It was August 2017. Sitting on the small terrace of the B&B in Anacapri, with a view over the bay and the scent of orange blossom in the air, I was reading the same product description on my laptop for the fifth time. "Artisan soap of the highest quality, made with selected natural ingredients. ...

Naples, September 2006. I walk into the office of a vocational training organisation in the provinces. The request is straightforward: a logo and a website. The client already has the design in mind: they want something "professional but welcoming, modern but reassuring". I ask: "If your organisatio...

  When you've been doing this job long enough, the first thing you learn is that you stop being surprised. You're not surprised by clients who change their minds at the last second, not by metrics that collapse without warning, not by trends that arrive trailing hype and last all of six months....

It is February 2026. If you look around the digital landscape, you will see an endless expanse of white marble. Smooth, cold, without grain. It is the mass text production born of third- and fourth-generation generative artificial intelligence. Texts that never slip with a subjunctive, that cite sou...

There is an exact moment, a suspended millisecond, in which reality splits in two. It happens when I land at Heathrow after a period spent between Naples and Caserta. My brain has to make a "switch" that goes beyond language. It concerns the way I perceive value, time, and above all, the way people ...

You’re in a co-working space in Shoreditch, East London. The air smells of acidic filter coffee and electric ambition. On stage, a twenty-eight-year-old lad in the standard-issue hoodie is telling a room full of investors that his app is going to be "the Amazon of pharmaceutical logistics". He hasn’...

  Milan. A trade fair. The air is exactly what you'd expect from one of those vast exhibition halls: a mix of dust, watery vending-machine coffee, and that chemical whiff of new carpet that gets right up your nose. Picture a 28-year-old. Let's call him Marco. He's from Caserta, and he's only be...

It was a November afternoon in Manchester. One of those afternoons where the grey of the sky bleeds into the grey brickwork of old textile warehouses converted into offices. I was sitting across from a CEO with the crumpled face of someone twelve hours deep into back-to-back meetings, a stack of bla...

Naples. Or maybe London. Different skies, same silence. I'm sitting in a cafe that smells of specialty coffee and industrial ambition. Laptop's open in front of me. On the screen, a number is screaming at me. 14%. That's not just a statistic. It's a proper crime scene. The "victim" is a newsletter s...

It was a Tuesday morning at the end of January. I was sitting on a bench at the Granatello harbour, in Portici, notebook open on my knees and my Nikon resting beside me — cold as iron, despite the jacket pocket where I'd kept it the whole way from home. I wasn't writing. I was waiting. To my left wa...

  Let me tell you something that happened nearly twenty years ago — something I still feel like it was yesterday. It was a May evening in Portici. There was that sticky coastal humidity that plasters your shirt to your back, and I was standing on a stage knocked together in a hurry. I was stand...

It's two in the morning. Outside my studio window in Caserta, the silence is broken only by the distant hum of a car on the bypass. On the desk, a long-cold espresso cup has left a dark ring on the wood — a small mark of a creative battle that refuses to end. I needed to finish a piece for an import...

It's 8:12 on a Tuesday morning in Portici. The air is that thick, heavy kind — salt-laden and damp, rising up from the harbour, a veil that wraps itself around the buildings and makes everything feel slightly out of focus. I'm sitting at my usual table outside the bar beneath the office, the one wit...

  Berto rang me at the end of March. Going from memory: it was a Tuesday, I still had my coffee in hand, and outside the window Caserta was making up its mind whether to rain or not — that grey that wraps around the Reggia and leaves everything feeling a bit suspended. Berto isn't one for beati...

It's quarter past six in the morning in Santa Maria Capua Vetere. The light coming through the window hasn't made up its mind yet — it's that milky grey that comes before the real sun, the one that in an hour will start hammering down on the tuff stone of the buildings. In front of me are two sheets...

There's a precise moment in the life of every aspiring writer (and often seasoned ones too) when narcissism comes knocking. It's a seductive knock, whispering: "Hey, this story is yours. You're intelligent, you've got strong opinions about the world, you've suffered. Why not say so? Why not explain ...

Have you ever thought about what a disgruntled reader feels? To the thoughts of those who get lost in front of the repulsive texts they read every day at work or outside work? I'm not talking about fiction here, but about everything else. Even the message "do not open this door" taped to the door in...

  It happens to everyone. You've just finished writing a crucial email, copy for a campaign worth thousands of pounds, or the final chapter of your novel. Your thinking is clear, your strategy is rock-solid, the words seem to flow like a river in full spate. You reread quickly – or perhaps not,...

It's Tuesday night. Or perhaps it's Wednesday morning already, depending on how much caffeine you have circulating. In the Insight studio there's that electric silence that precedes great ideas or great disasters. I'm sitting at my desk, and across from me is Berto Bastone. For those who don't know ...

Here I am, immersed in the bluish light of monitors, with a cup of coffee that's now gone cold and a pile of Asimov and Gibson novels staring at me judgementally from the desk. Today I want to take you on a journey that touches the deepest chords of my nerdy soul and my profession as a communicator....