25 to an art college where I could paint and dance, another passion of mine, ignoring the fact that it required a lot of money, which I did not have. At the time, I was looking for a way to express myself, but it was very difficult. In the end, by exclusion and not to remain there without studying, I decided to return to Rome and I enrolled in the Faculty of Languages and modern foreign Literatures at La Sapienza University. I have always loved reading. Even novels allowed me to travel with the mind, not only drawing and painting, which I had continued to do on my own, even after graduating with honours. When, soon after, I started working in the field of communication, on the one hand I was very busy with work, on the other hand having a salary allowed me to study art with private teachers and attend afternoon courses at the school of Arts and Crafts of San Giacomo in Rome. I was fascinated by the smells of painting! The scent of turpentine, the scent of solvents... I could finally start to really dedicate myself to painting. You tell us something about your trip to the United States in the booklet–catalogue accompanying the exhibition Cambialamore, held in 2004 at the Salon Privé Arti Visive in Rome... I had identified California as a place of freedom where everything was possible, but when I got there, I discovered that things were very different. Maybe I should have gone to New York, not Santa Cruz where it was all “let’s have party”. It wasn't what I was really looking for, although I had a lot of fun! Yes, I talked about this experience in the booklet for Cambialamore, my first major exhibition organised by Sergio Rispoli. I made an installation that was a 30 metre strip, 80 centimetres high, with photos taken from magazines and the web, manipulated and reassembled in a sarcastic and provocative way. They were mainly images of pain contaminated by others that, instead, reflected a society that does not suffer, presented to the indifference of a gaze that has learned to ignore the sense of tragedy. Shortly before, there had been the attack on the twin towers on 11 September 2001 and then the war in Iraq. I also reconnected with my personal experience, making an excursus that started from the contradiction between the imagination I had fed for California, listening to the music of Bob Dylan or Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and the reality that had failed to fill my inner restlessness. Artistically, the linear photographic narrative of this project, which was a description of what I was seeing, is parallel to the written one. It is an alternative
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