Nós da Montanha's photostream  

I've been tagged

The photographer between Manjarín and El Acebo, Camino de Santiago, 2006
(photographer unknown)

I’ve been tagged by Jordi (all-i-oli), so it’s my turn, and here go 16 things about me.

1. I am a Buddhist who doesn’t believe in reincarnation.
2. I have two passions. The first one has always been art, in any form. The second one is mountaineering, which I discovered nine years ago.
3. When I was very little I learned to read on my own. I enjoyed the attention this brought me but when later I started kindergarten I was made to seat on a nun’s lap and read a book while the other children could play barefoot outside in the garden, so I forgot the alphabet overnight and only learned it again in grade school, and then became forever a voracious reader.
4. I lived, studied and worked in New York for 12 years where I got a B.F.A. and an M.F.A. in painting and sculpture. Here in Brazil I make a living as a private English tutor, mostly preparing people to apply for diplomatic studies or for their masters’ and doctorates abroad. Most of my best friends have once been my students; some still are.
5. I absolutely love Brazil, particularly my adopted city, Rio (I’m from a Southern Brazilian state). My second favorite country has always been Italy, mainly because of its art, but last year I discovered Greece and fell in love with it, and I plan to live there some time in the future. I love its food, its people, its simplicity and spareness, the smell of herbs in the countryside, the small scale of everything, and the fullness of human life there with so little.
6. I am Brazilian but I also have Italian citizenship. My ancestry is 40% Italian (Piemontese) and the rest is Catalan, Spanish, German, Azorean, Galician and Guaraní (Brazilian Indian) in roughly equal proportions.
7. Nothing gives me more pleasure than climbing a mountain surrounded by nature in the company of a few good friends. Sleeping on the summit above the clouds and waking up to see the sunrise is more heavenly to me than all the most beautiful cathedrals in the world put together.
8. I am the third of five children. My family is spread all over the world, including my parents, who are old but luckily still quite healthy. My father is 91 and still perfectly lucid. He is a great storyteller and since I was very young he sparked my imagination with stories about his adventures, some real, some exaggerated, and some wholly invented. He was a huntsman and sharpshooter, and sublimated this natural gift by becoming a microsurgeon. When I was little and he was working in the eradication of TB among Brazilian Indians in a faraway state on the border with Paraguay, my favorite toy was an authentic set of bow and arrows he brought me back from the Indian village. I think that besides a love for the outdoors and for wandering, I inherited from him the sharpshooter’s quest for the split second, the elusive detail, the precise point where time and space intersect, which for me has become a love for photography. As soon as I could read he also gave me The Travels of Marco Polo, which I blame for my lifelong fascination with exotic cultures and journeys to distant places.
9. My oldest memory is of climbing onto the rooftop of a chapel across the street from my hill-top home and being awed by an open vista of the sun setting over a green valley with distant blue mountains and a single tiny house with smoke coming out of the chimney. That was the world beyond my home, and it was beautiful, and it beseeched me.
10. That revelation triggered a childhood passion for climbing high trees and onto rooftops (I think there wasn’t a single tree or rooftop in my neighborhood left unclimbed) that got me into constant trouble with my parents, along with setting things on fire, which I did innocently just to see the flames so I couldn’t understand why they got so mad.
11. I am a mountaineer who is prone to developing A.M.S. (Acute Mountain Sickness), so I have to be very careful in high altitudes. I also have S.A.D. (Seasonal Affective Disorder) which is caused by lack of natural light, so cannot live in high latitudes. On the other hand I have photophobia (which, btw, is not "fear of photography" [hehe...], but visual intolerance to bright light) so here in Brazil I have to wear sunglasses all the time, even indoors, because of the excess of luminosity…
12. I’m highly allergic to certain insects’ bites. I have claustrophobia. I had two serious panic attacks some years ago, but thank God I never developed the syndrome. In light of the above, I suspect I am also hypochondriac. And I can’t see blood. It makes me faint.
13. Four years ago I had a scooter accident here in Rio and broke my leg. Then last year I had a similar accident (gravel on the road) in Santorini and the scooter fell right on top of the same leg, on the same spot, but since the new bone that had grown to heal the fracture was much stronger than the original, this time it didn't break. So my first accident turned out to be sheer luck...
14. When I was about five I asked my mother what art was. She said it was something that brought you closer to God. Many years of art school and countless hours of heated theoretical discussions and tomes of art theory later, I have never found a better definition, and I am grateful to her for this gift. It has given a direction to my life.
15. I am left-handed, but not a leftist (I’m not a rightist, either). I live alone (actually, with two temperamental cats), but I almost never feel lonely. I love nature and solitude, but what moves me most is other people. I have never had a beer in my life. I want to live to be 100.
16. I talk too much (and write too).

All rights reserved

Uploaded on Feb 14, 2009

2 notes / 45 comments