Close-ups

Let’s talk about you: what is your background, what do you teach, and what are your research interests?
As a university student, I never imagined that I would be able to type my name into a search engine and discover that I had a person with my same name, born in New Jersey, who died in 2018. Nor would I have imagined that it would be possible to draw information about so many of my experiences by consulting social media and the Ca' Foscari website. Indeed, I would never have imagined holding this interview in my role as Associate Professor of L-Art04 (since last January) for this University, as I had never come into contact with it before winning a public competition. Likewise, I would never have thought I would publish anything: "I wanted to be an architect" (but since I was not admitted to the Politecnico di Milano, - but never mind! Or luckily?) I hurriedly turned to a then recent degree - it was 1995 - such as Conservation of Cultural Heritage in Lecce, even further south than my place of origin: Ceglie Messapica, in Magna Graecia. At least there I would have studied a lot of Art History (which was actually why I wanted to study Architecture). I was, how to say, "disoriented".
Maybe I come from another era, I was born in '76 and I'm a Gemini, so I'm saturnine, and I was trained in an analogue, paper-based world, where you had to photocopy books, you had to go to libraries, the telephone was used to make phone calls, you took the photos for your dissertation with a 'canon zappy', my red one, with 36-exposure rolls of film; you printed them after a week.

Tell us about your academic path.
In 2021, someone reminded me of the 19th anniversary of the day I defended my dissertation. I just smiled, thinking about how much time had passed from the moment I thought of the remote possibility of continuing to do research after graduation, to the day I learned that I had passed yet another university competition, which I faced not without scepticism (in December 2020)! In the meantime, many things have happened and I have ‘found’ some of them, specified in the CV on this very website.

How do you plan to contribute to the growth of Ca' Foscari students?
I do not know if I have anything concrete to teach others, but I hope that I can at least help by not only fulfilling the duties of teaching by passing on contents, by teaching a method for studying a 'phenomenology' of the arts or Art History, but rather by passing on the pleasure of learning to linger over what they are studying and to seek out opportunities for intellectual pleasure and to know how to share them. In short, to develop a mindset inclined towards observation and the search for Beauty, just as someone taught me, that I am still learning.

What do teaching and researching mean to you?
I don't know how to answer that because it's like having to explain how I can taste an almond or take pleasure in looking at a cloud. It has to do with physiology and it means communicating in a certain way. 

Can you offer any advice to researchers in the early stages of their career?
I say seek and ye shall find. And as an artist friend of mine says: 'you have to be like silkworms; always producing'.