Although all my adult life I have lived in Roma…..

….my formative years, eight to eighteen, were spent in Napoli, and I suppose that decade was a huge factor in determining my worldview. The people in Napoli have endured a far different lifestyle to those in Roma and the northern cities like Milano and Torino.

Although I grew up in a more affluent area of the city my friends were a mix from school. I had a few friends my parents didn’t really approve of and although I rebelled against that stricture I wasn’t stupid enough to get involved in drugs or alcohol (my Papa being an officer 👮 in the Carabinieri, he would have detected things very quickly and my friends would have faced his full Sicilian onslaught!).

I got pregnant at a party just as I was finishing school and I was offered a place at the Sapienza in Roma to where we were moving on my graduation from middle/secondary school 🏫. My parents rallied around me and absorbed as much as I needed them to being so young. But yes I showed at university and everyone knew I was going to be a teenage Mama.

Just after my daughter was born I switched disciplines and started working on a marketing degree so I could get a better career than my first choice degree would have given me, perhaps. I haven’t really thought about that much nor projected if I would have been a company director by age thirty (I was actually a director at twenty eight).