Born in Naples into a family that has lived there for generations,
I nonentheless have a drop of Swiss-German blood.
At age three, I started to change cities.
I hold a degree in philosophy, having studied the sociology of art and literature, cultural anthropology, social and language psychology, with a thesis on Gordon Craig’s theory of the actor.
Then I began to write.
I worked as a reporter in a daily newspaper.
Then as a copywriter in an advertising agency.
I didn’t like the way things were advertised, so I set up an agency with my art director to do things differently.
I have thaught at Rome’s La Sapienza University.
I have published two essays on communication
which are also university texts; a novel based on the true story of a suicide bombing in Jerusalem,
translated into 11 languages including Hebrew and Arabic; then the true story told as a novel of the trial of the ‘cold-eyed bocconiano’, which helped to reopen the judicial case; a surreal short story that takes up the witness accounts of the tortures suffered by the protesters at the G8 summit in Genoa, nominated in the United States for the Pushcart Prize; a novel inspired by three gender fluid teenagers
who let me enter into the chaos of their lives and the fictionalised biography of an Italian film director who lives through the 20th century on three different continents and with two opposing sexual identities.