Since I was very young – let’s say 8 or 10 – I fell under the spell of writing: I simply enjoy doing it and it comes quite naturally to me, effortlessly I would say. I could spend hours writing, without noticing time flowing by. I have always liked to play with words, to experiment through them, to seek ever new ways to express ideas. Most importantly, I soon realized that writing, if let free, could be a powerful means to tap into realms we are not even be aware of. An exploratory endeavor. This leads me to touch upon my other long -lasting passion – travel – which I have got, in all likelihood, from my parents who, since I was a kid, compelled me to immerse into other cultures and embrace the pros and cons of leaving one’s own domestic bubble.

It is no surprise that, by the age I was in middle school, I wanted to become a journalist. In my imagination (it was still the 1990s and the Web was just at its dawn), I saw journalism as the right compromise between three aspects: to write while doing socially good (i.e., to inform), to get a fair dose of mobility, and to plunge into a sufficient amount of daily novelty to avoid boredom.

As it turned out, I did purse, since the second year of my bachelor degree in Communication Sciences at the University of Bologna, a “career” in journalism, beginning as a local reporter for a regional daily newspaper now extinct. From that moment onwards, however, my life-path underwent some radical twists that I could have hardly expected.

I spent the third year of my bachelor at the University of Paris VIII – a drop of the Erasmus tsunami which marked at least three European generations. Needless to say, the hours spent on night buses outnumbered by far those spent on books; and yet, I was still able to complete all the exams, registering also a spike in my marks’ average (mostly due to the not-so-strict evaluation system of that 1968-wave-born institution). Upon my return, I graduated with distinction, with a semiotics-inspired dissertation on the new communication campaign and rebranding strategy of SNCF, the French national railways company. After that, instead of naturally enrolling into a Master program, I felt that 1) Bologna was by now too small for me; 2) my French had fully supplanted my English, which was now in need of a refresh.

This led me to London for four months, where I upgraded my English to a proficiency level from which I have benefitted since then. Then, in the summer of 2006, I embarked on a 40-day public-transport-only journey from Denmark to North Cape, in Norway: it was the first time I copiously took notes while on the road, although they never saw the light into a proper publication. After which, yes, it was eventually time to go back to university, but not in Bologna; in Rome, instead. I followed a two-year Master program in Journalism and Publishing with minors in contemporary Italian literature and cinema. The thirst for writing had rejuvenated in connection with literary criticism and visual arts. In fact, the years in Rome allowed me to put my education into practice, for instance working as an editor for an independent publishing house, Gaffi editore, for which I was in charge of the review and revision of manuscripts – both fiction and non-fiction – the direct communication with authors, and, from time to time, the quest and suggestion of hidden gems for publication.

At the same time, however, during my stay in the Italian capital, I did not give up reporting. Indeed, in 2008 I had the chance to collaborate as an intern for the foreign affairs’ office at ANSA, the main Italian news agency, covering news from the middle east and the far east.

The two roles – editor and reporter – found a natural blend in the writing of my Master thesis. When I joined the publishing house, Gaffi editore had just published a volume titled “L’arte di aspettare”: a thematically spurious collection of personal essays by New York writer and critic Phillip Lopate. Upon the conclusion of all the exams of my academic curriculum, I started to think about a possible topic for my thesis. The dilemma was between cinema and literature, with the addition of a further mandatory principle: to go abroad, again. To wave together the whole canvas, as life sometimes can naturally do, was the reading of some of the essays by Lopate: not only acute reflections against the “joie de vivre”, but also opinionated and well-informed critical pieces on cinema, especially Italian and French cinema. And yet, apart from the few pieces included in the volume just published by Gaffi editore, nothing else was yet translated into Italian. I had found my topic; a generous scholarship from La Sapienza University did the rest, allowing me to go to New York for three months to collect the needed materials as well as two interviews with Lopate.

The problem is: I can hardly do one thing at the time. A few weeks before leaving for New York – it was October 2008 – I informed ANSA about my fast-approaching departure and stay in the United States, and I was granted the chance to officially collaborate for the news agency covering the upcoming Presidential elections, i.e., the first historical win of Barack Obama. Needless to say, the months in New York metamorphosed quickly into an exuberant life rollercoaster: daily press conferences, on-field reporting from swinging states, testimonies from New York black communities – and just about the time to conduct two long interviews with Lopate and gather all his most relevant publications on cinema and American movie critics, which he was kind enough to gift me with.

