I have spent most of my life in Messina (Sicily) but my affective and cultural “roots” branch off the lands of Hybla. My parents were from two small country towns in Val di Noto: my mother, the daughter of an innkeeper, lived in Canicattini Bagni; my father was born in a peasants' family in Monterosso Almo. Orphan of his father at the age of nine, he was forced to leave school to work on the land with his elder brother until he definitively left, still very young, his homeplace to serve for thirty-six years in the Arma dei Carabinieri. His enrolment, originally motivated by his aspiration to achieve a cultural and professional qualification, was to become a life choice which modelled and sharpened his rigorous system of values that were to form the backbone of my own ethical and civic education. He was posthumously awarded the Medaglia d'Onore for having been deported to Germany during the second world war and forced to hard labour in the Nazi camps as an “Italian military internee” (IMI).
I am married to Mariangela Nastasi. We have two sons, Emanuele and Ruben.
psichès estì logos eautòn auxon
è proprio dell’anima un logos che accresce se stesso
psyche possesses its own logos which increases itself
(Eraclitus, DK 22 fr. B 115)