I like to create.
I wasn't born digital. I've watched the digital world emerge, grow and change everything around me.
I was born on 30 April 1975. Exactly eleven years later, on my birthday, the CNUCE research centre in Pisa established Italy's first connection to the Internet.
A curious coincidence, considering that this network, still unknown to most people, would become my profession a few years later.
My education was mainly in economics, but the path that eventually led me to the web took a very different direction.
Where it all began
My first real encounter with computers came in 1995, just after finishing school. Around that time I also attended a regionally recognised vocational course for webmasters, earning a formal qualification in a profession that was still being invented.
Digital video editing was already among my interests. I was fascinated by the idea of using a computer not just to process information, but to create something.
Yet the Internet wasn't my job. That would come a few years later.
The web as it used to be
Between the late 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium, more affordable Internet providers helped turn the network from a niche curiosity into something increasingly accessible.
Around 2000, building websites became my profession. Home computers were spreading, affordable digital cameras made producing images easier, and more businesses began to understand why they needed an online presence.
It was a very different world.
Social networks as we know them didn't exist yet, nor did platforms that let almost anyone create a site in a few clicks. Building an online presence required specialised skills and often meant starting from scratch.
Those were also the days when registering an Italian domain meant sending a fax with a letter of responsibility, signed by hand.
Today it may sound prehistoric. To me, it's simply how it all began.
What changes. What remains.
In more than twenty-five years, I've seen the web transform profoundly.
Tools, expectations, costs and the ways we communicate have all changed. Social media created new opportunities, ready-made platforms made publishing easier, and the market became far more competitive.
Economic crises have also changed what businesses need and how they choose to invest.
Today, someone turning to a professional isn't necessarily looking for a person who can simply put a site online. They're looking for experience, an understanding of specific needs and solutions that actually work.
That's the part of my work that still interests me: understanding what's needed, finding a solution and making it happen.
Away from the screen
Digital technology occupies a large part of my life, but not all of it.
I enjoy reading, listening to music and spending time with objects that have a story. I'm particularly fond of vinyl records and vintage audio equipment, perhaps because I enjoy a more deliberate, less immediate way of listening.
Another passion is making tactile, material-based artwork: colours, surfaces and materials transformed into something new. You can find some of these pieces in the Materia section of this site.
I don't know whether there's a real connection between designing a website, listening to an old record and working on a painted surface.
Perhaps there is. After all, they're different ways of giving an idea a form.
And maybe that's why, whenever I have to say who I am, I still find myself saying: a bit of everything.