My story

With Gigi and Feber my master's flew by in the blink of an eye. Whole evenings spent talking about cosmology, about string theory, about what relativity means for quantum mechanics. But then you stop and ask yourself whether it is worth it, whether there is any sense in this restless study, this search for everything and for nothing. And yes, we can't do without it, because we need elegance, we need to satisfy our curiosity, perhaps to reach an abstraction no one has ever reached before. And beyond the thousand things they set off in me, they are the ones who pulled me back from the edge. Talking about politics, about society, full of seriousness and nonsense, lightened me and brought me back to reality.

I have always loved eating; it would be nice to be able to call it a passion. Then university opened the door to cooking. It all started with wanting to make something new for my girlfriend, and that is how I discovered how good food sparks new moments of conviviality. And over time it became a way of exploring new cultures and new traditions.

I often wonder whether it is worth reflecting on abstract ideas without sharing them with the outside world. That way they would be dull, sterile, self-referential. This is why I believe in the power of stories, and why I look for them constantly. I don't know exactly what I want to tell. Perhaps only an intuition. We live on moments, on impressions that blur away in an instant. Thoughts follow one another endlessly. I would like to stop that process and capture it in an intuition. I don't know how, and I haven't even quite worked out what it would mean. But I am sure that, inexorably, we live by telling ourselves stories.

My conversations with Ciù convinced me that physics and art are very much alike. In both cases Nature comes second to man. However hard we try to understand it, to represent it, to shape it, it is always something other, immeasurable and out of reach. Art represents it through an image, physics through a mathematical model. In both cases the result is rough, approximate, superficial. And yet it holds what is truest and deepest in our essence.

Photography is a shadow that has been following me, insidiously, for years. With a photographer for a father I could only end up close to this language. An affinity for art and the urge to tell stories did the rest. But however often I tried, I was never satisfied with the result. I learned to accept that frustration, and to see its good side. Finally, something to do lightly, feeling no pressure, with no judgement and no goal to reach. And from an Achilles' heel it became the pastime I shut myself into so as not to think about anything and to empty my mind.

My bachelor's degree was demanding. I was constantly looking for my own limits. I was after excellence, and I wanted to know the price you had to pay to reach it. But perhaps excellence doesn't exist; perhaps it is only relative to our perception and to the world we shut ourselves into. That realisation softened my stormy instability and let me face my studies with more vigour. Exactly as now, back then I didn't know what the path was, I didn't know the goal, the truth was unknown to me. But that is the wonder of the search, blind and relentless. Because it is in the journey that we live our moments to the full, it is in curiosity that we live our truest emotions, it is in passion that we live life to the full.