I carry my grandfather’s name, and I’m proudest of that.

1. 1981

   Catania

   Born on 19 October in Catania, and I carry all of this land’s contradictions inside me. I am devoted to it just long enough to go back to hating it.

2. 2002

   London

   I was barely past twenty when I packed a suitcase and left for London. I had no clear idea how long I would stay or what I would do. What I remember is the price I paid for the excess weight.

   I come from the South. My parents are from the South, my grandparents too. So the suitcase was full: three kilos of pasta, homemade passata, sun-dried tomatoes, everything a twenty-year-old who had not yet met the world would want with him when the apocalypse came. Grandparents say goodbye with “have fun”. Mine only said: “don’t come back thin”.

3. 2005

   London

   Three years there set the course of everything that followed. I took a degree in international finance and started work as an analyst. If you know how this ends, that is the part that makes me smile.

4. 2006

   Sicily

   I went back to Sicily, because there is something inexplicable that ties us to this land. I was living in slow motion. The film of that period was one long flat sequence. Just enough time to enjoy Italy winning the World Cup, and I packed again. No pasta, no tomatoes this time, only a computer, and no real reason. Spain.

5. 2006

   Seville

   I settled in Seville, washing and ironing hostel sheets at night in exchange for board and lodging. This is where I earned my first euro from photography. I shot on my day off and sold 20 × 30 prints to tourists: a black cloth on the ground, and a group of Colombian street sellers who had taken me in and warned me whenever the police came to move us on.

   It was the least serious way imaginable to become a photographer, and the only one that ever worked on me.

6. 2007

   Italy

   A large Italian bank called and I went back to an office. Eight hours a day: the first hour finished the day’s work. I have a thoroughly average mind, I am no kind of genius. The rest of the time I studied how to get out. My only relief was having no contact with the public, which let me wear my hoodie in a place built for a jacket and tie.

7. 2008

   Sydney

   I lasted a year. Then I bought a ticket to Sydney, said goodbye to everyone, put my fingers in my ears in front of everybody who thought I was mad to give up a permanent job, and went.

   Australia is where I stopped long enough to work out what I wanted to do with my life. Photography had always been the first thing. It was time to try. I had no great technical skill, so I assisted on other people’s jobs until I was good enough to walk on my own legs.

8. 2010

   Sicily

   Back to Sicily, obviously. I opened my studio. I learned photographic technique so well that I understood very quickly it was the last thing that mattered. Empathy, humanity and the ability to tell a story: those were the elements.

   Being a photographer taught me how to live. I was solitary and quiet, and I had to force myself to meet people in order to tell their stories. I stayed solitary and quiet, but my interest in human beings grew.

9. 2013

   Teaching

   I started teaching photography at a local academy, and in 2014 I became head of the whole department. It turned out that explaining why an image works is the fastest way to understand it yourself.

10. 2019

    Ulilearn

    With Giovanni Cocco, who also shoots the weddings on this site with me, I founded Ulilearn, a school built around contemporary photographic culture rather than around equipment.

    Lectures, courses, workshops, masterclasses and documentaries made with some of the most relevant voices in photography. Antoine d’Agata and Alisa Resnik among them. It exists for the same reason this site does: photographs get better when the person making them has something to say.

11. Today

    Rome & Catania

    I still do both. I photograph weddings across Italy and abroad, and I still teach, between Rome and Catania, wherever the work is, and online when it makes more sense.

    In the meantime I read and I keep studying. I trade money for time, time for knowledge, knowledge for life. I am not rich. I am free.

My currency is time, not money.