When I have some free time I love reading books, traveling in search of archaeological tours and organising cultural events. That’s partly due to my academic background. At age eighteen, I really wanted to become an archaeologist. My academic path quickly changed, but all that passion for archaeology is still one of my major interests.
BOOKS
I mostly read masterpieces of Italian and international literature. I especially love family-saga books that follow families over multiple generations. Below is a selection of some of my favourite books:
- “The house of the spirits” – Isabel Allende
- “Fahrenheit 451” – Ray Bradbury
- “The kite runner” – Khaled Hosseini
- “A Thousand Splendid Suns” – Khaled Hosseini
- “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” – Milan Kundera
- “The Great Gatsby” – Francis Scott Fitzgerald
- “One Hundred Years of Solitude” – Gabriel García Márquez
- “Love in the Time of Cholera” – Gabriel García Márquez
- “Lord of the Flies” – William Golding
- “The Long Life of Marianna Ucrìa” – Dacia Maraini
- “The Rain King” – Saul Bellow
- “Diary of a seducer” – Soren Kierkegaard
- “The witch of Portobello” – Paulo Coelho
- “The time of Indifference” – Alberto Moravia
- “A life” – Italo Svevo
- “Family Sayings” – Natalia Ginzburg
TRAVELS
I also enjoy traveling. I like to discover different countries and cultures with friends, my girlfriend or my family. My job allows me to travel quite often. And it’s more than that. Generally, at physics conferences I attend there is always a free afternoon with an organised excursion to discover the conference location, which is often an archaeological site. This is what happened in May 2019, when I attended one of the major conferences in my field, LHCP2019, which was organised in Puebla (Mexico). The conference excursion allowed me to see the magnificent Teotihuacán, the place where men become gods. It was one of the most influential cities in the pre-Columbian era. The view from the Pyramid of the Sun is breath-taking. In 2019 I also visited Iceland, another amazing country. Do you know that one of the few places on the planet where you can physically see the continental drift is Iceland? Iceland literally emerged as the result of a divergent, spreading boundary between the Eurasian and North-American plates that run through the country. One of the best evidence of the continental drift is given by fossils. Of course, while looking for fossils I was also searching for the northern lights!
Below you can find a selection of photos from my travels in Mexico, Greece, Northern Europe countries, Brazil and Italy with some friends and my family.
CULTURAL EVENTS
In 2015, as a member of CAIF (Cultural Association of Italians at Fermilab) I was the chair of the organising committee of the popular “Festa Italiana”, an event organised to promote the Italian cultural among physicists working in the laboratory. The event was a blast with more than 200 people. Below you can find some photos of the event. More photos are available here.
