Testaccina visits Texan-born artist Cythia Korzekwa in her studio in San Lorenzo, to find out more about the illustrations in her compelling blog, Art for Housewives, and her project to uncover the stories of the illustrious dead in the Verano Cemetery
I first came across Cythnia Korzekwa’s blog, Art for Housewives, a few months ago, and was immediately drawn to her compelling storytelling in her own illustrations and words. ‘Some people were born to be foreigners’, she writes, and her posts possess an outsider’s detachment, combining an acutely critical eye with the eternal traveller’s curiosity. She’s also an incredible illustrator: her hand-drawn images, chiefly in black and white shades, haul the past into the present day.
‘My big passion now is Verano Cemetery. I’ll give you a tour sometime,’ Cynthia says.
Cynthia’s most recent blog posts derive from her long walks in the Campo Verano, the vast Monumental Cemetery in Rome, a labyrinth of the dead from which she has excavated stories about some of the city’s most beloved actors, entrepreneurs and society folk. An artist by trade, but possessing a rare talent with words, Cynthia tells the stories of dead Italian icons and paints bleak images from their often tragic lives, in a bold, graphic style.
Curious about her story, I visited Cynthia in her studio in San Lorenzo, by appointment, to find out more about her fascination with the Verano Cemetery and her relationship with recycling, both as an environmental practice and a means of telling stories.
Her studio is a space where her love of recycling stands out above all: old soft drinks cans are hammered to the furniture, and she is dressed in a brightly coloured robe, sewn from patches of fabric. We share a pot of tea.
Cynthia starts by telling me that her current blog has evolved from a passion for online writing which dates back more than 20 years.
‘When you have a blog for a long time, it becomes a part of you; it grows as you grow,’ she explains. ‘My art has always been narrative, never abstract; I like to tell stories.
‘My big passion now is Verano Cemetery. I’ll give you a tour sometime,’ Cynthia says.
‘A while back, an artist friend of mine said, “I don’t like to walk unless I have a destination”. Well that was a kind of epiphany for me. I love walking and I decided that I needed somewhere to walk to. I’m based in San Lorenzo, so I went walking to Verano Cemetery one Sunday morning and I was just so blown away. I had been falling out of love with Rome and this gave me a new creative focus. First of all, it’s quiet; there’s nature, no traffic – even just for a walk it’s beautiful. Then – it’s divided into different sections. Once upon a time, the mentality was, whenever you make something, you make it beautiful. So Verano’s like a sculpture garden. And it’s also a history garden. And I decided I was going to learn about the history of Italy using Verano.
‘I started by researching Italy’s post-unification period, patching together the things I knew. I would find graves relating to this period and it blew me away. I whittled down the names in the cemetery to a list of about 80 – and that was so hard to do – there are so many interesting people buried there. The surface of the cemetery is bigger than the University of La Sapienza – there’s even an electric bus that goes round every half hour.’
Cynthia’s stories on her blog are deeper than the graves: she touches on social, political and economic history, while keeping the narrative achingly human.
‘The first few times I went to Verano, I was kind of spooked. The birds were cawing and I felt at any moment they were going to get me! But now I feel at home there. It sounds like such a strange thing to say but I started looking at the names buried there in a chronological way and started to create a portfolio of stories and images around the cemetery. I’m using my blog as a notebook at the moment, and I’m filling it in piece by piece, as I slowly build my next book, telling the story of the icons of Verano Cemetery.’
Cynthia’s latest book, Bebina Bunny, is a sometimes cynical look at naivety, telling an adult story in words and pictures of a rabbit person that lives in the city, a symbol of innocence in a dirty world.

Cynthia Korzekwa’s graphic novel “Bebina Bunny’s Cabinet of Curiosities”, available on Amazon © 2015 Cynthia Korzekwa
‘I’ve always put words on my paintings, even when they were big. After my bricolage period, reusing and patching things, I started moving towards storytelling again, capturing a moment. That was the phase when I created the character Bebina Bunny, whose cartoon quality contrasted with some pretty aggressive storytelling. That was published as an e-book (which you can buy here).’
‘If I don’t create, I’m not happy,’ Cynthia concludes. ‘Art is my country. It’s my nationality. And as long as I have my art, I can survive anyplace. I love research and I’ve found a way to marry my drawings with my research: that’s what I’m doing now.’
Read Cynthia’s blog, Art for Housewives, here.
Buy her book here.
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© Rome blogger Isobel Lee