Back in Rome, I had a luggage full of photocopies, pages to be translated and notes to arrange into a proper scholarly work whose overall structure still escaped me. Hence, I decided – to make things easier – to go to work in Paris for six months: not only was this the cradle of the Nouvelle Vague loved by Lopate, but I needed a job, and an independent publishing house – Max Milo – agreed on taking me onboard as an attaché de presse. It was a breathless run – à bout de souffle: daytime work and nighttime writing, shifting back and forth across French, English, and Italian. My graduation cum laude eventually took place in a sweaty June afternoon in Rome.

At that point, encouraged by my supervisor and mentor in Rome, I had the chance to start a PhD at Sorbonne university in Paris on American literature – but the truth is that I had enough of books, essays, and interviews. I wanted something different; something refreshing.

A new opportunity materialized out of a joint collaboration between the Italian Ministry of Culture, a network of Italian universities among which La Sapienza of Rome, and the Australian association COASIT, tasked with providing educational services for Italian migrants to Australia. Together, these three bodies developed a one-year program aimed at supplying local schools in the state of Victoria with native Italian teachers able to deliver classes of Italian as a second language to pupils from elementary to secondary schools. After an evaluation of my CV and a job interview, I obtained one of the four positions available from La Sapienza university – and off I was to Melbourne. Writing did not abandon me during this time either, as I kept a year-long blog recounting my experience down under.

In passing, I shall note that while teaching from 8am to 4pm Monday to Friday in a primary School of Sandringham’s bay area, from 5pm onward I collaborated regularly with SBS Italian radio, editing daily news and conducting interviews on faits divers for the Italian audience in Australia.

For better or worse, Australia was a bubble for me. Still today, when I think about it and recollect all the moments I lived there – as if rehearsing a praise – a sense of serenity and self-fulfillment run through my mind my body. That’s a fact. And yet, the whole experience remains a sort of self-contained box; a wonderful and unexpected detour of life; a suspended and almost unnecessary twist, like a baroque carving on a church façade.

So, what do to once back to the old Europe? Let’s not rush too much ahead. As a form of cultural and climatic decompression, indeed, I decided, on my way back from Australia, to stop over in south-east Asia, for a two-month journey embracing Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand. A truly disconnecting experience. On this occasion, too, I systematically took travel notes along the road. Once home, these notes underwent a long decantation process – of the ideas they contained as much as of the person who had jotted them down – into a small drawer of my desk, and it was only a few years later that I had the courage to bring them out and rework them into a travel novel.

One year spent on the other side of the world can be a rather enlightening experience. Plus, once on the road I had time to think and plan what I wanted to do: I felt mature enough to pursue the PhD I had put on hold. But after 18 months or so outside of academia, my interests had shifted, and I wanted to build my PhD’s application on a more solid ground. This is why I enrolled into a Master by research in Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. I knew what I was keen to research – travel literature, what else? – but I needed the right theoretical and methodological toolbox.

One year went by quite quickly in Amsterdam, after which I started to look for a funded PhD position in Europe that could accommodate my research project, officially on contemporary off/online travel writing about China. All the criteria for the choice were there: what, why, how, where; what was missing was the hosting institution and the money. After a few months of quest (a fairly short span of time, I came to realize afterwards), I found my place – supported by a full scholarship – at the School of Fine Art History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds.

For roughly three years – a remarkable time for a person used to relocate on a six-month basis – I settled down. Sort of. At least I tried. At the beginning my project configured an ethnographic-driven comparison between printed and online travel writings about China, with the Middle Kingdom as the focus of my work for two reasons: 1) a personal fascination with the country; 2) the desire to give the topic a political appeal. Initially, authors I considered were contemporary Westerners (texts were in English, French, Italian), advancing an analysis, at once, inter-medial, inter-cultural, and inter-linguistic. Yet, while developing the research, I realized, on the one hand, that it was impossible for me to avoid a discussion on older travelogues – at least dating back to the second half of the 19^th century – whose publication contributed to establish a proper literary tradition as well as to crystallize pivotal discourses around China which endure to the present. As a consequence, a whole chapter in the thesis came to be dedicated to a (cursory) survey of travelogues by Western authors from the 19^th century to the 1980s – without missing, ça va sans dire, a reference to the Godfather of them all: Marco Polo. On the other hand, I felt quite early on during my research that the whole project risked reifying that same polarization West-East which it tried to debunk or – at least – to criticize by relying on the direct testimonies of the authors. And little, in this respect, could do a reversal of the gaze, that is, an analysis of how contemporary Chinese travel writers look at and represent the West in their off/online travelogues. What I sought was an insider perspective that could unpack and bring to the fore the “indigenous epistemologies” traversing Chinese-written travelogues about China.

