I was born, raised and, in a sense, shaped inside a hotel that turned 70 in 2026, a hotel that has seen three generations and countless guests come and go. For me it was never just a backdrop to life. It was the place where I learned almost everything: how to be around adult strangers even before kids my own age, how to treat sand between my toes as part of the daily uniform, and how to understand that hospitality isn't taught from books but absorbed at breakfast, lunch and dinner, every day, through endless seasons.

I grew up with the ambivalence typical of anyone born into a family hotel: other people's summers were holidays, mine only partly. But it was in those very seasons, behind a counter, between one errand and the next, that I began to understand what it really means to take care of someone you don't know, for the precious time they choose to entrust to you.

A hotel school chosen almost by chance, university studies in Rome in political science and law, and then a move I hadn't planned: L'Aquila, a few years after the 2009 earthquake. A city that had nothing left of traditional tourism, yet still needed hospitality, paradoxically more than before. That's where I discovered a different way of understanding our profession, far from the beaches I grew up on but no less human.

Today I manage several properties and work with a number of universities and training institutions: seven years at Roma Tre and two at Tor Vergata, to name just two. Every lesson reminds me that the people in front of me are entrusting me with something serious: a piece of their future in tourism. I don't see it as an academic role removed from practice, but as the same care I learned as a child, applied to a classroom instead of a front desk.

My background in political science shapes the way I read the social, economic and technological trends linked to tourism, with constant attention to sustainable development. These are the lenses through which I interpret the world, looking for a healthy path forward for our industry.

I remain convinced that Tourism is too often dismissed lightly as an entertainment industry, as if it didn't deserve serious reflection. I believe the opposite: behind every stay, every experience, there is something that concerns people's well-being, and nothing is more serious than that.

Wherever I work or teach, I bring with me a way of thinking that I sum up in a short phrase: "Here to inspire not only to host"