BEYOND borders
Essays have been written about the glamour of cross-cultural attraction, and theses on the potential pitfalls of interaction between tourists and locals where there are differences in culture and economic standing. Most recently, in her article ‘The Interplay Between Imaginations and Interactions in Maasai Cultural Tourism’, Vanessa Wijngaarden, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Johannesburg, reported how both sides can fear being viewed as naive or ignorant, and fear being exploited.
Yet none of that factored in the romances of Ilaria Beraldi, a hotel school management graduate and chef, and Cristina Pedrinzani, a 34-year-old seamstress with a diploma in linguistics, and the Maasai men, Andrea and Mosses, they each met and fell in love with in Tanzania.
Although both women are from Tuscany, they met each other only after both couples eventually moved to Italy, when they got together on a beach there (of course!) in June 2017. In emails from Italy,
