Emanuela Gris
emanuela@orizzontintorno.com

Born in Bolzano, I lived my first adventures underneath the pink summits of the Dolomites, in the forests searching for mushrooms, listen to the sounds of woodpeckers and squirrels, between lights and shadows of birches and conifers, immersed in the scents of humid soil and high pastures.
The rustling of a live and free forest, the bubbling of icy torrent water, the flaring of the sun on the mica rocks, the silence of a maso-house in the evening; the cold, the snow, the dazzling whiteness, my first skis, my ice-skating competitions, the challenge of going further and further on iced lakes: moving to the Treviso planes hasn't changed at all my passion for flowered balconies, the wood of the houses, the scents of Tyrolean kitchen.

After the scientific college I've dived into the Economy faculty. But I've chosen Venice as the site of my academic life… Milan could wait. In the meantime I'd closed one chapter (fourteen years of ballet) and, a little at a time, I had opened a new one: my Summer escapes abroad.
Typical study holidays in college and than my first independent steps in the United Kingdom and the USA before what I like to call my "year in the army" in Los Angeles, where I've finished my university exams at UCLA.
There I've lived the student's paradise, the wonders of the far west, the implacable desert light, the typical fights against those who believe that throwing a handful of salt in pasta boiling water means a heart attack, culinary temptations and general efficiency of Mom America, Nevada madness and the empty spaces within Death Valley and any boroughs inside the metropolis.
As everyone else, I've come back home slightly disturbed, fattened, angry against all Italian inefficiencies and the fog of the planes. But also, tired of individualism and anxious for more Mediterranean contacts.

After a never-ending thesis at the university, my first jobs and an MBA at Clemson, I've landed in Milan. And here I get to know Carlo, a mountaineering-lover from Genoa. We've been colleagues briefly enough to understand that we were made to escape together and become accomplices during adventures that until that moment we'd deemed improbable.
We take pictures of different things, we write in opposite manners, we tell each other our trip as long as we proceed, and when we open our home door again we run toward our famous world map to stick new little flags on it, and then step back and contemplate the world searching for our next destinations.

While travelling, the main activity of this formerly quite silent child is always the same: observing.
The Arab and Persian hospitality, the global relativity of the concepts of tea and coffee, learning enough Russian to be able to survive in half Asia, bouncing back against Chinese closure and the Indian way of doing business, the blowing of trade winds and the generous shells of the oceans, new dishes with unknown spices, the looks of people, the shadings of faces and languages, the different ways to wear a foulard and the different hairstyles, contracting methods with taxi-drivers, juicy watermelons in the oases, sugary dates and coconuts where you can stick your straw.
Former USSR borders, bodies of people blown up on landmines in South-East Asia, small men and women with a shovel and light dresses on Chinese street sides, dogs-children-old people on the street that goes through a Mexican-Uyghur-Nepalese village, no shoes for the feet of a shepherd at 5.000 meters of altitude, sixty kilos on a young guy's shoulders under monsoon rain.

Just need to switch off the TV set and catch a train in Milano Centrale station together with Carlo.

Carlo Paschetto
carlo@orizzontintorno.com

"To travel you need to have a meter, a measure. Otherwise it's just about moving". It's not my quote, I don't remember who's the author, but it's quite true.

I constantly carry with me the suspect of moving instead of really travelling; it comes with me every time I'm at a check-in desk at an airport. I often think that I should maybe leave at home my photo camera in order to travel less with my eyes inside the lens and more inside the people that I meet.
Still, be it either moving or travelling, I've been going through this extraordinary planet since I was a child, lucky enough to be born (in Genoa, 1965) in a not really sedentary family.
My first interesting "hits" without Mom and Dad have been a short autonomous expedition to the Svalbard Islands in 1987, together with a friend, and a two-month travel on my own through the Austral Patagonia winter, in 1990.

Passionate but constantly amateur mountaineer, carrying in my pocket the dream of climbing an 8.000-meter mountain ever since I started dreaming, my first travels had to share a cold climate. Up and down Scandinavia, Artic regions, Tierra del Fuego. Until I've entered Sahara. Then I've realized I love much more the sun than the rain, and that warm weather goes easily with the latent laziness that, altogether, fits into my traveler's bag.

In the latest years my addiction to travelling has worsened quite a bit, both because of my job, which does not make it easy to have a regular and stationary life and because of destiny which, funnily enough, has made cross my path with the one Emanuela's - she's a vocational gipsy, a polyglot for a hobby. Chance is that Emanuela and I shared also the passion for the same destinations: any, anywhere, anyhow. Since, between the two of us, we count more than 120 countries, we decided to spend our three-day honeymoon in Venice.

Once a senior manager in some American multinational companies, now a free-lance consultant, I share with my travelling and life companion the dream of leaving our regular life for real. Not for one specific travel, but "to travel".

I've been and still am sometimes a travel writer and I've published pictures on travel magazines and school books. I've not been able (yet) to make a profession out of it, although writing is the way I would like to earn my life when I grow up.

I'm a member since 1981 of the Italian Alpin Club, as well as a sustainer of Emergency, whose missions represent my absolute ideal of "travel" in today's world, and of CIGV.

Although I've taken off almost three hundred times, some of which thanks to airlines of embarrassing reliability, I'm terrorized by flying. I also travel with my fear of crowded buses, insects, elevators and almost any closed space and any means of transportation that I'm not personally conducting.

Emanuela puts up with all this quite patiently, knowing that anyway, and with no doubt, I could never quit leaving for any reason in the world. Especially with her.