On the 18th of December I took my last flight, Lisbon-Milan, my journey has come to an end. Tired and confused I got out from the plane and I found myself in Milan, really far from the heavy temperature, which was there, when on the 12 of July I left everything, my first step for the beginning.

That day with my luggage and backpack I went to the airport, feeling sick and a mix of curiosity and pain, and I left. This time I did not feel fear, not because I had been brave, but because, let’s say’, who wouldn’t have felt fear to do such a crazy and unknown experience, but I was just tired of the last days, spent organizing everything for this five months long trip.
I have had the strength to wake up from what I called, my long paralysis. Finally I decided to get it out.
Nearly ten months before due to an unplanned meeting in the Italian alps, I changed my mind about all the things that until now were certain for me. All my certainties began to collapse. For the first time I listened to what I had inside, and that in the last years I tried to not care about.


When a person as me, who in his life has never really got involved in anything, decides to do this kind of experience, He is either crazy or He has understood that this is his last chance to take control of his life.


This is what happened to me: Alessandro, a scientific high school student from Milan, that unconsciously after having passed an important university entry exam, had his future already set for the next three years.
This has never been my choice and not listening to what I had inside, as I did in the last few years, my sadness would have just grown.
I may have a job in a multinational company as the people towards me dreamt about me, but I would have always been unsatisfied. The time to stop a little bit and to decide how and when to act, had arrived.


I had not left because I wanted to travel around the world, but because I felt the necessity to do it. It’s difficult to explain, but I felt that I needed a drastic decision to change my life or at least to try to do that, and I found it in the journey.
Just getting lost in the inside of Peru’ in a little town called Pampacangallo dispersed in the Peruvian Andes, I had the time to know me and to reflect: To understand what I got wrong and how to change it. I just needed to leave all the certainties that had characterized my life since now: in order to get me lost, search me and at the end find me.


After five months spent to organize this journey and to try to let my parents understand my choice, that if I could have seemed illogical, for me It meant so much.
At the end I was ready to leave.


With this motivation I left Italy and I arrived in Peru’: alone, without knowing a word in Spanish, and above all not sure about what was waiting for me there. This has been for sure the place that has given me the most in terms of experiences and reflections: I passed four months helping people who really needed it, and to live side by side with difficult situations: family who could not guarantee to their children a correct alimentation and the possibility to study.


After these months I felt the necessity to change, to put in act what I learnt and, for another time, left all, and go.


From that moment, I felt extremely free and light. Finally, I was the owner of myself and of my time. I have left all the objects that have influenced my life, until that time, and I departed with just my little backpack. This backpack, even if it does not seem like something important, it had obliged me to take with me only what I really needed, understanding, in this way, what was really essential and what was not.

Another thing that these travel months of quietness and distance from the world had taught me, what was important for me and what, as the dresses and objects I donated and left in Peru’, was not. During these months I couldn’t understand how lots of people suddenly forgot me. For a moment I felt really lonely but at least I knew who really cared about me.

This has been the first stage of my five months trip in South America, just the beginning.