So, why don’t go to China? After all, I needed first-hand interviews and texts which were barely accessible from Europe. I shall also note, however, that while during the three years of my PhD I took regular classes of Chinese, my knowledge of the language was still limited, so I had to look – at least as an entry point to the topic – to texts that also had been translated into English. The convergence of these thoughts and factors materialized into two research grants – from the Worldwide University Network and the Universities’ China Committee in London – to conduct fieldwork for four months in Hong Kong, where I was hosted at the English Department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. While systemically different from Mainland China – if not a geopolitical and sociocultural unicum altogether – Hong Kong represented for me the “right distance”, or better the “fitting compromise” from which to approach the topic. And so, off I was again: in March 2015 I took a flight with destination Hong Kong (where I stayed for three months) before moving to Mainland China, which I traversed by land from south to north over a month. When I first landed in Hong Kong, I only had one interview scheduled, one local contact, and one windowless-6-square-meter bedroom rented on Airbnb and shared with a young woman and her daughter. It was especially the interviews – and the concrete risk of failure – that occupied my mind: Had I allotted enough time? I had identified libraries and scholars who might direct me towards possible interviewees, but I had no certainties. Then – also helped by my previous work as a journalist – I learnt to dwell in the realm of the hypothetical, to wait for the right time, and to enjoy the unexpected, especially that kind of open-endedness that only Chinese guanxi – the proverbial networking – are able to unfold. At the end of my fieldwork, I had collected 14 interviews, including three in Mainland China (two more had to be canceled along my way up to Beijing). I should also mention that during those four months I set for myself the goal to keep a travel blog, regularly updated on an almost daily basis. Its content eventually informed a practice-led self-reflection on my entire research, added as an Afterword to the thesis (unfortunately, the blog is no longer accessible because I stopped paying the domain and forgot to transfer all the materials). At the end of June, it was time to head back to the UK – which I reached, of course, by land, over three weeks, riding a train through Mongolia, Russia, and Europe. How could I miss that chance? So much for sustainability.

Once back, it was the PhD that needed to be brought home. No more delays. I moved to London and for six months I wrote on a 12-hour basis, accompanied by good flatmates and a daily glass of prosecco (maybe two) in the evening. I had planned to finish the PhD with the beginning of new year and then start looking for a job in London while waiting for my defense. That was the plan. Then, just when I was about to submit, I received an email.

The email was from Hong Kong, from Robert Simanowski, a professor I had met at a conference there, whose work in media theory I knew well and admired. He had a postdoc position to fill for one year thanks to a grant coming from the Hong Kong Research Council. The project aimed to explore forms of self-writing and self-representation on social media. The “how” was still to be defined.

With the alternative being a stiff dose of unemployment in unaffordable London, nine months after my departure, I was back to Hong Kong. This time with a proper salary allowing me to live on my own in the city and commute daily to the City University.

Research-wise, initially the idea was to scrape social media to get the data for our analysis, but it soon became clear that this was not possible for technical as well as ethical reasons. So, we decided to involve – on a voluntary basis – the students of our course on “Social Media and Self-Writing” in an ongoing self-reported autoethnography covering the whole semester. Responses from the students were warm and noteworthy: they – too – were keen to get critical insights into their own daily social media diet. In my double role as a postdoc fellow and teaching assistant, I delivered various lectures, and I was in charge of the design and coordination of the whole digital autoethnography. Moreover, I conducted the analysis of the data by implementing qualitative (thematic analysis) and quantitative (network analysis) methods.

