Life

I was born in Naples in 1973 – the year of the last cholera epidemic.

We soon moved to Florence because of my father’s work. I grew up there, captivated by my mother’s stories and songs, which convinced me that we came from a bigger, more colourful, fun and human place. She instilled a sense of belonging in me with the same naturalness with which she embraced me. Even the language was different, it sounded heavy to us.

The first stories were those told by my grandfather. The exploits of the paladins of France embodied in Sicilian puppets, and the misadventures of Pinocchio. Once I learnt to read, I devoured books on history, geography and science. The thing I loved doing most of all was drawing. Then, somehow, I expressed a desire to play the violin, which I went on to study for six years.

We lived in a quiet neighbourhood surrounded by nature. I walked to school with my best friend and spent many afternoons out on the street playing volleyball with the neighbours. I hated football but was passionate about tennis. In my first years of secondary school, I took up theatre, an experience that would prove invaluable later on.

My teenage years were at first withdrawn and repressed, then explosive and reckless. A time when foreign languages and literature became the main means of crossing boundaries, exploring other worlds, and then making them my home. At the end of secondary school in 1992, I moved to Dublin for a great love. I enrolled at Trinity College to study Languages and Art History and, at the same time, found work as an Italian teacher.

I got involved in student society life, eventually becoming treasurer of the Modern Languages Society and secretary of the Gay and Lesbian Society. And I won the Concours de Français oral, organised annually by the Alliance Française and the French Embassy in Dublin to recognise the student with the best spoken French across all of Ireland’s universities.

At the end of my second year, it became clear that I needed to spend some time in Germany to improve my German. I turned down a departmental scholarship that would have allowed me to spend nine months at the University of Kiel. I simply wasn’t interested in the placement. I decided instead to take a gap year; better to fend for myself than to miss out on Berlin, the destination of my dreams. Here I supported myself by washing dishes in the canteen at the Hochschule für Künste and giving private Italian lessons. In the final months, I also worked selling copies of the daily Der Tagespiegel fresh off the press at night on the underground trains. I devoted some of my free time to volunteering at the Schwules Museum on Mehringdam and began to take an interest in the history of the LGBTQ+ movement in Weimar Germany. This lead me to decide to write my dissertation on the work of John Henry Mackay, a pioneer of gay liberation in 1920s Berlin.

Two years later – with top marks and a heavy heart – I left Trinity. I could have stayed in Ireland, but restlessness and uncertainty got the better of me. I secured a scholarship for a master’s degree in Italian Studies at University College London, and a new bridge was built. Further funding allowed me to stay and complete a PhD under the supervision of Emmanuela Tandello, a scholar of 20^th century poetry. My chosen topic: homoeroticism in the work of Umberto Saba – my attempt to open up queer studies to the Italian tradition. Four enriching but tough years, during which, alongside my research, I began to teach in the department. As well as going for a swim several times a week and not neglecting the London house scene.

Summers, as always, were a different matter. I travelled across Europe in fits and starts, relying on the hospitality of friends, lovers or new acquaintances, to reach Italy and the sun. I often ventured further afield, and explored Greece as an adult. I went clubbing in Mykonos but also discovered the pleasure of hiking, of getting to know places slowly on foot.

Having completed my PhD, I spent a year at the British Academy in Rome thanks to a British Academy Fellowship. For the first time in many years, I had time. All I had to do was research. No practical tasks.

The city enveloped and enchanted me. 

The Academy paid me to broaden the scope of my doctoral thesis to encompass the entire body of gay male poetry from the Italian twentieth century. And it is through this research that I came into contact with figures from the cultural world who would become friends: Massimo Consoli, the self-proclaimed father of the Italian LGBTQ+ movement and friend of the poet Dario Bellezza; the literary critic Francesco Gnerre, a pioneer of gay studies in Italy; Elio Pecora, writer and biographer of Sandro Penna; and the essayist Andrea Pini. My Roman Holiday proved a turning point, not least because I wrote an entire collection of poems in one go. Miraculously, it was accepted by the very first publisher to whom I sent it.

New ties were binding me back to Italy after a long period of wandering and linguistic displacement. But I returned to the UK for a temporary post at Christ Church, Oxford, teaching Italian literature. Yet my gaze began to turn elsewhere. By the end of the year, my thoughts had clarified and I decided to return, after fourteen years abroad, more or less permanently to Italy.

The collection, entitled Sensi diversi, had just been published. At thirty-three, I was not a particularly precocious debutant, but a few months later I was awarded the Camaiore Prize for a first work.

Coming back was harder than leaving. It takes more effort to readjust to one’s own culture than it does to feel at ease in a foreign one. What’s more, from a literary viewpoint I felt as though I had been catapulted from an unknown planet. With a great deal of study and experience behind me, but no apparent literary apprenticeship.

