Portici, Granatello pier, 1990. It's pouring, and the car is parked along the pier, the windows steamed up from the inside until nothing gets through any more. It's not the Granatello you know today, the nightlife spot, the city's living room. In 1990 the port area was something else entirely. Even ...

Quartieri Spagnoli, a Tuesday in November, 7.40am. The alley is just wide enough for two scooters to brush wing mirrors. The bar on the corner has already fired up the coffee machine; from a ground-floor basso comes the smell of washing hung out to dry. Stop beside an iron grate, where the rust has ...

  Thursday morning, end of September. Outside the workshop in San Leucio the air has that first damp chill that rolls down from the hills of Caserta and makes you fancy another coffee. Inside, the smell is an unmistakable mix: warm PVA glue, freshly die-cut cardboard, wood dust, and the burnt d...

  Tuesday morning, October 2024. 06:12am. The Granatello harbour in Portici reeks, at this hour, of cold smoke, diesel from the fishing boats and that thick salt tang that clings to your skin. A thin wind was cutting at my ankles and creeping up under my jacket. I was sat on a frozen iron bolla...

Tuesday morning, Santa Maria Capua Vetere. The porticoes opposite the Criminal Court are a pocket of shade trying to defend itself against an already fierce June sun, the kind that can get the tarmac smoking before midday. Around us, the usual waltz: solicitors with leather bags that weigh like boul...

The light slanting in through the sash windows had that particular grey tint, typical of London autumn afternoons, that seems to hold its breath. It was 5.12pm on an ordinary Tuesday. Through the glass filtered the muffled rumble of red double-deckers slowing at the City Road junction, right in the ...

It's late on a Tuesday evening — just gone two in the morning. Outside my studio in Caserta there's that still, heavy silence that comes before the dampness settles over the Campanian plain, broken only by the dull rumble of the odd car cutting along the bypass in the distance. On the desk there's a...

  Portici, Granatello pier. Thursday evening, October 2017, 11:14pm. There's a thin mist rising off the sea, mixing with the stale smell of fried food drifting from the shuttered restaurants and the salt air slowly corroding the iron pillars. I'm not in my studio. The studio — with its ergonomi...

Agro aversano, a strip of land suspended between Sant'Arpino and Orta di Atella. It's a September morning in 2024, just gone half nine, and the air outside is only beginning to warm up — but in here, everything runs on a completely different logic. I'm sitting inside a dairy that smells intensely of...

Borough Market, Southwark, London. It's a Thursday morning in November 2024, it's twenty-three minutes past eight, and the cold air rising off the Thames cuts straight under the collar of my heavy jacket. I'm standing beneath the wrought-iron spans of the Victorian structure, a few metres from the e...

January, quarter past eight in the morning. The air rolling down from the Tifatini mountains is a needle of ice that drives straight into your lungs if you make the mistake of breathing too quickly. I was in Santa Maria Capua Vetere, standing in the middle of Piazza Adriano, my hands practically fus...

Libreria, at 65 Hanbury Street in Spitalfields, is a corridor. Long, narrow, with shelves in ochre yellow plywood running floor to ceiling on both sides, heavy with volumes arranged without genre labels — only themes, like "The Enchantment of the Disillusioned" or "The City". Individual reading lamp...

Have you ever walked into a bookshop, opened a novel lauded by critics for its style, read the first three pages and thought: "Wow, what sublime writing"... only to fall inexorably asleep by page four? And conversely: how many times have you devoured in a single night a book that, on closer inspecti...

Picture the scene. It's 8:15 in the morning. Your potential client — let's call him Marco if we're in Naples, or James if we're in London — is drinking his first coffee. He's got his phone in one hand and he's scrolling with his thumb in a rhythmic, almost hypnotic movement. Swipe, swipe, delete. Sw...

It's night. Or perhaps early morning, that uncertain light filtering through the blinds reminding you that today, once again, you're behind schedule. There you are, in front of the screen. The cursor blinks. Tick, tick, tick. Like a drop falling into a metal sink in an empty room. The blank page is ...

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...

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...