I was born in Turin, Italy, in 1981, and I grew up in a house filled with books and surrounded by nature. When I was in first grade, I used to go to the bookstore with my mom once a week, each time looking for a new book to read. I would have bought them all! I used to read tons of children’s books at that time. And this for sure helped me developing my natural predisposition to transform my lively imagination into words and stories. I loved drawing as well; the favorite subjects of my drawings were princesses and ballerinas, and I was secretly dreaming of becoming one of those as an adult! I remember myself taking great care of my colored pencils during the elementary school years. I even used to keep them in a specific order in my pencil case, the same of the rainbow’s colors.
I spent the best part of my childhood playing in the huge backyard of my family’s home, with my two brothers and our dog. We lived so many wonderful adventures all together there, whatever season of the year it was! We even built our tree house all by ourselves: it was our special castle, our secret refuge, and only the three of us were allowed to play on it. My first stories, written during the middle and high school years, took origin from these happy childhood memories and from my daily life. I wasn’t writing thinking about publication at that time, I was too young to think about such thing; I was just writing for fun, because I really loved it. Everything was inspiring to me: a little memory, for example a good one if I wanted to create a delightful and fun story; or a sad one, if I wanted to write a thoughtful story; or even a topic suggested by my teachers during the lessons at school…everything was food for my imagination and my pen! Sometimes I liked to participate in literary competitions. I was 13 years old when I wrote a fiction story, having the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi and the Italian singer-songwriter and rapper Jovanotti as the main characters, in order to participate in a literary competition reserved to middle school students. I had a fun time creating that story! Eleventh grade was another important year in the development of my writing dream: in fact, when I was 16 years old, I wrote a story about my own city, celebrating its beauty and the many ways I felt connected to it. With this story, I participated in the literary competition entitled “Tell about your city”, reserved to people of any age, living in the city of Turin and surroundings. That time, together with other 99 writers, I had the pleasure to see my story published on the pages of one of the most known newspapers in Turin, La Stampa. It’s been such a huge honor to me, I was only a teenager.
In the following years, I just focused on my school career at the University: in 2005, I graduated with flying colors at Università degli Studi di Torino, becoming a pharmacist. I remember that, in those years, my main goal was to become a pharmacist. I really felt it as one of the biggest dreams of my life. Becoming able to be close to people, to help them solve their health issues, to make them feel special as patients, took me a lot of time, work and effort. I was completely dedicated to my studies and, during the first years of my career as a pharmacist as well, sometimes I thought that my passion for writing would just remain an impossible dream, because I was not able to find the time to dedicate to it. But, in my heart, I knew that I was missing it a lot. And I also knew that, sooner or later, I would have begun to write again. It was part of me!
That time arrived when I was pregnant with my first child: some complications occurred, and my doctor prescribed me a long rest…so I decided to turn what, at first, had seemed to me a boring situation in a positive opportunity to dedicate myself and my time to my secret dream: writing! I believe that the special emotions that I felt in my heart and mind during my first pregnancy inspired me the idea of creating an illustrated book for children. So I wrote the story and realized the first sketch of the main character of this book, Juliet Stork. Little did I know that I would have published it for real one day!
In the following years, I continued to fill my daily life with the immense joy of being a wife, a mother and a pharmacist. In 2017, my husband’s job brought us to the United States, where we currently live. I am so thankful and happy for this opportunity that has been given to us. Of course, taking the decision to leave the city where I spent literally 35 years of my life seemed hard at the beginning. I left my family and a lot of friends there and I miss them deeply. But we got to know some truly kind and dear friends here as well, and this makes us feel blessed. In the past years spent in the US, I found new inspirations to write and illustrate my first book for children: Edward the little magic star and Claire. I started to think about it this way: I would like, for my young readers, an easy plot, narrated with easy words, illustrated with easy drawings…but it has to explain them an important message. Because this is the way children use to communicate with us adults: they tell us their simple stories, using their simple words and drawings…but the messages and emotions they are able to communicate are so big and deep. They have so much to teach us! I believe that we, as adults, should all try to learn a bit more from our kids: sometimes our complexity is so excessive that it should crumble in front of their pure and true simplicity. That’s why, reading this book, you will get to know the story of a little girl (Claire) and her new special friend (Edward), narrated with easy words and accompanied by hand-drawn illustrations (I used colored pencils as a child would do! Then I modified some of the backgrounds and some details using a drawing software)…but the message explained in the story will be surprisingly big!
I have recently published two new books for children, Juliet Stork: mission North Pole, based on the story and the sketches that I created many years ago, when I was expecting my first child, and Chef Quiche’s ABC, a “baked with love” alphabet book for preschoolers.
I am planning to write and illustrate many other books for children, so stay tuned! And, in the meantime, I hope you will enjoy the books that I have already published.