Our Story

The boat’s name was Maruzza. I brought her to Procida, where she was based for four years in the fishermen’s harbor of Corricella, a truly stunning place. I spent every weekend on board—sailing, taking things apart, doing maintenance. As the years went by, I devoured technical sailing manuals, went out to sea whenever I had a free moment, and slowly realized that the time to leave was getting closer. Squall after squall, I understood that Maruzza was safe, seaworthy, and truly capable of everything I dreamed of.

In short, I had fallen in love, and I couldn’t just leave her for another one! So at thirty-one, after living on bread and tomatoes for 48 months to save money, I quit my job, moved to Procida, and spent five months doing an endless list of yard work to prepare Maruzza for a journey across the Mediterranean. They were fantastic months—full of wrenches, drills, friends, parties, and a lot of love… and not only for Maruzza.

with my backpack through deserts, oases, and remote villages in the Atlas Mountains. I was living a true adventure of freedom, and I felt as comfortable as a mouse in cheese. In April 2002, I returned to Maruzza, got her shipshape, and set off for Kelibia on Tunisia’s eastern coast. From there, I sailed to Malta. At the time, I was accompanied by Patrizia, a skilled sailor and a woman with the courage of a tiger.

It was a stormy voyage, full of rain, wind, squalls, rough seas, and calm patches. To cover the 450 miles between Africa and Malta, it took us ten days—a mini ocean crossing! In the middle of the sea, motionless in the calm winds, I saw sharks, misty rainbows, and an immense sky. But nothing else. It felt as if we were the only humans on the planet. Just me, Patrizia, and Maruzza—a 6.7-meter boat keeping us company with all her lines and sheets, whose sounds I had come to know intimately. In short, Maruzza had begun to speak to me. Because yes, boats do speak!

And one morning, through the haze on the horizon, we spotted Kythira, almost touching the southern tip of the Peloponnese. We had arrived in Greece—under sail alone, never using the engine. Not at departure. Not at arrival. For me, that was the ultimate joy, my own apotheosis of happiness.

Then, in 2004, I headed east, and after a stop in Northern Cyprus, I reached the eastern edge of the Mediterranean. One morning, looking ahead from the bow, instead of seeing sea, I saw a line of land. It was Syria. The Mediterranean had come to an end. I left Maruzza in the dock at Latakia, among Assad’s navy torpedo boats and soldiers in flip-flops armed with submachine guns. I hopped on the first bus I found and headed into the Palmyra desert.

There, I began an adventure that would eventually take me around the world with a camera in hand. I decided to try making a documentary about a recent discovery in the area: a very rare and iconic bird for the local Bedouins, the Northern Bald Ibis. It promised to be a beautiful story of people and nature.

I returned to work in Naples for a while, splitting my time between life in the lab and editing the documentary I had shot in Syria. Finally, after an enormous effort, I put the film together. I called it Ahmed and the Return of the Phoenix. It won a ton of awards and was even purchased by National Geographic. At the time, I didn’t know it, but that small film would change my life.

I went back to the boat, sailing through the Aegean, the Libyan Sea, and the Ionian Sea. Then I left Maruzza on the island of Salamina, near Athens, and set off for Kenya without regrets. I wanted to become a nature documentary filmmaker. And I did—spending more time in Africa and India than on Maruzza—for many years. Until 2022. A few years earlier, I had brought the boat to Samos, just a stone’s throw from Turkey, and there she had lain abandoned for over five years. By some miracle, she wasn’t damaged.