About
I have never been particularly interested in writing about myself. I have been interested in finding out what remains when the self is no longer enough.
There is a border we spend much of our lives trying not to cross.
On one side are the things we know: our desires, our fears, our explanations, the stories we tell about ourselves. We build a life there. We learn its language. We become remarkably skilled at moving within its boundaries.
And yet reality continually exceeds them.
Sometimes gently: a landscape, a face, a line of poetry, a sudden light falling across an ordinary room. Sometimes violently: failure, loss, love, the collapse of something we thought would last. There are moments when the world ceases to fit inside the meanings we have prepared for it.
Much of my life and work has taken place along that border.
I was born in Bologna in 1980. I studied Classical Literature at the University of Bologna, pursued part of my research at Oxford, and later trained in screenwriting and film production. I have worked with poetry, cinema, translation, songwriting and education. My life has repeatedly moved between Italy and the United States, between languages, places and forms of storytelling.
For a long time these seemed like different roads.
I no longer think they are.
The word, for me, begins where possession ends.
I do not believe that writing exists primarily to express what we already know. I am interested in the opposite possibility: that words can take us somewhere we did not know existed before we began speaking.
This is why attention has become central to everything I do.
To write a poem is to discover that the tree in front of us is infinitely more difficult to name than the word “tree”. To translate is to discover that meaning does not belong completely to either language. To work on a story is to follow characters beyond the ideas we had about them. To teach is to ask another human being to suspend, for a moment, what they think they know and look again.
Different disciplines. The same threshold.
Somewhere along the way, I began to call those who cross it witnesses.
A witness is not simply someone who reports what happened.
A witness has allowed reality to contradict him.
He has discovered the insufficiency of his own explanations and remained there long enough for something larger to appear. His task is then to return with words — knowing that words will never contain what he has seen, and yet refusing to abandon the attempt.
This idea became the centre of Consequentia Rerum, the book in which I tried to understand poetry against what I see as one of the defining crises of our time: the progressive loss of a direct, sensory relationship with reality.
But the book did not create this search. It gave a name to something that had already been moving through my life for years.
It was there in poetry.
It was there when I crossed into another language through translation.
It was there in cinema, where an idea is worthless until it becomes a face, a gesture, a body, a place, a sound.
It was there in classrooms, when I asked children and young people to leave words behind for a while, go outside, look, listen, touch, and return only when language had once again become necessary.
And it was there in America, a country that became for me both a real geography and an immense imaginative landscape — until fifty encounters with that landscape became fifty poems, one for each state, in Most of the Stars.
I have come to believe that the divisions between these things matter less than I once thought.
They are useful names. They tell you what I do.
They do not quite tell you why.
What interests me is the moment when the world becomes larger than the person looking at it.
The moment when an image ceases to be decoration and becomes presence.
When a word stops explaining and begins revealing.
When the story we thought we were telling suddenly turns around and tells us something about ourselves.
When what appeared to be a boundary becomes a threshold.
There is an expression I used in Consequentia Rerum:
The terrible glory of reality
I think, in one form or another, I have spent my life looking for that.
And perhaps everything gathered here — poems, films, translations, songs, classrooms, journeys — is simply the record of that search.