My rebellion, all luggage and airline tickets.

Me flying in Cornwall, August 2012.

I am writing alfresco from the garden of a semi-detached house in a green village just outside Cambridge. I blew 33 years few days ago. I left my country with no regrets by one of many Mayflower crossing the English Channel with many young dreamers, "Puritans", rebels fleeing Catholic Italy.
Yes, because even Italy has its insurgents. At 33 I could not witness the crucifixion of my happiness. Graduating in History in Venice with honours, I packed some other smoky academic satisfactions and then convinced myself that in addition to being a nation of poets, artists, saints, thinkers, scientists, we are also a nation of seafarers and transmigrants. Always ready with a suitcase, now I feel that. I am also Marco Polo. Jack London wrote in "The wanderer of the stars": << I went for ten thousand generations, I've owned a number of bodies. I still exist, I am the life, I have never ceased to be the spark that still flares up, filling with wonder the face of time. >> As soon as the news adjourned with certainty the amount of debt per capita of 33 thousand euro hanging over the bowed head of every Italian, I decided to exist still as a free man, I raised my head and I shot my arrow without return. I planned my escape from that coward debt per capita. Coward him that he was chasing me, not me. I have always lived happily and simply without going into debt, I, "puritan", could not accept someone beginning to assign debts to me. What the hell, life, the spirit is the only reality to last. Whoever is trying to perpetrate even debts, attributing them to young unborn people, breaks  the generational pact in an inhumane way. With this anger I left Italy. Who ruined and spoiled my country now would presume to leave to posterity also the bill unpaid? This time I said No. My rebellion, all luggage and airline tickets.

This picture was taken by me in the Holkham Hall (UK). 

I speak of life, with the bitter realization that every day someone, even suffocated by debts, renounces its wonder. I want to share the strength of this alternative with all those who are no longer able to dream and who feel confined in the camp of the crisis. Aren't the pangs of hunger to hurt but psychological ones. The alternative sees us discover ourselves as unmatched sailors and transmigrating without fear. I am speaking about an adventure around the world, of course based on more than 80 days. Frankly, I do not know if I will ever come back. Leave and discover your true potential, that's my motto. Marco Polo did, so we can. There is honour in leaving. Abandon the idea that leaving nowadays means accepting the role of the sad immigrant who sadly dries  a trickle of tears on the parapet of life. I come from the Italian offices where you do not produce anything except chat and work for your colleague. Here I finally rolled up my sleeves and started to work hard in supermarkets and by becoming a waiter in Colleges. The difference is that abroad it seems as if you are walking on a cloud. You still dream.  John Steinbeck once said, “People do not take trips. Trips take people."  If you decide to leave a hungry village you are a talent because you secure yourself more chances of survival. My generation, that can't see a future even if using binoculars, is paying the burden of this crisis. Due to an old model of gerontocracy. The unknown adventure of a flight abroad oxygenates ideas. The Italian bleeding of talents as an underground river of lava is flowing continuously abroad thousands of young thinkers who share the same idea of making a radical change in their lifestyle. Few people notice and analyze this lava that anticipates a future eruption. Few people attempt to investigate the state of mind of someone who explores, who takes advantage of becoming a pioneer, who, rebellious, opens up new tracks and shares with others, in an Italian society dominated by conformism and homogenization, that devour the very core of the vital spirit of a person, the passion for adventure. Only by travelling will you prevent that your soul, bored, leaving your body. 

Jean-François Millet, Mountain Landscape with Lightning, The National Gallery, London, vers 1675.

In fact, in a happy metaphor about "frogs around a pond" Plato warned of the terribly limited prospect, echoed by many fairy tales, of a frog in a sort of well that looks upward to small circular sky, convinced to know all the starry firmament and the universe. There are many  terribly unhappy, people that no longer feel Marco Polo within themselves, conditioned as they are by conformity and traditionalism, which seem to ensure a peaceful life. In reality for the adventurous spirit of a man there is nothing more devastating than a secure future. There is a lot of 'Into the Wild' in what I am writing. The books of Jack London, G. Orwell, H. D. Thoreau, M. Twain and Emilio Salgari have put me on the road. For me the joy of living comes from the encounter with new experiences. You have just met mine. This is what we have forgotten, we who have run aground on the beach of the traditionalism our Santa Maria. Christopher Columbus, Marco Polo and Amerigo Vespucci knew how to find land where inertia wanted to see only the sea. In stagnation, regression instead only sees crowds of courtiers appeal mutually Magnificent or Magnanimous, now Emeritus and so on. A life spent in formal pleasantries, a muffled world where baronial hypocrisy reigns and where revolutionary and brilliant ideas are nipped in the bud as if they were matchsticks. In this sense, I came to the conclusion that we need to find out ourselves as decent citizens of a borderless world, discovered through empirical experience and direct observation. Explore, finding ways to express ourselves professionally in a job according to a utility parameter in a world that we have to conceive differently. In Italy you work waiting for your payslip without paying attention to the mental disposition, psychological and ethical qualities, the spirit of cooperation, the sense of honesty, sacrifice and the spirit of initiative, perseverance, intellectual and experimental curiosity of the workers. Let me  quote this: << The "international sense" has an ethical component and a cognitive one: the first is related to the concept that everyone has about life, the concept of man, his equal in dignity, social solidarity, a global destiny of humanity. This ethical attitude, which in a more mature form is presented as "love for others", is essential in the study because the "others" are not considered things and numbers and variables, but human beings marked by their originality and authenticity that only respect and esteem allow it to penetrate deep with patience, tact, wisdom and the knowledge that every human individual or society has its hidden depths. That result is not always easy to read for those who keep coming from another cultural context. >> (Orizio B., Comparative Pedagogy, Brescia, 1977, p. 60-61)