But books have a way of moving people. Thanks to mine, I came into contact with a Florence different from the one in my memory, which blended seamlessly with the connections made in Rome. At my first public appearance, I was approached by Mariella Bettarini, whom I later discovered to be the doyenne of poetry in Florence. Beside her was her partner Gabriella Maleti, a poet and photographer, with whom she ran a publishing house and edited a magazine. And then there were Marco Simonelli and Rosaria Lo Russo, who are still part of my life today.

I met up again with Lino Centi, an artist and designer with an international career, with whom my relationship would never falter over time. I lent my voice to the public readings of his first novel, and he dedicated works to me. I first set foot in his enticing home-studio, perched high above the rooftops of Via Palazzuolo, at the age of fourteen, when I was still neither fish nor fowl.

I began working as a lecturer in art history and Italian literature for the James Madison University Abroad Programme in Florence. I slipped quite naturally into the English-speaking bubble of the universities for international students in my city. But I kept a foot in two camps and also collaborated with the Trekking Italia association, which gave me the chance to design itineraries and lead hiking groups. Among various destinations in southern Italy, I ended up getting to know Basilicata very well, the Italian region that has most fascinated me since I was a child.

Marco Simonelli became my great friend. With him I shared and discussed the poems I wrote, receiving his in return; we exchanged books to read and poetic gossip. We began to appear together at readings and presentations. Thanks to Claudio Finelli, a Neapolitan activist, poet and playwright, we secured a regular presence in my hometown and were invited to the cultural weeks accompanying the revitalised Campania Pride. We were often together in Viareggio, where his parents have a house. Leisurely days spent cycling through the pine forest with his partner to while away hours on the beloved Lecciona beach.

Marco also introduced me to lots of people. Among the first was Giuseppe Girimonti Greco, then at the start of a brilliant career as a translator from French, who organised soirées in his house crammed with books and had a unique talent for bringing people together. I owe him for his constant support over the years, consisting not only of advice and contacts, but above all, his acts of generosity.

I continued to write, published in journals and anthologies, attended festivals, and forged new connections within the worlds of academia and poetry, including Franco Buffoni, poet and scholar of LGBTQ+ literature. I also supported the work of other poets. To mark the tenth anniversary of Dario Bellezza’s death, I edited a special feature for Columbia University’s Italian Poetry Review, which included my English translations of a selection of his poems. For the Korean poet Ko Un, a multiple Nobel Prize nominee, I wrote an introductory essay for the Italian edition of his long poem Venti (Winds). I also edited and translated two volumes of verse: Goethe’s Roman Elegies and a selection from the works of Christina Rossetti.

Meanwhile I completed a new book of poetry, Territori d’oltremare, which recounted my years in London, Rome and Greece, and submitted it to a competition. It won the Sandro Penna Prize for unpublished work, to which will be added – following publication – special mentions in the Astrolabio, Gozzano and Tassoni prizes, and select translations into Slovenian in the anthology Moral bi spet priti: sobodna evropska gejevska poezija, edited by Brane Motzetič, and into German by Eva Taylor in the journal Signum.

Fortunately, I remained divided and scattered. Literature lives on with the rest. And among this ‘rest’ is Ithaca, a place I discovered and to which I began to return regularly. The friendships made there drew me into a grassroots cooperation project to reopen the ancient network of footpaths. The collective work bore fruit, enabling me to start leading hiking groups on the island.

I believe in travelling slowly and exploring places with respect, allowing them to sink in. Guiding tours in various parts of Greece is a joy that continues to this day.

In 2012, Le parole tra gli uomini. Antologia di poesia gay italiana dal Novecento a oggi (Words Between Men: An Anthology of Italian Gay Poetry from the 20th Century to the Present) premiered at the Queer Festival in Rome. The work filled a gap and attracted attention: it saw three editions within a few years, was discussed on Radio3 and reviewed in La Lettura and La Repubblica, as well as touring abroad with presentations at Trinity College Dublin, UCL, the University of Salford and the Italian bookshop in London. At the suggestion of the poet Gandolfo Cascio, professor at Utrecht University, we took Le parole as our starting point to conceive a similar but lighter work, containing a smaller selection but translated with the original text alongside. Thus De beste jeugd (The Best Youth) was born, funded and published by the Italian Cultural Institute in Amsterdam, where we presented it together with the translators.

Last but not least, the Le parole project allowed me to forge links with various authors, including the elder Enzo Villani and Agostino Raff, and the Swiss-Italian writer and theatre director Lou Lepori, with whom I maintained a regular exchange, punctuated by his annual visits to Florence, when we go out for a meal together at a trattoria.

