My love affair with photography started many many years ago, when I was at elementary school. I was so lucky that the school was one of the very few in Italy to have a darkroom and to teach the students how to use an SLR, how to develop the film and, the most interesting part, how to work that magic process that makes the images appear on a piece of paper....

Since then I always pursued Photography even though with varying dedication, approach, media, equipment and of course subjects.

I got the first camera at the age of 11, it was a completely mechanical Praktica PLC3 with the 50mm Carl Zeiss Jena lens that my father smuggled from DDR (East Germany) to Italy inside his dirty laundry bag. With his next work trips came also a 35mm and a 135 mm, both from Carl Zeiss Jena too. Excellent lenses that I still use after 40 years...

That Praktica definitely bonded me to photography for the rest of my life. Believe it or not, despite all the beating it got, that Praktica is still "alive" and working. Who dares to say now that eastern Europe cameras are not durable? it withstanded my teenage years....

In the beginning it was of course all color film and prints but as I reached the age of 16 I bought myself a dia projector and started shooting slide film. Kodachrome 64 first and after a few years it was all Fujifilm Velvia 50.... Great film with fantastic saturated colours. I would like to use it again but prices nowadays are crazy, about three times what I used to pay for one 36 exp. roll.

Around 2004 I jumped into the digital era with a Nikon D200.