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Talented, beautiful, bright, true. These are the four virtues of Ana-Maria Petrova’s aura. You can not help but feel it when around her. You somehow know about it instinctively when watching her on the screen. She is an actress, dancer, journalist, poet, wife, mother - a true Renaissance figure in the early 21^st century, who lives and works between Rome and Sofia. She came into our homes and won her way to our hearts as the beautiful Nedda in Stefan Dichev and Nikolai Mashchenko’s "The Road to Sofia" and attracted our attention for decades with her film roles, interviews with some of the biggest names in world culture. Ana-Maria is the wife of one of the most famous Bulgarian opera singers Nikola

Ghiuselev . In an interview with Maria S. Topalova she speaks of her poetic searches, intercultural dialogue and living in the rush.

I understand the symbolism of flowers and thorns, because nothing is definite in life. But why of Via Egnatia?

Because I go along this old Roman road every year, sometimes even 2-3 times and it is something like a transition in my life, because in my last collection of poems Flowers and Thorns of the Via Egnatia includes some poems from my first book of poetry that have been translated into Italian and I have original Italian poems too. I write in both languages, depending on how it sounds to me in that particular moment. Sometimes it sounds directly in Bulgarian, and sometimes in Italian, I write it down and then I translate it into the other language. This is my second book of poetry, and it is in Italian. I had not much time to go in this direction, but I wrote all the time. The last thing I wrote was in March this year. The first collection of poems was called Prayer for Life. It was in both languages but a few poems were in Italian. It was published by the publishing house Ivan Vazov, which was one of our major national publishers but unfortunately it does not exist now.

When did poetry come into your life?

I was about 16-17 years old when the cinema and the poetry came into my life. The ballet came since I was 8 years old and I started working as a journalist in the 1990s. The first poem is called November Surprise and I wrote it in November 1977, because it snowed. I did not expect it to snow, but it started, it was very cold, and then I wrote this poem.

How did the cinema find Ana-Maria Petrova?