Chi sono

Ultratrentenne, “anarchico conservatore” (cit.), ossessionato dagli hobby, geek senza speranza. Vivo a Modena da sempre con tre gatti in una casa che sembra un magazzino. Lavoro come responsabile IT ma vorrei fare altro.

University

I have been following lessons at the Computer Science dept. of the University of Bologna, but had to move to the brand new faculty in Modena due to several reasons.

English

Introduction

For those who are still puzzled to know what the purpose of this website is, I can just tell you that its functionality is twofold: it is both my personal home page (everything you need to know about me, my hobbies, my interests and general chitchatter), as a working area to test some experiments of web-design and programming, as a big collector of things useless and ludicrious, as a place to store files I need to download elsewhere than my home station, as a container for some websites I am managing (or developing, like HERO GAMES Italia website), a place to share opinions about everything that goes from cinema to politics, leisure (much of it, actually) with the rest of the world (at least that part that has a computer and a dial-up connection to the cyberspace, a place to publish my works of webdesign and web-development (regarding which I would like to create the no-profit Streetcleaner Studios Web Agency someday).

Oh yes it’s more than two. Want to beat me?
This website is also my first attempt at a totally CSS, HTML 4.01, Standard browser compliant creature. Of course to carefully oversee every single detail for compliance, this website will start as extremely simple and plain, I plan, however, to improve its looks in due time. All for now, plunge into the realms of uselessness and time-wasting.

Update: WordPress is much better than anything I can ever hope to write, so that’s what I am using now.

A Note on the Language

I want to apologize to all Englishmen and English mother-tongues for my subhuman use of the English language within these pages. I am a totally self-taught English user (thanks Gygax), by no means literate, and I don’t have the occasion to talk with other English speaking persons more than 10 times a year. I might have written the whole website in Italian, my mother-tongue, but I don’t think it’s a clever choice when you’re publising a work on the WWW as it would have cut out 90% of the possible visitors.

My Biography

There is no real reason for me to lose nights designing this website, nor for me to spend money in a domain name. I basically just needed some place on the Internet to use as a temporary container for files and a developement place for websites. Besides, surfing on the Internet I found very interesting to read about people alla around the world and their lives, so I decided in the end to use this domain to share my views and talk a bit about me and my recent interestes.
I am 26 as I write these lines, I was born in Bologna, Italy the 11th June, 1976.

In my life I have lost countless hours reading, watching TV, writing at the computer, listening to music, basically spending time in every kind of leisure and avoiding strenous works :). I have had many hobbies, many of which I still cultivate to this very day, this website is a portal towards all my passions.

The Store

Recently (2003-2004) I have decided it was the right time to open a store. A store dedicated to underground, obscure music, literature and cinema. The opening was rather succesful, and I really hope I can continue doing this work until retirement. You can check a bit about what the store is about by clicking here: www.buio-omega.it. Buio Omega was a crowning achievement for my early, atavistic passion for the splatter and the macabre.

Horror and Comics

When I still was in my first school days (4-6 years old) the nuns were terrified by my drawings: blue water clogged zombies, crumbling ruins with cadavers hanging all around, gut eating zombies, inverted crucifixes and black flaming suns were not the typical product of their standard kids. I still sympathetically remember my early nights in the first mid eighties creeping out of my bedroom into the evening room to watch Argento movies until midninght. Contrarily to what my relatives like to say, I have never lost a single night of sleep even if I was still a child, but instead I was growing a morbid fascination for the supernatural, grotesque and just shocking. That was the period when I asked my mother to buy me second hand comic books and I started digging in old dusty bookstores for vampire and horror books. But more so, I developed a big passion for comic books. Among the very first comic books I started to read were Alan Ford and Kriminal, both by the same publisher and featuring the same artist and writer (although while Kriminal often swapped artists and writers Alan Ford was steady for over 70 issues). With these comics I discovered he who still is my favorite artist of all time, the great Magnus, probably the most influential and innovative artist ever lived in Europe. With Kriminal my passion for the noire and the morbid developed, while Alan Ford gave me a huge spin and help in developing a bitter sense of houmor. This comic book in its early days (a mockery of it is still released and can be found in the newstands but it’s just plain pathetic) was so brilliant and unconventional I seriously feel it has helped me develop a quite early sensibility and intelligence very different from those my age, and also helped me to start reading when I was barely 5 years old. By the time I was in the “real” school, I was already reading “books with no pictures” (a cleverness which however sadly stopped in puberty eh eh, I was a very clever kid, but I am not a very clever adult at all, on the contrary I acknowledge I am today very very ignorant). That was the time I stopped playing out with friends and begun reading heavily, principally books, closing myself in a world of mine.

