There are stories that seem to spring from the pen of a visionary writer, where fantasy reaches unimaginable heights. And yet, sometimes reality can be more surprising than fiction. That’s the story of Lorena D’Ercole, who already as a child began to notice the signs that would guide her step by step on the road to what is now her life’s mission: Art.

Lorena was born in Basel, Switzerland in 1975, the daughter of two creative souls: a passionate seamstress and a great gardener. They were two Italian talents with many dreams in their suitcases when they emigrated to Switzerland in the early 1970s. They realized their dreams, but not without difficulty.

Lorena’s first contact with life was peculiar. Her mother likes to recount the story that Lorena did not want to enter the world. Was that an omen? It was as if she did not want to leave the dimension that she came from. The doctors had to use forceps to bring her into the light. Her childhood was dotted with “signs” that drew a magical aura around her, but which sometimes caused some concern in the worried eyes of adults. She experienced a need to give and receive love that went beyond ordinary human feeling.

Imagine a little girl who talks to her deceased grandmother, who chooses a sixty-five-year-old woman as her best friend, who goes to school accompanied by a cat that thinks it’s a dog, and who, without ever having read a holistic book before, tells her classmates and teachers that “we are all connected” and that “love makes us all one.”

A great ability to perceive the deepest purity of the human soul and to read people’s thoughts, especially the thoughts of people who are in difficulty, has always been for Lorena a strong feeling that cannot be explained by reason alone. It has been both a cross to bear and a joy, both a gift and a burden. That burden has often led her to shield the weakest, which in turn subjected her to wounds for which she still bears invisible scars.