The need for a break from the pace of these early years of writing arose. I managed to carve out two whole months to wander around Greece, from Mount Pelion to Thessaloniki, Samothrace and Athens in winter. On another occasion, after longing for it so much, I was finally able to set foot in Epirus. I returned there, spending a month in Ioannina, during which I began to learn Modern Greek. All thanks to the support of a friend from Epirus, the last shepherd of a village in Zagori, who loves the fact that I am so taken with his land.

Years of poetic silence followed, with travelling alternating with a more introverted and contemplative phase. I was on the cusp of forty. I devoted myself to my new flat, where I loved to host parties, and which had a small terrace where I indulged my love of plants. With my commitments now lighter, I turned to a long series of scientific and Eastern philosophical readings. A new sensibility that would slowly take shape, leading to a return to writing with the first pieces of the future collection Anno naturale.

The sculptor Filippo Dobrilla entered my life – a much-loved genius who would soon be exhibiting his Giganti at the Milan Expo. Until his untimely death, I would regularly visit his extraordinary hermit’s retreat on Mount Giovi near Florence, sharing in the joys and struggles of his art and of his radical lifestyle choice.

At the start of 2016, the world called me back in some way. I received a commission from Patrick Dubuis, editor of the French queer magazine Inverses, who entrusted me with a special bilingual issue on Italy, for which I involved a wide range of writers, artists, activists and scholars. On the Florentine front, Alessandro Raveggi shared his idea of foundingThe Florentine Literary Review, the first bilingual literary magazine in Italy. He offered me a place on the editorial team to focus specifically on poetry, and I accepted. The teamwork, the literary scouting, the heated meetings at my flat later calmed by an Indian takeaway, were an exciting new experience.

Sale del ricordo was published, the second volume of the trilogy begun with Territori d’oltremare, featuring poems about my years in Dublin and Berlin and about Mykonos. It was a finalist for the Mazzotta Prize, with a jury comprising Franco Buffoni, Antonella Anedda, Fabio Pusterla and Giuliano Ladolfi.

As for my travels, my geographical coordinates shifted for a while. At times, I was drawn back to my ties with Northern Europe, a longing for languages – so I walked through the Rhine Gorges, and then along Hadrian’s Wall.

In 2019, Itaca, my debut as a travel writer, was published. For years I doubted I would ever finish it – following a long period of groundwork, in-depth research and three successive rewrites. But it was featured in the cultural supplement of Il Sole-24Ore, on Radio3, and on the Osservatorio dei Balcani e del Caucaso, receiving special mentions at the Naldini Award for travel literature and the Gambrinus Award – ‘Travel and Exploration’ section.

I established a friendship and working relationship with Claudio Visentin, a writer, lecturer and founder of the ‘Scuola del Viaggio’, and I took part in his creative writing courses by accompanying the groups to Ithaca.

The Covid years were unforgettable. I lost my job, my home, and a great love came to an end. A breakdown kept me in the shadows for two years. When I started to emerge from it, it was like starting all over again.

I went to work in a factory, then in a shop; I saved up enough money to afford further training and obtained a new qualification. But reality was so harsh that it stifled creativity. I wondered if I would ever write again. However, I had two books almost finished in a drawer, and to shake things up I decided it was worth publishing them.

Thus, in 2021, Anno naturale was published: a collection of verse inspired by nature and science, marking a departure from my previous work. It provided an opportunity to deepen my acquaintance – which grew into friendship – with Tommaso Lisa, a writer and entomologist who penned the introduction. The book was a finalist for the Rainer Maria Rilke Prize and was ranked first in the Poetry section of L’Indiscreto Quality Rankings. The following year, L’altro Saba. L’omoerotismo nel “Canzoniere” came out. The result of a project begun many years earlier, it was reviewed in Trieste’s Il Piccolo and La Repubblica, was presented on Radio3, and ranked second in the Non-Fiction section of the Quality Rankings.

These are books I haven’t been able to follow up on as I would have liked. Among the few public events, I like to recall the one on Saba at the Marconi Library in Rome, at the invitation of Andrea Pini, featuring Elio Pecora and, in one of his last public appearances, the much-loved Francesco Gnerre.

In the meantime, I gradually returned to the circle of foreign universities in the city, and today I teach art history and Italian at various institutes such as the Accademia Europea di Firenze, Kent State University and AIFS, as well as continuing to translate from English, French and German.

I began to explore meditation and Buddhist philosophy. My interest in psychedelia lead me to spend a month in the Netherlands in a small wooden cottage not far from the giant dunes of the North Sea. The following year, I was in Portugal to take part in Boom!, Europe’s largest psychedelic festival.

I am increasingly devoting myself to travel literature. I proposed a Book Club focusing on the works of great travellers at the ‘On the Road’ bookshop in Florence; the initiative is a success and continues to this day. I resumed leading treks in Ithaca and Epirus.

In 2025, my latest work, Eight Steps on the Rhine: Walking the Rhine Castle Trail from Bingen to Koblenz, was published.