THE BEGINNING..

Sorry for the long silence! I’ve been busy with many other things during this period, but I promise to write more often from now on. It’s finally time to get back to the Wild Path, the main theme of this blog. Just a quick reminder, “My Wild Path” talks about my own journey into the wild, how I changed in time and grow up with a strong connection to nature and wildlife. This is not just about me, but I hope this can be an inspiration and a motivation for other people to follow the same direction, establishing a deep connection with nature, learn to respect it and enjoy it at the same time. I want to bring you together with me in this journey. I will do this by writing about my stories and my trips with the help of my photos, hoping to be able to raise awareness on how beautiful and at the same time fragile is the environment that surrounds us. If you want to know more about this or you missed my first post, here you can find all the information you need. As I said in that post, to learn how I started to follow this wild path you need to know more about me. So, let’s start from the beginning!

I was born and I live in a small town called Pistoia, in the green Tuscany region, Italy. Probably this town will be unknown to you, but I’m sure you know Florence, the beautiful artistic city, the cradle of Renaissance. Well, I live just half an hour from there. Here everything is small and quite, and I’m glad about it because I’m not a fan of the big and chaotic cities (at least as a place to live in). What makes this a nice play to stay is the fact that it’s surrounded by some amazing natural places. Just half an hour from my home there are beautiful mountains with many rivers, lakes, waterfalls and forests populated by deer, fallow deer, roes, boars, foxes, and even wolves, together with many other animals. Bears are missing unfortunately, but you can’t have everything you want (although they were present in the past)! I consider myself very lucky for this since I don’t have to travel much to find some wild places rich of wildlife. There are a lot of hiking trails and you can spend a very nice time there. Living in a place like this made it easier for me to develop my strong passion for the natural world. But many years ago things were a bit different..

I grew up just like any other kid here in Italy, going to school, meeting with my friends (we were more social persons and less social networks addicted than the present generations!), and so on. My parents always took me to the seaside for summer holidays, almost always in the same place. It was a nice place, but not much excitment! While I was going to school I developed a strong passion for technologies and computers, so I ended up studying computer science. I liked everything that was hi-tech, and I spent a lot of time working with the computer to learn new things. I loved (and still love) music, especially rock music, and I used to play guitar as self-taught and go to a lot of concerts. Nothing better than listening to your favorite band in a live concert. Actually I really miss this, I still have my guitars and I would love to play them like I was doing before! So, as you can see, nothing so different from any other kid/teenager. But where is the nature and the wild in all of this? Well, in my case, it’s been a progressive process. While growing up, I changed myself and together with me, my passions and priorities changed. I still like technology, and I think it can be very useful to us if used in the right way. But all my interest for this has been moved to something different. I started to go out and explore the nature that surrounds my hometown. I started to go into the woods, hiking in the mountains, crossing rivers and finding new places to discover. Sometimes I went there with a friend of mine, but most of the time I was alone. Just me and the nature, nothing else! Here I started to feel something different inside me, something that only if you experience it by yourself you can completely understand. I started to feel alive in a way that I’ve never felt before. Yes, I was free and I was alive. That’s how it all began..