MY LOVES

Michele (my wife forever) has been telling me that I still love her only because my brain is injured and while I always comment that love comes from the heart – like it’s been portrayed for centuries by artists of all kinds and in all fields of arts – I’m going to list here all my plenty strong loves that I’ve had at least since I was a teenager and ask why am I so much in love with the practice of these activities (mainly sports) so here we go:

PLAYING PIANO

Glenn Gould is the piano player who was just about like a God to me, he used to play Bach (Goldberg Variations) using the grand piano – even if at the times of Bach, the harpsichord existed – in such a beautiful and innovative way that the important musicologists of his times were saying that as he was playing Bach, he was recomposing such was the strictness to the written notes, while – of course – his interpretation and tempi was immensely liberal – as Bernstein explains to a public before a  Brahms concerto.

DIRT BIKING/MOTOCROSS

I'm just going to put here the link to a post I had published on 1/26/2015 simply because I said it all already with the main difference that my dad drove me in the middle of the night (I wanted it yesterday!) to buy my first dirt bike that I put it in my bedroom and slept with for a full week

http://lingiaca.blogspot.com/2015/02/my-trainer-matt.html

WINDSURFING

I believe to have been among the very first “addicted” to this sport, the lake of Garda is close to where I was living in Verona and I owned a small apartment in Malcesine, very few miles south of Torbole that’s considered the Hawaii of Italy, for its very strong winds and (not big) waves. I remember that when I brought Michele there, she was horrified by the crowd of girls all topless and by my being extra-fool with my windsurfing friends – nothing could ever hurt us, no matter what we were doing, both in and out of the water (brrrrrhhh).

SKIING

I started to sky when I was 7 y/o and my father owned a home in Folgaria, that’s in the Trentino region (not very high mountains) so by the time I was 25 I was an extremely and self-confident all terrain skier, I was happy to ski no matter the steepness, the type of snow (powder or icy), in or out of piste, sometimes in the pine trees woods.

In fact I used to go skiing with some of the great skiers who were working with me at Tecnica USA who were either ski champions or “ski bums” and I never showed to be with the wrong group of skiers.

SWIMMING

As much as my dad loved the mountains and climbing them, I was in love with water since 5 or 6 y/o, therefore not only all that has anything to do with it, both fascinated me but it made me feel that I was doing my “homework”, in fact I remember going to the pool to train at 6 am before going to school and going back for the formal training at 2 pm for a total of 5 hours spent swimming per day. My trainer at that time later became the Italian Olympic team trainer (Alberto Castagnetti) and I remember having been among the swimmer to be chosen to be part of the swimmers to choose for the Olympic games in Rome in the 80ies, here too I wasn’t taking anything for granted, just work as hard as I can to obtain what I planned to have.

SCUBA DIVING

The logical activity connected to my love for being in water, is to scuba dive, in fact I’m (still now) a PADI scuba diving instructor.

This devouring passion came to me for having spent my one month long summer vacations in the island of Ponza that initially was were the ancient Romans were going to vacation – and had built magnificent villas, still visible today – but later it was the place where the fascist Mussolini was sending in imprisonment anyone against him or his beliefs.

Anyone can imagine how strongly the people living in the island were Fascist, in fact every summer a communist party attempted to take place and it always ended up with a fist fight of communist – from Rome - against local fascist, one summer I remember my cousin Vittorio – convinced communist – returning from such a festival with blood coming out of his mouth, he never said a word about this, but we all understood what had happened and nobody asked any question….

BICYCLING

The great skier who were working at Tecnica with me used to ride road bicycles all summer long – I guess to keep the legs muscle tone – so, since I wanted to keep contact with such great athletes, I purchased the great Cannondale bicycle that I was riding when I got killed, I

post a picture of it after my accident, to show that my bicycle got truly murdered.

ANCIENT ROMANS

Given that Ponza is practically in front of Rome and I had plenty very good friends who lived there, being in Rome was like being in Verona for me, I had so many friends that when my dad was in Aprilia (small town near Rome) to work for a week, I was going with him and I was staying at friend’s homes and explored the Appia Antica, the ancient Roman’s main road to downtown Rome sided for many miles with tombs of Roman patricians, I remember that once there were road works behind the house of one of my friends and in the excavations a tomb was found, this had to stop the excavations to notify the find to the ministry of culture in town, so there were no more workers in the place and me and my friend went there to take a bunch of oil lamps and broken pieces of dishes, fully against all the laws that protect such finds in Rome, and in the rest of my country too. This turned out to have their language Latin become a true passion for me, in fact I ended up reading the entire "De bello gallico" in Latin as written by Julius Caesar.

ANCIENT EGYPTIANS

Complimentary with my fascination with the ancient Romans there’s always been the same for the ancient Egyptians and since – as a scuba diver – I was going on vacation sometimes to Sharm el Sheikh, that’s on the Red Sea not far from El Cairo, neither from the great pyramids, I did once visited during a flight stop the Cairo Egyptian museum, therefore I fell in love with that ancient civilization and culture too.  Sharm El Sheikh is very close to mount Sinai too, where God gave the ten commandments tablets to Moses and where a very ancient monastery was built hundreds of years ago, if you want to go there you must be prepared to walk uphill for about one mile, but once there, the view of the red sea and the desert is magnificent.

ADVANCED MATHEMATICS

I guess that since I had shown since I was very young interest for numbers, my parents chose to make me attend the “Liceo scentifico” that’s equivalent to a college of mathematics and science, there not only I became good in dealing with Italian literature, Latin, geography, foreign language (I chose German) chemistry and with an approach to high level mathematics that comes from the way that Pitagora used to define it:” At its deepest level, reality is mathematical in nature”.

Since what you receive at this type of Liceo is the science of space, number, quantity, and arrangement, whose methods involve logical reasoning and usually the use of symbolic notation and which includes geometry, arithmetic, algebra, and analysis. I’ve been considering the graduation of this type of Liceo equivalent to a college degree in science here in the USA.

PHILOSOPHY

Regardless of the fact that quantum mathematics has made me very interested in philosophy my Liceo teacher in this matter (Dello Russo) was an alcoholic who would smoke his preferred cigarettes – filterless camel -  in class during his lesson that – among the various philosophers, mentioned how great the “blonde tobacco” used for those cigarettes tasted. I was told that he died few years ago as an alcoholic for liver poisoning…..

GEOGRAPHY

Geography is part of what the Scientific Liceo offer as education matter, in the sense that what you learn is how the continents were formed, how they had moved when planet earth was still young and forming, the way mountain chains formed and the influence over countries of eco-systems.

GENERAL MANAGEMENT

This didn’t really come from my Liceo education, it actually mostly came from my times being a swim teacher and scuba dive instructor, especially given the fact that as a swim teacher you must deal with children not older than 8 and as for the scuba you must deal with people of all ages and education that, at times think to know everything about diving better than their instructor for having watched few documentaries and have read the book text.

OK I do realize that this post is very (maybe too much) long but I’m really hoping that with all the videos I put it’ll be both a fun and interesting  for you, just know that no matter all of these loves of mine, based on education and experience my primary love is and forever will be for Michele, mother of my two treasures!