Carlotta Mismetti Capua is an Italian journalist based in Rome. She has worked for Time Out, La Repubblica, E-Polis and Eat Magazine. Her City of Asterix Facebook story was awarded the Ischia Journalism Prize in the social media category.

This article was first published by the European Journalism Centre (EJC), an international non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting high standards in journalism through the training of journalists and media professionals.

One evening coming home on a bus I met four Afghan boys, who spoke English and seemed happy. They had arrived in Rome that evening after a six month trek, jumped on a city bus and got off at my stop: Piramide. If they hadn't been smiling so much and hadn't got off at the same time as me, I might never have told this story. If a reader hadn't written to me on Facebook the day after, offering her help, I may never have told it. If a colleague had never said "it's not really appropriate, but I hope you write about it", maybe I would never have told it. If I had never told it I would never have lived, or perhaps vice versa.
 
I write this almost two years after what happened to these children, lost in the city of Rome. Our Facebook group is called La Città di Asterix (the City of Asterix) – the nickname the boys gave to Rome. A few days later I took them to the Colosseum, where seeing the gladiators reminded them, I'm still not sure why, of a French cartoon: Asterix and Obelix. They had never seen France, knew nothing of Italy (except that it was the 'garden of Europe', as described in their text books); they didn't even know where they were until they recognised the Colosseum and Asterix. So, in tribute to their amazement, my story continued.

I used Facebook as I would have used a pencil: it was there and I knew how to use it. My background is in written press. For 12 years I worked for 'La Repubblica', and for the past 2 years I've been writing local (human interest) stories for the freesheet Epolis. I had no experience in online journalism, I read with curiosity about citizen journalism, of the debates on 'slow reportage'. I admired the 'graphic journalists' who changed profession and language while I ploughed on with the same job and explained the world to people who don't read newspapers.

I wasn't really interested in how they had arrived, after their long and difficult journey that we call 'people smuggling' (another media invention, as often they are just families who scrape together some money to send a child away on foot, just like our Italian grandparents escaped on foot). Instead I was interested in their journey here, to Europe, where we have peace and human rights.
 
My director at Epolis, Enzo Cirillo, just like any other director I presume, found the story about their journey exciting. I think that's the best way to describe it. But no-one else, my newspaper nor other papers or sites, found the story exciting enough to print what happened next, what happened once we got off the bus. Of course, red tape and human rights are not exactly sexy, unlike 'people smuggling' or war,  and are tremendously difficult to describe without sounding superficial. It takes time and money—two things in short supply in Italian journalism. I had no money but I did have free time, so I used it.

First life-changing…

Following them step by step, and starting with very simple questions (where they sleep, who takes care of them, what rights they have, what office they need to go to, and what time does it open?) I found the experience changed my views about work and life. I had no goal, no director, no deadline, and I wasn't writing for any 'target' audience, rather a virtual, boundless and infinite audience.
 
There are rules in journalism for deciding the priority and prominence of news: how many readers are involved and how close is it to us? Afghanistan is very far, and no readers were involved. So it was a potential 'no news', but for some reason I believed this story was bigger than it seemed, and close enough to bring four children of war to Rome. In the end, I was nothing more than a journalist telling a social story, pouncing on details and arguments, trying to make a lucid, readable and above all timely account. But instead, I became very slow, like life, reality and history. It took three months before one of the boys, Akmed, found a bed in a family home and an entire year before he found a place at school.

Telling the story of this boring and empty year, could it ever be sexy? Something was working even if not in a traditional way: thanks to the 1700+ readers on our Facebook group, and to this whole 'wild goose chase' (following in their footsteps), I ended up not as someone who understands things but who experiences them. 

What happened to me was the greatest professional gift. I still call it storytelling because in the end there are no lights, no stage, no script, and I look people directly in the eye (like a professional storyteller in a bookshop or a theatre).
 
Paradoxically, I won an award this summer from the media establishment: the Ischia Prize for Journalism. I then got an offer to move the project to an online paper, but it was the same one that I had suggested it to the year before, so now I refused. Today when people ask me what I am doing, I say that I am busy storytelling, but I don't really care for labels. The City of Asterix has become a group for light-hearted activism and social narratives. All this will be published in January 2011 as a book, by Piemme.

...then award-winning

Our logo was a gift from Massimo Bucchi, the cartoonist and humorist from 'La Repubblica', (also a dear friend). Our group trailer (like many other things was given to me by film-maker Leonardo Cinieri Lombroso) won the Rome 'Festival della Fiction', in the documentary category; and then our Facebook project won this unexpected prize in the social media category of a major Italian journalism prize, the Ischia Prize for Journalism.
 


As part of the last edition of the 'Woman Fiction Fest' literary festival, schoolchildren from Matera, in southern Italy, read the story as an eBook, and also met the boys. And now some classes have adopted the Facebook group and actively take part as editors and illustrators for my book.
 
These things happened spontaneously, often just from people reading the story on Facebook. They are personal initiatives and I just let them happen without interfering and without trying to influence the outcome. At one point I suddenly wanted to make the group and everything that I had written, as well as the gifts that I had received from colleagues and cartoonists, available as 'Creative Commons', to stress how the main aim is to share the story—as a free and therefore symbolic gesture.
 
So what are we? I don't know, but it doesn't matter: I just hope that it can be a useful, well-told story. I had hoped that Facebook would be able to kindle a certain amount of activism, that this boundless audience (with 13 million members in Italy alone) might get more involved. The spirit of the internet is one of sharing, but activism takes more than a mouseclick. That kind of help never really materialised, but other things happened—in the media word, virtual world and real life.
 
Our readers have shown their admiration, affection, as if it were a novel, despite it being 'true' and 'live'. Now the boys are going to college, and have to pay for their books and taxes, and people offer them help in many different ways (as Italian welfare is not working very much for them). I think they appreciate how I put myself on the line, on a personal level. Perhaps some of them don't even know that I'm a journalist.

Translated from the Italian by Howard Hudson, editor, EJC.