RPG

It was slightly later that I started developing an intense passion for the medieval and fantasy fiction. When I was 7 I discovered the Lone Wolf serie by Joe Dever and Gary Chalk, and the world to RPG was open. By 1986 I discovered Dungeons and Dragons, and by 1989 also Champions, two Role Playing Games I still have much passion for (more on that later).

Comics

In 1989 I was playing with a group of much older people (about 30-something) among whose were several comic book collectors. Even though I used to read my uncle’s Spider Man collection (editoriale Corno) when i was just 6/7, the stories I was reading that time were totally different in spirit and maturity. I was lucky to start my involvement in superhero comic books when two new editors were just born in Italy, Star comics and Play Press, that took the whole heritage of comic books and brought it back to the general public. That was the time of John Byrne’s Fantastic Four, Frank Miller’s Daredevil and Chris Claremont’s X-Men, to this very day my favorite stories and what I consider the greatest age for superheroes. To close the comic book parentheses, I also had two big passions for Conan the Barbarian (which is started collecting in 1988) and Vertigo comics (much later, I think about 1993), today my favorite comic book remains The Books of Magic.

Music

1984 was another important year for me. My older brother was first involved in Heavy Metal by a very close friend (they’re still very frend to this day, he owns a wine bar in the countryside of Modena) and Metal albums begun popping in my bedroom. I remember being immediately fascinated by the album covers, and it was not much later than I started listening to his albums. I remember I had a very strong hatred towards the most classic Metal albums he brought in. I was still deeply in my horror-movie/gore-fascination period and I struggled to find something really dark and evil in the music. Discarding Motley Crue, Iron Maiden (which I really hated back then and today find totally unbearable with their stupid gallops and gay vocals) I was seriously deluded by Heavy Metal: although I liked Judas Priest’s all studs and leather attire, I found the music totally unsatisfying, just little more than rock’n'roll or pop, without any really evil message behind the covers. They looked evil, but the music was just not what I was looking for. That was until I heard something truly chilling coming from the stereo one day. It was Mercyful Fate’s “Don’t Break the Oath” and my road to perdition was prepared. Soon after hearing the album I asked my parents to buy it, it was still a time when Metal was barely known and ninety percent of the music we heard was just dubbed tapes. That album was just rented by a friend of my brother so I had to wait a bit before having the economical possibility to buy it myself. Right after Mercyful Fate my love grew for other bands like Celtic Frost, Slayer, Exodus, and by the time my brother shifted to Punk and Hard Core I was totally immersed in Thrash Metal, and begun looking for Sodom, Kreator, Sacrifice and Slaughter records. That was the time when I was going to school with my denim and patches and studded leather bracers, which are so commonly accepted today, and don’t really upset anybody anymore. But if you think you’re discriminated today, you have no idea how totally avoided you were back in the mid- 80′s. Never mind. I was proud in my worn Kreator shirt, and I just kept living in my world of silence. It was in ’88 that I started tapetrading and begun my obsession for the most extreme and obscure bands around. With Carcass I found a new dimension, that of grindcore, and after a first row of grindcore bands like Axegrinder, Prophecy of Doom, Electro Hippies, Larm, Siege etc, in the years across the 80′s and the 90′s I found my greatest musical passion for Death Metal. As long as it was raging and energic (or in the case of Doom, just “vibrating”) I also continued developing my musical tastes for Noise, Industrial, Hard Core etc.

I still didn’t consider myself a “rocker”, in fact I have nothing to share with tight denim Iron Maiden fags, I was into extreme, noisy and real filthy music, independently by its category, it’s just a case Death Metal has some of its roots in Black Sabbath. I don’t give a shit about Black Sabbath, because Black Sabbath were just hippies. What I was looking for and still today look in a band, is that it has to be twisted or disturbing in some way, and that is something people seem to find difficult to accept. They can’t understand how one can listen to Thrash and Death Metal without being a fan of classic Metal, or even Hared Rock. However that was a time when tapetrading was huge, the best band were forming or writing their best records, catalogs were spread on xeroxed paper, and people around the world were writing each other letters and not e-mails. In 1993, Death Metal had become a mainstream thing in the schools, although we were still a handful in one as big as mine which at the time counted over 2000 students, I was no longer just one, and I begun hanging out with other people into my same interests, drinking beer and talking about this music. Of all the people I knew at the time, none is still into Death Metal, I found it incomprehensible at the moment, but I learned to accept it with time and generations passing by.

