Bio

My dual passions — music and conscious living —  have always been underpinned by the words and examples of some of the greatest rockstars I’ve had conversations with: Bono, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Coldplay, Roger Waters from Pink Floyd and R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe, to name a few…

Spending time with all these enlightened musicians has allowed me to look beyond societal norms.

Ever since I can remember, I’ve always believed there’s a truth. A truth that each one of us must seek inside ourselves. I started at a young age, becoming a vegetarian at the age of twelve, in a traditional Sicilian family who had never even heard the word “vegetarian”.

Nevertheless, I was already motivated by an ethical choice; I had noticed the contradiction between teaching people to love animals, and then eating them.

I considered animals my friends, and I didn’t want to eat my friends.

My mother got cancer when I was 23. We set off in search of a cure. We spent a long time in Mexico, out of a holistic desire to understand what leads to this disease and why, in our society, getting sick is almost seen as “normal”.

Her illness presented us with a major learning opportunity, and we wanted to find out what it was.

This was back in 1991. In those days, only a few enlightened souls were talking about the correlation between our lifestyle and the risk of developing diseases… the relationship between mind and food, and the mind-body connection.

Why do people talk so much about prevention, and never about salutogenesis, or the origins of health?

Why is the focus on preventing illness, rather than preserving our health?

This agonizing situation was also an opportunity to develop a critical, responsible attitude.

During that same period, I began studying the ancient Far Eastern philosophical science of macrobiotics, which literally means “great life”. I studied under two Masters, Michio Kushi and Martin Halsey, and began practising Buddhism.

The time was ripe for me to stop eating any animal-derived foods, back when “vegan” was a term most people had never even heard of.

From that day on, I have never stopped seeking, travelling, and studying what makes us so wonderfully human. I have lived transformative experiences, out of a desire to find a more conscious way of living and understanding the meaning of this extraordinary experience on earth. I’ve done volunteer work in Cochabamba, Bolivia; those mothers and their children living 3000 m up on the Andes taught me everything I needed to know about motherhood.

I made several trips to India and Thailand, where I had some extremely valuable educational experiences. These included two cycles of fasting and silent meditation lasting 14 and 7 days, which helped me understand that our body is our temple. And thanks to twelve years of sessions with an amazing psychotherapist, I worked on my origin story, reaching into my childhood and family history to shed light on the subconscious mechanisms that were holding me back from truly experiencing my life to the full.

I study anthroposophy, and have been talking about sustainability and our impact on the planet since 2005 when I became an ambassador for the United Nations ‘Stop the Poverty’ campaign. I was later appointed goodwill ambassador by the European Commission, for a climate protocol aimed at young Europeans at the 2009 summit in Copenhagen.

In 2009 my family, consisting of me, my seventy-nine-year-old father and my three-year-old son, Timo, lived a zero–impact life for one year. In a big city like Milan, we went without electricity or central heating, a car or a fridge. The idea was to fully understand who we are as consumers, and how we can leave as small a footprint as possible on this weary planet of ours.

I gave my first Ted Talk on sustainability in 2010. And, back when these were still ‘niche’ concepts, I wrote three books (in 2010, 2012 and 2013 respectively) on how to lead a low-impact life, veganism, the raw food diet and the search for food that can provide deep nourishment to Mother Earth and all her children, on an equal basis. I later published two more books, on how to find inspiration in music, and a workbook that includes ‘inner exercises’ for living with presence.

In May 2020, I realized that, like a hummingbird, it was time to travel North. I began preparing for my permanent move to Sweden and discovered the beauty of immersing myself every day in the cold waters of the Baltic Sea, learning to feel comfortable in discomfort.

Since then, I have deepened my studies to become a life coach and embarked on a journey to explore my divine feminine and sacred sexuality with the great Taoist master Mantak Chia.

I chose to live in close contact with nature, and at the same time as my move to Scandinavia,

I brought to life a big dream-humans—my meditation and personal growth app, where I can finally share and deepen the human experience in an increasingly superficial society.