Here is my story in brief: the people who shaped me, the hard years and the dream I work for every day.
I was born on 10 November 1970. I was eighteen months old when I lost my mother to acute meningitis. In fourth grade I could barely read and write: today it makes me smile, because the method I teach is called Three-Dimensional Reading. In middle school, at boarding school, I met the first of my teachers, Father Gabriele Maragno, a Franciscan friar who taught me never to give up.
I enrolled in Medicine in Padua, and in the meantime I worked as a youth leader in my parish and volunteered with the Red Cross. At university I discovered Neuro-Linguistic Programming, and it fascinated me so much that I left my studies just a few exams short of graduating: I became a trainer and business consultant. In the nineties I led the teaching side of a large training Project for Banca Mediolanum.
I was always searching for what I then called “the Truth”, and to find it I attended courses of every kind. Then I met the man I consider my Teacher, an educator I followed for fourteen years. From Him I learned almost everything I know, starting with looking at Life for what it is, and not for how I interpreted it.
With a very dear friend I worked for five years on BTM, Business per il Terzo Millennio (Business for the Third Millennium): a network that would have given a large part of its profits to ethical businesses. It didn't turn out as we had hoped, and I too carried a great deal of the responsibility. I had to start again from scratch, and my Teacher left me too. I got back up slowly, helped by Silence, by prayer and above all by Forgiveness, towards myself even more than towards others, and in particular towards some who had judged me, condemned me, seized my house and made my life truly hard. I was on the ground.
Little by little I recovered and, after a long look at my mistakes, I went back to work as a consultant. I felt the need, and also the duty, to teach others what I had learned from my mistakes. I had devised my own method of global learning, which until then I had taught to very few people: Three-Dimensional Reading, which draws on techniques I learned during my years in training, including photographic reading, anchoring from Neuro-Linguistic Programming and relaxation from Mind Dynamics.
I began teaching it to adults; then, at the request of a dear friend, I organised for the first time a week of training and education for teenagers, the first Change Your Life week. And there everything changed. In those six days I saw the young people open their eyes, I saw them almost “reborn”, moved by an impulse of love that had swept up both them and me. From there the Project The Bridge Educational Center was born, a Bridge between the schools of the world and a new way of doing school, and with it Change Your Life, an evolutionary educational experience for young people. In 2022 the Project found its first permanent home at the Borgo del Monte Antico, in Italy, and in 2024 at the Finca de la Paz, in Spain.
My dream for the next twenty years is to open at least ten centres in Europe: the Schools of Choice, where young people will enrol because they decided to, and not because school is compulsory. There they will study with the best learning methods that exist today: they won't learn “by heart”, but will learn to connect ideas and develop the intuitive mind. They will be residential schools: the young people will live together and do everything, from cleaning to cooking, respecting Nature and people, without judging and without ever giving up. Moving from one centre to another, they will learn languages by living them and discover that those who are different are not a threat. The Schools of Choice will not be against ordinary schools: I want to work alongside them and show through facts that today we can educate in another way.
I needed to be recognised, to be somebody. I overestimated my own strength and that of the people around me, and I thought I knew how to do things that, in truth, I couldn't yet do.
… and by making mistakes I learned a lot!
Knowledge is useful; values, even more so.
With young people I try to pass on the knowledge they need to face the working world competently and, even more, universal values: respect for Nature, for the environment and for others, not judging. The mobile phone, that little box they carry every day, doesn't teach them; and the places where they were once learned, parish clubs and the Scouts, hardly exist any more. That's why I offer them the Change Your Life experiences.
Listen to the heart, use the mind.
Managers today, more than ever, need to learn to look inside themselves: that is where they find the strength to run their companies and lead their people. We live in a society that looks for everything “outside” and has forgotten that the greatest wealth is within us, in the heart and in the mind. With the Professional Master Training, an advanced management training experience, I teach how to listen to the heart and make good use of the mind.
The most important job in the world has no manual.
I help parents to be excellent parents. Being a father or a mother is the most important job in the world, and it carries a responsibility no other job has ever surpassed; yet nobody hands us a manual for doing it. We become excellent parents by making mistakes, but when we make mistakes we cause disasters.
I'm not alone! My dream is also the dream of the people of the “Eccomi” community. I live in Malta and sometimes I work at the Finca de la Paz, in Spain, and at the Borgo del Monte Antico, in Italy; soon in the United Kingdom too. I devote myself to the Project from Monday to Friday and from Friday to Sunday, without a break, for eight years now.
People often ask me what I think about politics and faith. I don't take sides, but I have my convictions, and I have written them down on a separate page.