In my free time I am most of the time playing music with instruments and computers (or you never know what might be useful), if I am not doing that I am playing basketball.
About me... kinda intellectual but not on the obnoxious side, I love tea and cake time chilling and talking with friends.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

Cause my dear friend Ilaria told me it's great and you get to meet good people. Some of her best parties were thrown thanks to Couchsurfing so yes, couchsurfing and good people = good time!

Sorry for all the unanswered requests or messages, that's life.

Interests

• walking
• alternative music
• art
• techno
• urbex

Music, Movies, and Books

Three songs for my experience on Couchsurfing:

The Vaccines - Wetsuit
Beirut - Postcards from Italy
Alice Phoebe Lou - Nostalgia

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

After some years I can definitely say: Couchsurfing!
It has been crazy.
The beginning was just an uncontrollable happening, meetings on a deep emotional level and shared experiencing of the living, long walks around the city, dinners and music, party party party ( lots of them) and with people who made them great (that's what makes activities more meaningful, people) and thinking that all of this started only for a coincidence, a message not expected, at the right moment... and this was the story I was telling when welcoming my guests, encouraging them to tell theirs.

After the start I was thinking of hosting people just for the sake of helping, make them spare some money and having a fun time in the city, then a genuine curiosity in meeting people from all over the world, literally, in my kitchen.

I really like the idea of a house as a place where you have to bring everything you need ( in fact I had nothing for the very two first couchsurfers, only a yoga mat they shared, editor's note...), then things get mixed and the creation part in which one brings, one puts what one wants to find there, where one finds what another one brings there, and in the chaos, Babababam, some find pieces of their puzzle.

Sometimes it happens.

Other times, evidently, this fun thought was an unbalanced one in practical terms (you attentive reader might get it) and so the rule was hospitality in exchange for plants, flowers or food to share (and well, also other practical rules of the house for the couchsurfers).

But not everything is roses and confetti, human nature in all its form and ways can make it wonder or toilet or meh...to make it short I can safely say that I have gained myself a master in Tourism Hospitality and Conciergerie Cleanings and Logistics, I can think to write it in my CV.

On a sleepless night I've decided to scroll through the message archive and count and read, getting surprised about the numbers (I could have been a millionaire...), about how the people on this platform changed, the way of behaving on CS through the years and the requests. I've seen again some pearls, some parts of my life, good memories over everything else.

Teach, Learn, Share

The Grand Tour, or journey of culture and leisure through Europe, is a widespread practice whose varied, unmistakable characteristics respond to the mentality of the time and its changes.
Spanning from the 17th century to the first quarter of the 19th century, the Grand Tour left deep traces in culture and, in particular, in the novel, the genre with which it was sometimes confused.
The reasons that make travel books the most popular literary genre, especially in the 18th century, the age of reason, involve the salient aspects of an entire era.
There are no books from which one derives greater delight than those that tell of travel, and this also reflects the cosmopolitan spirit of an era.

An epoch or civilisation that wants to know the world, that believes in the idea of the natural man to whom it is possible, thanks to the hypothetical uniformity of human nature under every sky, to communicate with different ethnic and cultural realities, to overcome linguistic barriers and above all to understand them in their peculiarities of customs and habits.

This last aspect constitutes in the Age of Enlightenment, the sense of what is right and what is not, it promotes the benevolent attitude towards one's fellow human beings and allows one to grasp everywhere the pleasure of the new, of variety, of diversity, in the optimistic faith in a common language of reference and understanding.

Then there are those sentimental voyages, those that turn the traditional view of the old-fashioned traveller upside down, shifting the investigation from man's outward behaviour, from his customs and habits, to his inner life, focusing on emotions, feelings and motions of the heart.
In this way, the traveller becomes a mirror fit not so much to reflect the world around him or her, but to project onto it, altering it in various ways, the reflection of the own feelings and emotional reactions.

In this attitude, one glimpses on the horizon the romantic traveller who, unlike his Enlightenment-era counterpart, is attracted precisely by the irreducibility of the cultural differences and customs of the humanity of the countries visited.

Moreover, in front of the picturesque, the sublime or the horrid of the landscapes he passes through, even before the reactions of reason, it is his feeling that vibrates and, like the wind harp - the famous Romantic symbol - becomes a song that describes them, depicts them and, in its own way, recreates them.
For contemporary man, travel is a rapid and more or less comfortable movement from one place to another in one's own country, on a continent, on the planet.

At the time of the Grand Tours of Europe, the travel of the English, French, Germans, Spaniards, Russians, Scandinavians, and later Americans, was a unique and basic experience that required careful preparation, shrewdness and above all organisation, starting with the choice of means of transport.

In the 18th century, the roads in European countries and Italy were almost always uneven and bumpy and in rainy periods they were often flooded.
Bridges, especially stone ones, were rare. On the Rhine, for example, there were no bridges below Strasbourg. North of Paris, the Seine had to be crossed several times on barges, and the Po, past Turin, had no bridges until the wooden one at Ferrara.
Rivers and canals were not only crossed, but travelled as real waterways that supplemented those on land. Among the most travelled and described was the network of canals with their proper locks that connected Bologna with Ferrara and Padua. From Padua one continued towards Venice by navigating on the Brenta.
A privileged destination of the Grand Tour, Italy imposed the arduous feat of crossing the Alps before granting the traveller the chance to enjoy its attractions.
From Mont Cenis to St Gotthard, Simplon and Brenner, the crossing of the passes is described as a real initiation test carried out by different means and in different ways.
One component of the material journey is the post inns which, in addition to being places of refreshment and overnight accommodation, ensured the change of horses without which it would have been impossible to proceed.
This is the reason why the travellers' itineraries along the peninsula are always the same, i.e. those served by the inns of post with their changes of mounts.
Travellers on the Grand Tour left many amusing accounts of these inns, which very often, especially on lonely routes between one city and another, turn out to be real hovels.
Stendhal dwells on the infamous inn at Pietra Mala, on the Apennines between Bologna and Florence, where the hostess, in cahoots with the village priest, made patrons disappear after robbing them.
On the border between the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and the Papal States was the inn in Radicofani, which enjoyed a very bad reputation.
For accommodation and food, Laurence Sterne writes that he was half-poisoned by the rotten food.
All of which reminds us that like any other journey of the time, the Grand Tour was always an undertaking that required initiative and the ability to endure hardship.
It was therefore a practice that put travellers of all categories, aristocrats and rich included, on an equal footing of temporary equality.
In the middle of the 18th century, Lord Chesterfield replied to his son, who complained that his carriage had broken down at the foot of the Alps, that this inconvenience was only a foretaste of many other difficulties he would have to face on the journey of a lifetime.

Well, at the end of all the reading, you can think twice and more before sending a message, it tells a lot about you.

Countries I’ve Visited

Denmark, England, France, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Scotland, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, United States

Countries I’ve Lived In

England, Germany, Ireland, Scotland