CURRENT MISSION

Meeting people, intersecting different personal stories and experiences, even if just for a moment; communicating, and letting other people know my home town and its surroundings.

ABOUT ME

Well, I can't prevent myself from feeling a bit silly each time that I think about describing myself. I'm obviously none special at all, just an ordinary person among billions of other people, who definitely doesn't feel at ease with the concept of self-description. Maybe all that can make sense of, and somehow 'redeem', our existences is necessarily and always someone else's 'narration' of us; someone else's 'glance'.
Anyway... maybe this point of view is a sort of fragment of a self-description, after all.

Oh...by the way, in his notebooks Jean Baudrillard writes that 'being against war, telling stories, singing in the shower are signs of a good nature'.

PHILOSOPHY

"Me? I'm just a lawnmower - you can tell me by the way I walk."

Thanks to Genesis and Peter Gabriel for the content of the quotation above.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

Unfortunately I don't have a couch to offer, but I can show you around the town, and more than that..., and let you know places and sides of its history that guides usually don't even touch. And then, I like to talk about (almost) anything ;-), and to listen to other people's stories, experiences and points of view.
Create your own visitor map!

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

Since I'm a real rookie, until now I had only one experience, in Prague, where I had the pleasure and privilege to meet a brilliant young woman, who's an experienced and very active CS2 member.

Interests

• singing
• socializing
• history

Music, Movies, and Books

I'm open to almost any kind of music. Anyway, among my favourite kinds are: early music, renaissance music, baroque music, celtic traditional music. About italian music, I can't surely do without some of our singers-songwriters: Fabrizio De André, Francesco Guccini, Francesco De Gregori, Ivano Fossati, Franco Battiato, Angelo Branduardi.
Coming to pop/rock music...I tried very hard to make a list of the bands/artists that I love, but I found it almost impossible. So consider that I love many many groups from the 60's, the 70's, the 80's, and so on. Eventually, If I should compulsorily pick someone among all of them as the dearest one to me, well...I'd say: Peter Gabriel. Yes! PG forever.

Picking from film directors that I love: Stanley Kubrik above all, Ingmar Bergmann, David Linch, Peter Greenaway, Robert Bresson, François Truffaut, Robert Altman, Akira Kurosawa, Ken Loach, The Cohen Brothers, Woody Allen, Tim Burton, Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, Lars Von Trier, Kim Ki-duk, Wong Kar Wai, Zhang Yimou...
I love cinema, I can't even imagine my life without it, as well as without either music or literaure. I can watch anything. I usually go to the cinema alone. I never left a movie theater before the end of the film, even the worst one ever; and I can't stand those who phone, chat or eat during a showing.
Thinking of a movie, right now, I don't know why I can't avoid seeing, with the eye of my mind, Robert De Niro's smile at the end of 'Once upon a time in America', and recalling his character's reply to his old friend Moe's question: 'Hey Noodles, what did you do in the last 35 years?!' 'I went to bed early.'

Books that I love: they are so many (philosophy apart, obvioulsy)! What I can say here is that it all really began - as a very young boy - with Dostoevskij and Melville (in particular, 'Notes from the Underground' and 'Moby Dick', respectively); and then...
Picking at random among the authors that I love: Thomas Bernhard, Ingeborg Bachmann, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Robert Musil, Samuel Beckett, Agota Kristof, Magda Szabo, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer, Italo Calvino, Michel Tournier, Daniil Charms, Michail Bulgakov, Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Roberto Calasso, Cesare Pavese, Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond Queneau, Marguerite Yourcenar, Milan Kundera, Arthur Schnitzler, Jorge Luis Borges... Nice muddle, isn't it?
Ok, it's pointless; they're too many.

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

I met something ineffable as I looked down the rocky cliffs of Inis Mór, sheer to the livid waves of the ocean, while sitting on a thin layer of weeds and lichens, laboriously set down there by the millenary work of man and the elements; slapped by the violent wind, mute with joy and admiration; 'a dot, a nothingness, on the edge of a continent': extreme end of Europe; pressed and crushed, for an instant of being, by the pressure of the whole, overwhelming, unspeakable mass of her history.
In front of me, the immutable, abyssal openess of three thousand kilometers of water, and then - invisible, but sure - America: another history.

Countries I’ve Visited

Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Ireland, Morocco, Romania, Spain, United Kingdom, United States

Countries I’ve Lived In

Italy

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