A few people remember catching a glimpse of her on that late morning in late spring, a young woman lingering by the gasoline pumps while traffic blasted past a truck stop in this nondescript industrial town, her white bridal gown, layered like a wedding cake, fluttering in the breeze of the passing cars.
Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo, a 33-year-old Italian performance artist who called herself Pippa Bacca, had come to Turkey on a quixotic quest: hitchhiking through the region to promote Middle East peace. The wedding dress, which she planned to wear throughout her journey, was meant to signify the "marriage" of cultures and the building of mutual trust.
"She was idealistic -- naive and idealistic," said Beral Madra, an Istanbul artist and curator who had offered support and advice to Bacca and her friend Silvia Moro, 37, as the two embarked on the Turkish leg of their performance-journey.
She warned the pair of the project's dangers in a country where women face violence daily. Never travel alone, she advised. Go where women congregate. Take rides only from the bus station, and always make sure someone is watching, taking note of any vehicle you get into.
For whatever reason, Bacca didn't heed the warnings.
Bacca came early to her wanderlust.
The third of five sisters in a close-knit family, she was raised by a free-spirited mother who inculcated her daughters with a love of travel and taste for exotica.
The first of many journeys with her family was in 1987, when Pippa was 12. Her father was long gone. The six of them traveled to Santiago de Compostela, along the famed Spanish pilgrimage route in Spain, on foot, by bicycle and by thumbing rides.
"I hitchhiked a lot," her mother, Elena Manzoni, said later. "It is the best way to get to know people and places. Pippa got that from me."
Bacca, whose plain, strong-featured face was transformed by a ready smile, had an artistic pedigree as well: Her late uncle was the well-known sculptor Piero Manzoni. She worked hard to establish her own artistic reputation, with more than a dozen exhibitions and gallery shows of her conceptual art to her credit. One piece, called "Surgical Mutations," consisted of a single leaf displayed in a wooden frame.
She and Moro had conceived their project more than a year earlier, talking about how they could dramatize their peace message. They wanted to incorporate a road journey, in part to symbolize the ways in which minds can travel toward compromise. Their wedding dresses would evoke the sense of hope and life-changing possibility that a bride might feel on her wedding day.
