Valeria moved to France four years ago to start a PhD program in Demography at the Sorbonne University. She would have completed her PhD soon, somewhere next year. Valeria wasn’t killed by coincidence, as many in these days say. Valeria was killed because she represented our generation and the future of Europe. In Italy Valeria was a volunteer for many years for Emergency, an independent organization which provides free medical treatment to the victims of war and poverty. In Paris she often helped the homeless and, during her academic career, she dealt with gender issues, with special attention to women’s difficulties tied to professional career. “Allez les filles, au travail!” was just one of her essays on that topic.

I wonder whether there is anything we can do for Valeria and for all the other innocent people that were killed that night (stupid Facebook profile picture updates excluded). We can't do anything to get them back, but maybe there is something we can do to make sure their death wasn't in vain. For example, reading, and talking about it only with full knowledge of the facts.

We might sit down and open books, watch documentaries, read newspapers with sense of criticism, admit how ignorant we are, and, eventually, ask ourselves questions, such as: what does ISIS stand for? Where did ISIS establish its power? When was it born and why? What are their intentions? What is a Caliphate? Who is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi? Who are the Kurdish and Yazidi fighters and who is supporting them and why? Why did the Islamic state attack France?

A good starting point might be the book ‘ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror’ by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, or the BBC documentary entitled ‘The Islamic State's Social Media Machine’.

And finally, we might dedicate three minutes of love to ourselves, against the brutality and the inhumanity of this new, old world. Je n'en connais pas la fin, performed by Jeff Buckley at the Bataclan concert hall in 1995. It sounds more or less like this: And people came there from so far away, and everyone sang that little tune, all around town you heard it played “Ah, mon amour, à toi toujours, dans tes grands yeux, rien que nous deux”.