I was doing pretty fine in Italy.

Living with my parents at age 26, eating pizza compulsively and working hard to keep all those worldwide famous stereotypes alive. But no, I was not into Mafia, although at times I wished I were; usually while doing my monkey-job for a company which worked for a company which worked for a company which worked for Google which is God. Or the Devil, that is yet to be determined.

But that was just a side activity: between one click and the next one I was actually studying hard-ish in order to become exactly what I would never ever want to become. A serial killer child abuser drug addict programmer. You know when you order something at the restaurant and then you take a bite and you’re not sure whether you liked it or not? And then you take another bite and you’re still unsure? And then you go through the whole thing one bite at a time but in the end you still have no clue if it was good? That inscrutable dish was Informatics to me. And it actually took me six years to figure out that it was not my cup of tea.

Long story short: I was not going anywhere but down. Sinking slowly in a quicksand of unchanging boredom, like I was part of a still life painted in the fourteenth century, but not even in the center of the scene; more like one of those bananas on the side to which you never even pay attention. And the scariest thing is that I didn’t really feel the urge for a change.

Everything could have continued this way for a *long* time. Riding fake horses on the endless pointless reassuring carousel on which everybody I knew was standing.

But then I fell in love.