Who I am matters

When people ask me, I like to say that I come from what in the past used to be called the Roman Empire. For those who haven’t understood it yet, I come from Italy, more precisely from a region called Emilia-Romagna. Have you ever eaten Bolognese sauce or mortadella Bologna? Well, this food was actually named after my hometown, Bologna, the capital city of Italian cuisine.

It has been almost six months now that I have engaged on a wonderful trip, called World Bachelor in Business, which will take me all over the world. This is the reason why I am here in Los Angeles now and I will be in Hong Kong next year. However, I have always seen life as a circle and, in order for this circle to be completed, I have to go back to Bologna. I will certainly try to find my dream job in Italy in the future. Ultimately, I am allowed to say that Italy is where I come from but also where I am headed to, with a lot of exciting stops in between.

I have a super close relationship with my family, like the majority of Italian people. My parents are completely different from each other, one is Black and the other is White, one is Yin and the other is Yang. They are apparently opposite, but they are complementary and complete each other. This is the reason why I feel entirely identical to my father and radically dissimilar from my mother. But this doesn’t mean at all that I have a better relationship with my father than with my mother, rather the opposite. I would describe myself as practical, rational and stubborn, three features that fit perfectly with my father. Instead, the attributes that don’t belong to me but are characteristic of my mother are sensitiveness and empathy.

Throughout my life, I have always pursued my own expectations and my parents have never influenced my choices. If eventually my expectations will also satisfy those of my parents, it will be just a coincidence. Well, actually I wouldn’t be surprised if they are the same as my father's. We are so similar that we probably share also the same ideas about life.

The person I have always been looking up to is my father’s best friend. He doesn’t have neither a wife nor children, so he used to visit my family very frequently. I spent so much time with him that he became like a second father for me. I have always loved his way of communicating: he was an amazing storyteller.

Since I first read “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee, I have always felt a special connection with the animal that gives the title to this book, the mockingbird. This kind of bird is known for its habit of mimicking the sounds of other birds and insects. They don’t cause any harm to humans or other creatures and therefore they are for me a symbol of innocence. Unluckily I have never personally seen one in my life.

When I was a child, I used to go every summer to the same holiday house on the Eastern coast of Italy, an area typically covered with pine trees. It happened one day that while I was playing in the garden a pine cone almost fell on my head. From being potentially fatal for me, this encounter turned out to be a positive discovery. It is at that time that I fell in love with pine nuts! I remember spending a huge amount of time eating them with my brother during my childhood.

My horoscope

Rising Sign: 15 Degrees Virgo

Sun: 22 Degrees Cancer

Moon: 22 Degrees Leo