I was born in the Italian city of Pavia, nearby Milan, in 1982.
Son of a German father and an Italian mother who have met each other in Somalia in 1980.
I was lucky enough to learn traveling through my parents experience. As a kid I kept on changing schools, friends, houses and languages. I did not like it of course but I do appreciate it now.
The places I have been leaving in are many and most of them belong to eastern Africa:
Somalia, Niger, Djibouti, Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, and of course Italy.

At the age of 16, while leaving in Kenya, I made one of my first journeys: I reached the Island of Lamu, in northern Kenya, by bus with two friends. It took us two days and we had to cross some parts of the country considered dangerous enough to oblige our overcrowded bus to proceed in convoy and with an armed escort.
That was the time I discovered I really enjoyed traveling and that was the time I discovered one of my two paradises.
Lamu has changed a lot since 1996, but I always find what I want when I go back, beauty and atmosphere.

By the age of nineteen I had finished my high school and was ready to leave for the traveling I had been waiting for years.
After saving enough money working in a hotel in Rome I took a plane to Kenya and finally got to Lamu again.
I bussed several times between Kenya and Uganda before taking an other decision that would have changed my traveling from there on.
While in Lamu I met to strange Italians, they where travelers from India, leaving very cheap and spending their lives on the road. They made me understand you can travel without being a tourist and that India is a place where this seems to be very easy.

One of “the two strange Italians”

My budget was to tight for me to stay much longer in Africa and I therefore decided to take a four months return flight to Bombay.
I traveled from North to South, reaching kanyakumary and Darjeeling, I spent two months in Tiruvannamalai volunteering for a Swiss NGO (Terre des hommes), teaching to mentally retarded children and leaving in an orphanage.

Darjeeling

Kanyakumary

In India I learned how nice it is to travel budget, to be as humble as you would never be allowed in Africa and Europe. I learned that if you have time, will, if you don’t care about what you eat and where you sleep, two hundred euro a month are enough for you to have such a wonderful life as you could not allow yourself with twenty times as much back in Europe.
Returning in Italy to start my university I realized I had learned in one year of traveling as much as many more years in Italy had not thought me, I grew up in my mind, had changed my values and was more determined than ever to finish my studies and then leave again.

I succeeded after tree years and in 2005-2006 was finally allowed to leave once again.
After cashing up in my hotel in Rome I started my last trip: To India overland.
Leaving Italy in October, I crossed Greece, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and finally arrived in India, Amristar, in February.

The golden temple of Amristar

Having studied cooperation and development I’m always looking for something interesting to do, see if I can help out and maybe even earn something out of it.
While in Pakistan I was hired as a field officer by an Italian Ngo named ISCOS, I was asked to set up some schools after the earthquake had destroyed the entire town of Balakot and much more. It has not been easy but again this experience has thought me what years of university didn’t. My help has been appreciated and I left Pakistan with the feeling I have made all I could. The project is still going on and what ISCOS had started with little means in November 2005 has now become a huge project involving more than fifty people. I left Pakistan in January and made my way in India up to Gokarna. My second paradise which will soon be lost …
My plan was to proceed towards Srilanka in the hope of working for some post Tsunami reconstruction and than continue towards Singapore trying to get a boat to South America.
Instead I never went on and Gokarna has been the furthest place I have reached in my
journey.

Om beach, Gokarna.

My hart rushed me back by plane and I am now in Italy, waiting for my girlfriend to finish her studies.
We should leave for the same trip in August.

Tabata and I, camping in Italy