It could be a person, a song, a machine, or the laws of physics; it didn't make much difference.
I was interested in what couldn't be seen yet.
As a teenager, I wrote poetry, listened to heavy metal, and wore battered T-shirts of the bands I loved. I was a rather diligent tortured teenager.
Then poems became songs.
From the age of eighteen, and for much of my adult life, I wrote and played original music with different bands.
Words had stopped belonging only to me: they had encountered music, voices, ideas different from my own.
They had begun to change.
I started writing for LARPs, first as a storyteller for local and national groups, then for ten years as a Keeper for Clavisomni (opens in a new tab), building horror and investigative stories in Lovecraftian worlds.
Writing for someone who is going to live through a story is strange: you can build characters, places and possibilities, but at some point you have to leave the door open and allow other people to step inside; from that moment on, that world is no longer yours alone.
Many years later, I closed that door to open another one: The Heirs of Yggdrasill, my first novel. Today that story is finished and is about to begin its journey in search of a publisher.
In the meantime, I've already started exploring Hóros.
While I was writing, playing music and building worlds, I was also trying to understand the one I lived in: physics and science have always fascinated me. I studied nuclear engineering, and technology became the territory where I built my professional life.
I'm interested in understanding how things work, but even more in what we can do with them once we learn to look at them differently.
Perhaps that's why, on the other side of things, I've always been fascinated by psychology, because people, too, are worlds to be understood.
Getting to know them, listening to them and trying to understand what moves beneath what they show has taught me a great deal about others; and, inevitably, about myself as well.
It has helped me work through my own traumas, recognize parts of myself I didn't understand, and accept that knowing yourself doesn't mean arriving at a definitive answer, but continuing to change.
I found my way to PyCon Italia (opens in a new tab) almost by accident, through my work at Develer (opens in a new tab).
As Develer gradually stepped away from organizing it, I stayed.
After the EuroPython (opens in a new tab) years, the Italian community had become scattered; PyCon Italia needed to start again, but before rebuilding a conference, we first had to rebuild people's trust.
So I started again with them, one person at a time, giving people space, responsibility and trust, and allowing each of them to recognize a piece of what we were building as their own.
In 2014 there were around 180 of us, staff included, and today PyCon Italia welcomes around a thousand participants from all over the world.
The numbers grew, but what still interests me is what made them grow: the people.
At EuroPython in Kraków, I found myself sitting around a table with other organizers.
There were problems to solve, doubts, communities very different from one another, and I had years of mistakes, attempts, events, people and things I'd learned along the way.
We started talking, and something very simple happened: what I'd learned could be useful to someone else. That was when I realized how much I enjoyed doing it.
Not delivering answers,
but helping people find their own.
Today, I keep building. I spent many years at Develer, joining when we were around twenty people and moving through very different roles and responsibilities, all the way to account management for technology products.
Today I work with FastAPI (opens in a new tab), where community, technology and events have become part of the same job.
I keep organizing, mentoring, singing and writing.
I've never been very good at drawing clear boundaries between these things.
At this point, I'm no longer sure I want to.