I was born on 24 May 1978, at noon — and I have always been the kind of person who is loud at home and quiet everywhere else. From an early age I watched people the way others watch landscapes: looking for the cracks, the unguarded moments, the raw and unexpected humanity that hides just beneath the surface of everyday social behaviour.
I grew up in a small town in the province of Catania, Sicily — a place where time moves slowly, where things happen without warning, and where people still greet each other on the street. It shaped the way I see the world, and I carry it with me everywhere I go. Today I live in Treviso, in the northeast of Italy, which I consider — for now — the perfect place to be a father.
Before photography became the centre of my life, I was a biologist. I worked in Africa, an experience that marked me deeply and irreversibly. When I returned to Italy, I redirected everything I had towards creative communication: years of study in Visual Communication and Imaging led me to become an Adobe® Certified Instructor and Creative Web Designer for several Italian digital agencies. I learned to think in images long before I learned to make them.
My relationship with photography began timidly in my adolescence, then found its true form during my university years. For a long time it was a private practice — years of research, experimentation, and thousands of frames made in silence. Then, slowly, it became something else: not just a discipline or a passion, but a necessity. A form of salvation. What I now consider the one true antidote to the noise and contradictions of modern life.
Since 2014 I have focused exclusively on street photography — the genre that gave me what I had always been looking for: freedom. Moving through the streets with a camera feels, to me, like moving through a jazz score. My photography is an improvisation on the theme of life — unscripted, unrepeatable, entirely present.
That same year I founded fotostreet.it, which has since grown into one of the most widely read Italian platforms dedicated to street photography — recognised among the top 40 international blogs in the field. Through it I share my photographic experiences, cultural research, and my ongoing personal exploration of the medium.
In 2016 I co-led the Chicago Street Photography Experience, a ten-day immersive street photography project under the patronage of the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago. The resulting series — Everyday Heroes — became a permanent exhibition at the RTM Living Campus in Trieste, and received Honours Mentions at the Prix de la Photographie de Paris in 2018.
My photographs have appeared in numerous books and publications, among them: Italian Street Photography (curated by Benedetta Donato), the World Street Photography volumes 2015 and 2016, Urban Unveils the City and its Secrets (volumes 2 and 3), the Cities series (volumes 1–4, ISP/Fujifilm Italia — for which I also served as mentor and appeared on the cover of volume 2), Urban & Human Empathy, Short Street Stories — a tribute to the satirical street photography of Martin Parr and Nick Turpin — The Italians (ISP, 2018), Chromantic — a tribute to Alex Webb — and Real People, edited by Bruce Gilden. My work has also been published in Fotografare magazine, ClickMagazine, and in the annual report of Assicurazioni Generali.
Exhibitions of my work have been held across Italy and Europe, including Trieste, Rome, Florence, Milan, Modica, Orvieto, Łódź, and Hamburg — where a selection appeared at the Gudberg Nerger Gallery. International projections and installations have taken place in Miami, Hamburg, Paris, and New York.
I have taught and mentored at workshops and photography programmes throughout Italy, including the ISP Experience, the Premio Luce Iblea, and the Harim Accademia Euromediterranea. I have been selected as a Master Teacher for Review My Photo. My photographs of the Palio di Siena were selected as an authorial representation of the event, included alongside a restricted group of national and international photographers.
In 2022, the Municipality of Palagonia awarded me a Civic Merit Recognition for bringing images of the town to the world through street photography. That same year I received the honorary title of Custode della Memoria — Keeper of Memory — in Militello in Val di Catania.
I am the founder of 21MM and of fotostreet.it. I continue to teach, to collaborate, and above all to walk — camera in hand, eyes open, looking for the life that happens when nobody is performing.