,” she admits. “But the real journey, the one that never stops, is the one I make within myself. The search for a better version of who I am, cultivating kindness and gratitude. Because life is beautiful. We just forget sometimes.”


Martina Sciotto is grace. In the rituals that make a place her own. In the details she chooses to preserve.

In a world obsessed with movement, she reminds us that travel is not speed, but presence. That souvenirs are not objects, but vessels. And that maps don’t always lead us somewhere new, sometimes, they just bring us closer to what we already hold dear.

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