Alessandra's Thirst for the World
Alessandra gets carried away when she talks about many different countries, jumping from one to the other as she follows the thread of her life experiences. She looks like a girl, but at the young age of 27 she has places and accumulated experiences worth several lifetimes of an ordinary person. Alessandra Contigiani comes from the Marche region and earned her Bocconi-Paris Sciences Po Double Degree in 2013 (after an undergraduate degree in political science and international relations at LUISS). Today she is part of COEURE (Cooperation on European Research in Economics), an economic research project of the Jean Jaques Laffont Foundation at the Toulouse School of Economics, foundation which is headed by the 2014 Nobel Prize Jean Tirole. "COEURE gathers various universities, including Bocconi, and has the task of giving policy recommendations to the European Commission," she explains.
But Alessandra became political and economic analyst for the Commission thanks to on-the-ground experiences that made her face some of most serious humanitarian crises of the planet. She was in Jordan in 2014, where she worked for UNRWA, the UN agency that provides assistance to displaced Palestinian families. There, through an NGO, she also became familiar with the plea of Syrian refugees. During her Blue Book traineeship , the European Commission's official training program, which she was selected for after Jordan, she flew to Laos to monitor the country's human rights situation, where she followed cases of politically-related disappearances. In Myanmar, she embraced the cause of the Rohingya Nuslim minority, which, according to Alessandra, the Burmese government has the intention of completely destroying. Also, in the Andaman Islands she met indigenous tribes, "which are slowly disappearing, such as the recently estinguished Bo tribe". Last summer, she was in Kosovo, "to attend a course on postwar political and diplomatic reconstruction."
A wealth of experiences that Alessandra Contigiani has collected, pushed on by her thirst for travel and knowledge. During her college years, she was an exchange student in New Zealand, and spent periods of study in China and South Africa, and also did internships in Geneva and Peru, where she worked for a regional organization specializing in health policy, an experience that became the topic of her Double Degree dissertation. As of now, she has backpacked to more than 60 different countries. "This year marks a symbolic threshold. Since I started the university, I've spent more years living abroad than in Italy . As Flaubert used to say, 'Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.' I have learnt that my perspective one world is not the only one and is not necessarily the right one, either".
To retell all her experiences, Alessandra has recently opened a blog, which, in spite of its cryptic name of ' Viaggio 922 ' [Trip 922] is very clear from the start: "This is a blog where I can express and tell my thirst for the world, my curiosity for what's different and my desire for personal growth through travel. This is a place where discussion is welcome and tolerance is the mot d'ordre," the young woman explains. Most of all, the blog is about "writing about my experiences without any journalistic pretense, but with the urge to bring to the attention of the Italian public certain international situations that are absent from national media, but tend to be covered by Anglophone media. This is the reason why posts are strictly in Italian."