Why A Land Inside My Head?

This post is also available in: Italiano

A Land Inside My Head is the set of scents, colors and emotions that each of us is able to feel: the exploration of a new path, moving to a new city, walking for the first time instead of driving in a place that we routinely cross by car, are all experiences that lead us to discover the infinite colors that characterize our mind.

Once they told me: <<our mind is like a kaleidoscope. It contains all the colors but we can only look at them if we are aware of the infinity of possible shades and we look away from those few colors that we believe are the only ones possible>>.

I come from Basilicata, in the deep South of Italy ..

Born in the hospital of Bari and raised in Basilicata, I consider myself a Lucano DOC despite my facial features are more similar to those of a Northern European guy. It must be for this reason that I lived for about two years 2017-2018, in a small village in Holland, feeling “at home”.

The idea of ​​creating a blog or, rather, a diary where to collect my experiences and keep memories grew up in my mind in 2020, in the middle of the first wave of the covid-pandemic, after about 3 months (March-April-May) spent in Milano in lockdown.

Addicted to sport and nature lover, I have almost always spent time at least twice a week, combining these two passions, running and training by the sea, in the park, in the pine forest or in the woods. The national curfew prevented me from doing it for about 4 months and in the summer of 2020, I decide to return to Basilicata to get backmy “credit” with nature and sport.

The “confinement” of those months had contributed to fueling a strong desire for new adventures starting from dreams locked in the drawer for too long that, never like before, re-emerged more vivid, stronger.

So I decide to get on my mountain bike, bought second-hand a couple of years before but never used properly, to train and prepare myself for an adventure that has always been in my dreams: a bike trip.

Since my return to Basilicata, in June 2020, I start training by bike but not only: trekking and outdoor activities, on foot, on two wheels or even on horseback!

This blog contains some of them with a dual purpose: to have a place to keep my experiences and re-explore them whenever I like to; share it with whom might be interested about the beauty of such places, accessible to everyone.

Natural Touring Guide

A new chapter can begin from September 2022 when I joined, without any hesitation, a course to become a Natural Touring Guide sposored by the most representative Natural Touring Guide association in Italy: AIGAE.

Despite all the effort and difficulties we (me and my dears colleague) went through in order to balance our working and private life within the classes and the time for studying, I’m definetly glad to have made it: on January I passed three days of exames, theorically and practically based and got my “GAE qualification”.

I lived more than three months in a place that was completelly uknown to me and discovered an amazing piece of land, in Calabria, a quite yuong natural area: the Natural Regional Reserve of Valli Cupe. I got my soul, my heart and my brain filled up with extraordinary new point of view, different disciplines and a completelly new method of discovering the sourranding nature within the heritage interpretation.

Thanks to the “GAE” chapter, I got a new desire of putting down some previous and new thoughts in my “public” diary: I feel the urge of sharing what I am seeing and feeling with this re-new sense together with my colleagues, friends and host of my new adventures.

During my first bicycle trip from Policoro (Jonio) to Maratea (Tirreno), 02-10-20200