The return from Hong Kong meant – for once – the chance to slow down. 2017 was indeed a rather odd year in many professional and personal respects. It was, I would say, an unexpected sabbatical. Not a whole year, to be precise, nine months; but it felt longer. I could not find my place, my peace, my thing. I applied, diversified, initiated and aborted projects, took a rest. Disconnected. Breathed in, breathed out. It was not easy nor pleasant, at least at first; it was probably (or maybe not) necessary. Who knows. Simply put, it was a “no-period”, from which however I learnt the art – largely beyond my horizon at that time – of patience. Yet, it was not an unfruitful sabbatical. I took my time to systematize heretic ideas, writings on hold, reconnect with old friends and my own country, where I had not been since 2009. In those months, I stayed on a flat along the Adriatic coast, jogging every morning, meditating, reading the newspaper, trying to eat healthy, having one coffee per day. The whole pack. After nine months, I sent three books into publication (here, here and here). Then a call arrived.

Two dear friends and colleagues at the Polytechnic Institute in Milan – Giovanna di Rosario and Matteo Ciastellardi – asked me if I was around and willing to take on a part-time teaching position. I said one of the warmest “yes” of my professional life. Still today, I consider the two-and-half years in Milan as a wonderful – albeit underpaid – time and a great teaching endeavor. I learnt how to properly design a course, how to craft a learning experience, and what it takes to be a truly committed teacher – especially beyond the hours in class. I learnt to listen to students and – guess what? – they have a lot to say; what they need (most of the time) is just guidance to refine their dreams, thoughts, ideas.

During my time in Milan, I also met another one of my academic idols: Derrick de Kerckhove, intellectual heir and further prosecutor – for over thirty years at the University of Toronto – of Marshall McLuhan’s work. First, I was his teaching assistant in the course “Anthropology of Communication” at Polytechnic Institute, then we collaborated on a revised and updated edition, for the Chinese audience, of his seminal work The Skin of Culture; from there, we embarked on a five-year journey leading to the book Quantum Ecology: Why and How New Information Technologies Will Reshape Societies, published in 2024 by MIT Press.

The teaching in Milan gave me not only economic oxygen (to say it plainly), but also the leverage to apply for other academic positions. I knew what my expertise and research plans were – I only needed an open-minded environment to host them. Ultimately, this environment turned out to be the Nurkse Department of Governance and Innovation at Tallinn University of Technology, which granted me a two-year research funding to explore forms of datafication through both a social – Estonia is the digital republic par excellence – and geopolitical lens – notably, the role of Chinese ICT firms in Sub-Sahara Africa. I particularly cared about this latter topic because I saw it as a link to my previous affiliation to Hong Kong and Mainland China, which I planned to keep weaving through an ethnography in two dislocated settings: South Africa and Kenya. I confess that – at first – I had doubts about relocating to Estonia: I was 35, the country lays on a climatic borderline for me, and I did not speak the language. As it turned out, however, I had two extremely prolific and personally rewarding years up there and to these days I maintain several contacts in the country (but the climate, yes, remains a hindrance for me). Unfortunately, most of my plans involving China and Africa got severely disrupted by the outbreak of the pandemic, which prevented me to conduct fieldwork on two occasions, turning the research – chiefly – into a policy analysis.

Not without further doubts – but largely driven by external personal reasons – in 2021 I left Estonia and I landed to the Department of Urbanism at Delft University of Technology. Strangely enough for a humanist, this was the third technical university I was employed in, but I guess this tells something about my attitude and pleasure to think and work across boundaries. And it was a timely call, indeed: as part of the Knowledge Center Open Data, in Delft I had the chance to expand the work I did in Tallinn as well as through my collaboration with Derrick. Since the beginning of my appointment at TU Delft, I developed two intertwined research axes: 1) a sociotechnical approach to the digitalization of the urban environment (specially, the co-development, co-implementation and participatory use of city digital twins); 2) the design of a commons-inspired fair data ecosystem negotiating individual and collective data interests and values. This research also found a reflection in the elective course “Ethics for the Data-driven City” which I have created, designed, and taught to students from across the whole university. Research aside, the stay in the Netherlands – actually, a return – was inspiring in various respects: for the diversity of perspectives I encountered, the people I had the chance to meet and establish collaboration with, as well as the opportunities that kept arising at every corner. Now, it is time for a new page.