Your story in 10 lines
I was born and raised in the Valle D’Aosta mountains, between potatoes fields and castles where I used to spend my afternoons; soon I felt the need to look for newer ways than the usual ones; therefore, I started to study history of art that took me in Bologna – a city I did not live in its totality because of the intense study and work time. After the degree in art history, I landed in Venice for the second degree and got crazily in love, not only with the city. Over the past three years I have been working with a contemporary art fair, a work I love and wish it would become the basis of the near future, who knows…As for my private life, I am a serial monogamous, I only have passionate love affairs, often ending in the same overwhelming way as they started. I love arts, cooking, maths and many other things.
The relation with the native landscape and with the native word that you bring everyday with – it doesn’t matter where you are.
I come from a harsh and simple land. A land from which I have escaped; it is a fictional getaway because I can’t do anything different than bringing with me a mountainous horizon that overall imprinted my vision of the world. That horizon is very clear, not as the flat land or the sea where sometimes elements overlap; a line in the mountains separates the light from the dark, the liveable from the daydreaming, the good from the bad and maybe that sharpness signed a nature that is a bit too rigid.
You’ve recently undertaken a new professional experience in the field of arts. What do you miss and what have you achieved while searching for your place in this world?
For being born in the mountains, world for me is a place to slowly and silently conquer, as a peak; for this reason, I believe in the slow and intense activity, in the solitary and never-ending efforts. I go on to walk even if, sincerely, I am not able to see neither the path nor the top of the mountain. Then, as a good peasant, I feel a constant and somehow tiring envy towards who, around me, is successful. This is something, which creates anxiety in me.
How could it be to start – if you’ll go for this option in the near future –an entrepreneur activity as cultural producer?
I have a series of projects in my various drawers; in the passed years I saw some of them being developed by other persons, with somehow astonishing results or sometimes not. The hardest thing for me is to find the courage to open the drawer and to show its content to somebody, I am very ashamed of my ideas.
What your city is giving to you and vice versa?
Verona, currently my city, is giving me all the beauty I feel I need; as for me, I offer an opportunity to all the ice-cream shops in town to become richer and richer.
Describe a fantastic moment you had recently
A phrase told some days ago, in a difficult moment – a bit whispered, a bit embarrassed – by a beautiful person I have the luck to have beside me.
Can you share your favourite cooking passion?
I love spontaneous, happy cooking; I adore improvising and the food combinations arising from necessity or from fate. I hate foodies and who, in general, lives the act of cooking as a self-performance.
Which is your favourite drink?
I do not have a preferred drink as I do not have a preferred movie or book; even though a good glass of Ripasso…
Which is your music or the book(s) with you now?
La distinction. Critique sociale du Jugement by Pierre Bourdieu and La vita erotica dei superuomini by Marco Mancassola; I love to variate.
In which way do you try to live “slow”, if you like to do so, in a city as yours?
At the moment I like to run around the city, along its river. This act slackens paradoxically my thoughts and allows me to see my life at a different speed. The expressions of the people I meet seem more intense to me.
Which is a talent you have and the one you miss?
I would have loved to be an artist, but I always felt I was lacking something fundamental.
What have you learnt from life until now?
That even the smallest things can have the highest symbolic value; this is the reason why even the mozzarella with ketchup is able to evocate an entire palette of feelings.
Cover picture courtesy: Steve Sabella