Who I Am

I am Italian. I grew up by the sea — and for as long as I can remember, the sea has been everything.

My sea is the Ionian Sea, on the wild eastern coast of Calabria, the very tip of the Italian boot. Ancient water. Mythical water. This is the sea of Ulysses, of the heroes of Homer’s legends — a place where history and depth are inseparable.

As a child, I would stay in the salt water until I shivered, refusing to come out. I swam far from shore long before most would dare. The sea never felt dangerous to me. It felt like home.

The Girl Who Knew She Could Make It

I was sixteen — maybe younger — when I swam out alone to rescue my mother.

She had drifted away on an inflatable mat, pulled by a current that doesn’t negotiate. In minutes, she was far from shore. I went in after her, swam all the way to her, and brought her back.

That girl — fearless, certain, completely at home in the water — is the one I have been searching for ever since. Somewhere between then and adulthood, I lost her. I have been looking for her in every ocean on earth.

The Boat Ride That Changed Everything

In 2014, on a dawn boat ride off Ras al-Hadd, Oman, surrounded by dolphins rising from the morning mist, something clicked.

If I start diving, I will enjoy the sea even more.

I tracked down my friend Francesco Annis — a diving instructor — and signed up immediately. For months, I drove from Switzerland to Milan for pool training, then south to Liguria for open water dives. Friday nights on the road. Saturday in the water. Sunday back again. Exhausting — and absolutely worth it.

The day I earned my Open Water certification, everything expanded.

From that moment on, I dove wherever the world took me.

What Lives Beneath

A diving license didn’t replace anything — it multiplied everything.

I still snorkel pristine reefs at sunrise. I still float on the surface watching light bend through water. I still walk barefoot along the shore with salt on my skin. But now I also descend — into silence, into colour, into the world that most people only dream of seeing.

Hammerhead sharks moving through deep blue. Sea turtles gliding upward for air. Pygmy seahorses hidden in coral. Harlequin shrimp in colours that shouldn’t exist. Sardine runs that turn the ocean silver. Whale sharks passing like slow, magnificent ghosts.

I want to see all of it. I intend to.

The Voices That Lit the Fire

Long before social media, I had my influencers.

Piero Angela, whose documentary series Quark had me motionless in front of the television, mentally transporting myself into every frame. Folco Quilici, whose vast books on the underwater world I would read for hours — heavy volumes full of images that felt like portals to another planet.

Homer shaped me even more deeply. My love for The Odyssey was so consuming that at thirteen I enrolled in a classical high school specifically to learn Ancient Greek — Homer’s own language. The Ionian Sea of my childhood was, after all, Ulysses’ sea. I grew up on the edge of a living myth.

Jules Verne came next — Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, In Search of the Castaways — feeding a hunger for discovery that has never left me.

The Day I Stopped Waiting

For years I held the fantasy of real adventure, total immersion in the world — and I waited. For the right moment. The right companion. The right everything.

Then, one day, with uncomfortable clarity, I understood:

I could spend my whole life in the waiting room and miss everything.

So I booked a flight. Then another. And another.

The world does not wait for perfect conditions.

Neither do I, anymore.