Professional journalist with broad experience in print, online and broadcasting media in a wide range of domains (international politics, new technologies, culture...).
Originally from Milan, based in Lyon, often working in Brussels, I travel a lot between France, Belgium and Italy.
"If someone says it's raining and another person says it's dry, it's not your job to quote them. Your job is to look out of the f***ing window and find out which is true." Jonathan Foster
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Back in 2007, I received a call. It was my boss, asking me to try to interview Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk. At the time, it was next to impossible. Only Der Spiegel in all of Europe could do it. But I didn't give up. Two years later, he came to Lyon, France, where I live. I was the only journalist to have an exclusive interview with him. (You can see it here: https://youtu.be/6ZdqF1yh-8s)
Fast forward to 2012. The world-renowned English author Neil Gaiman was in Nantes, France, for the Utopiales festival. He wouldn't give interviews, so I didn't interview him, but I managed to organise a live chat between him and our young viewers. I was the only journalist allowed to meet him outside of the official press conference.
In 2015, I travelled to North-Eastern Syria with a camerawoman to film the amazing feminist revolution that went well beyond the female fighters we all saw on TV fighting Daesh. We had no production company behind us, no financing. We crossed borders that we were not supposed - or allowed - to cross, slept on the floor of houses devastated by the war, met the fighters on the frontline. Then we went back to Europe, and Murphy was with us all the time: if something could go wrong, it surely would. It took us 5 years of sweat and tears, but "The Flowers of Rojava" is today a reality.
You know, as a journalist, I'm cursed: when something newsworthy happens somewhere, either I was there just a little bit earlier, or I'll get there a moment later. Even the day a bomb went off in the city where I leave, Lyon, I was having a nap! And the irony is that I had just walked through that street a few hours earlier.
But what I lack in timing, I compensate with the devotion and determination of a hound, every time I chase an exclusive story.
So, if you want me to find out about something you haven't heard (much) about in the mainstream media, or talk to someone hard to reach, or go somewhere to see what is going on there, shoot me an e-mail. But be quick: I might already be busy chasing the next story.