Injuries

In 1994, I had a serious accident where I had a leg broken and several cuts around my body and head. Moved by my fascination for barbarian heroes of the books, and by my will to take my earned revenge from the idiots back at school, I begun training at rather early age, starting body building lessons when I was 14. Even though they told me my skeleton would have suffered by it, I started training, like I always do when I throw myself in a new passion, with total dedication, and I developed my nth interest for weightlifting and body building. When I had that accident, I had my 18th birthday only 4 days before. If I was not so fit and thick muscled at the time I could have possibly had my neck broken in the crash. From one side, I was lucky.

For a curious combination, by the summer I was recovering in my home, the company I was hanging out with disbanded, my RPG group disbanded too, and I begun writing more than ever now that I had no one to hang out in the nights. Might be worth saying that one year before my car crash I was also playing in some bands as a singer. One Hard Core band and a Death Metal one. Now neither of them exist anymore.

Fanzines

In 1994 I met the most totally passionate music fanatic I have ever met, Nicola with whom now I ran Buio Omega, which was just starting a fanzine called Hellflame. I asked him to participate and so I wrote some stuff for him. Nicola heavily into the new born wave of Black Metal, a scene which I just lived from outside because I didn’t really like the shrilly vocals, and I soon decided to leave for my own fanzine, Nuclear Abominations. I wanted Nuclear Abominations to be the ultimate in splatter, graphic imagery and brutal gore soaked music. The experiment was not a big success (read: pathetic) and the first issue came out big but quite low quality, and after some experiments I decided to move lots of material ready for the new issue on the Internet. A few weeks later Nuclearabominations.com was born. 2 years later I decided a webzine was not as interesting as a paper one anymore, and the huge wave of Internet grown kids with gigabytes of mp3s was starting to bore me heavily. When once you had to break your back reading flyers, writing letters, dubbing tapes and reading zines to stay up to date, by 1999 everyone could have anything at hand with some money, a cable connection, and a sound card. That’s what brought me back to the basics, and I wanted some ugly xeroxed paper zine to fight against technology.

Computers

An interesting contradiction if you think that after I graduated in Industrial Informatics, I actually started to develop my passion for the computer world. Having barely vegetated through all my years of school, my passion for the systems and computer mechanics exploded by the time I had to find my first job. Working as a hardware technician for a few months, during the nights I was spilling blood on configuring my first Linux systems and trying to write my first useful programs (they just taught me Pascal, C++ and DBF at school). Being the time when the Internet phenomenon exploded, I worked for 2 years as a network tech, but as soon as I could I was employed rapidly as a script programmer, developing ASP applications over strictly Microsoft-based platforms and databases. In 2001 however I decided I had to step away from my working place. It was a small, incompetent software house cut away from the world, where I was the only programmer, and I seriously felt I was never going to develop anywhere, especially when you have nobody to confront your discoveries with. That was when I made a very big decision, possibly the most important in my life: going to University. At first it was a dream, and while traveling 3 hours by train and bus every day to attend lessons revealed to be proving, I really enjoyed my studies, although I could attend just one and half an year before facing the economical need to find a full time employment. Having been in the underground music for 15 years convinced me I might have been able to handle a record store, and so together with my friend Nicola, we decided to give it a try. Although following Buio Omega’s bureaucracy and giving it a start is taking me more than 10 hours every day, it is also giving back lot of satisfaction. If things go as well as planned I might go back to University in a few months and find time to do some exams. I’d really like to have this education for me and for my parents who believed in me when I left my job.

Today (2004) I work at the store, work part-time as a freelance web consultant and project designer, and I plan soon to go back to the gym and get back in shape as soon as time will allow me.

Update: I no longer run Buio Omega as a store. I have this distribution going but the website is under permanent construction state. I work part time as a IT consultant today.

History

I also recently started to explore the history of the region where my grandparents were born: Istria, a region which was silently given away from Italy to Tito’s Yugoslavia to pay for war debts. My grandparents faced a great tragedy at the hand of the Yugoslavia and the Italian Communists, and today I find it right for me to know exactly how things went back then. They were sent to an ex-nazi concentration camp in Modena’s neighbors, and were later dispatched all over Italy together with thousands of other Italians that have lost home and identity during the war. I have some relatives in Australia today, and many more scattered all over Italy. The government just recently acknowledged the tragedy that struck in that region after keeping silent for so many years, silently accepting this situation due to the huge influence that the Communist Party (possibly the most corrupt and hypocrite we have today) had in this country and in my city in particular, and I feel part of it in even if I was not born there, because their blood still flow in my veins.