I was born in 1975 in a big city, Milan, where I spent the first 30 years of my life before moving to Brianza. To this day, I still wonder how, in such an overwhelmingly urbanized environment, I managed to develop such a deep passion for nature from such a young age.
I still have the diaries and field guides I used when I was just 10 or 11, where I wrote down my observations, made with a cheap pair of binoculars, during the occasions I had to explore natural environments. "The Amateur Naturalist" by Gerald Durrell was my daily bible, and every observation, every discovery, was a huge thrill. I still keep, in a kind of magical box, my first found pellets of the common owl, or the remains—a beak and skull—of a blackbird likely preyed upon by a sparrowhawk.
The idea of using more conventional (and perhaps less socially awkward!) tools to express this passion didn’t come until later, in my late teens. That’s when I started fiddling with my family's old analog Pentax camera and had the chance to take a short course in landscape and nature photography. That opened the door to a whole new world. But as a university student in the pre-digital era, my means were quite limited. I had to plan carefully the use of every roll of Fuji Velvia and Sensia film and be very selective about developing them. Photographing birds and other wildlife with just 36 shots per trip was unthinkable—they remained the domain of my binoculars and memory alone.
Like many others, my digital photography "revolution" came much later. For me, it coincided with the birth of my first child. Alongside a camera body boasting… 12 megapixels, I soon added to the classic 50mm lens, aimed at family portraits, my first telephoto, a 70-200mm. From there... well, it’s been a financial landslide. Now I shoot with lenses ranging from 500mm all the way down to a fisheye. Sometimes I wonder what else I could have bought with all that money. But I also wonder what I might have created, with the unmatched emotional drive of my youth, had I had those tools back then.
More recently, the rise of social media and global connectivity has made me realize that there are others out there who share my “illness” for nature. My childhood and teenage years would have been far less lonely if I’d had today’s means of sharing and connection. Maybe someone would have even appreciated my magical box of natural treasures! Today, I find myself part of a whole community of passionate, talented photographers and naturalists—people with whom I can share my work and from whom I constantly draw inspiration.
In the meantime, my professional life has taken the path of scientific research, naturally, still within the environmental and naturalistic field. This undoubtedly helps me contextualize my photography work as well. Still, nature photography holds a distinct and essential place in my life. I don’t use it as a source of income. I let it flow with my temperament—often fickle and easily bored—so that it can remain, as much as possible, a free and, dare I say, wild pursuit. Perhaps the same spirit that fueled those early adventures in nature as a young boy.
