Claudio
Apart from cuddling our ducks and our cat, as you can see in the photo above, and caring for our other "pond guests" (water turtles, fishes), one of the favourite ways of spending my free time is travelling: in the last years I had the opportunity of visiting many countries, most of them thanks to the Italian organization Avventure nel Mondo, to which I owe a lot of unforgettable experiences.
I like photography, gardening, trekking, and there has been a time when I was passionate about cycling, pedalling some 50 - 100 Km every week-end (have you ever heard about Stelvio Pass ? 2757 m. above sea level, the highest in Europe!!! I will tell something about it one day or another...). Ah, yes, recently I am taking an interest in genealogy!
And the computers? Oh, well, that was a real early start: my first auto-financed expense was one of the first, precious, HP-67 hand-held programmable calculators (someone remembers them?) in the far 1977; and then a D.A.I. Personal Computer in 1981: a really powerful :-) machine, with 24 Kb ROM and a 2 Mhz 8080 CPU inside, an audio tape as mass storage and a TV as monitor (I would like to know if there are other old-timers that used it out there!); I wrote literally hundreds of programs for these machines, today completely useless (and unreadable). Then computers became my field of work, and I only resolved to buy again one for myself in 1998, in order to be a part of the www revolution!
Due to the different work opportunities that I have had during the years of my professional career, I have had the pleasure of living not only in the town where I was born, Bologna, Italy, but also in a few other places, that I would like to collect here, now that the web offers this wonderful opportunity of “pointing” to far away places, making them virtually reachable with just a click of the mouse. I love all of these places, those where I was and the one where I am now: I will risk being considered rhetoric, but I dare say that I left a small bit of my heart in every one of them!
My first work was in Genoa, Italy: but I lived in Rapallo, some 30 Km East of it, along the wonderful “Riviera”, near Portofino. I still remember walking, on Sundays, to Portofino, or San Fruttuoso, or Camogli, through the thick Mediterranean bush. Or with half an hour train, reach the “Cinque Terre”. These places are rightly famous all over the world.
For a short but exciting period (7 months) the Italian company where I was employed sent me to a nuclear research centre in Cadarache, near Aix-en-Provence, in the sunny and windy “Midi” of France, the Provence, the kingdom of Mistral!. I loved the town and the region surrounding it: among the most cherished places I remember Cassis, with its “Calanques”, and Roussillon… but there is much more! The Verdon Canyon is one of the natural wonders of Europe, and Arles is full of roman architecture…
During three years (1999-2002), I lived in Mutlangen, near Schwäbisch Gmünd, 45 minutes driving from Stuttgart, in the South of Germany, not far from the Black Forest region. I loved these places: you can walk out of your house and in five minutes you are in the middle of a beautiful pine forest, with miles of traced paths interconnecting , every now and then coming out in wonderful clearings, or small lakes, or tiny villages. But at the same time there is everything you could need from a town. And for the week-ends, Munich, Heidelberg, or Neuschwanstein are just two hours away!
