The question they have been asking the most

If I had such a bella vita, why did I want to leave family, friends and a beautiful country like Italy?

It all started when I was in my last year of high school: I realised that any ‘normal’ 18-19 year old life experience was never enough and always too boring, that I was way to ambitious to just settle for the average job and that I needed to do something about it. I just didn’t know how to get there.

I was still in the middle of exams, half way through graduation, when I landed my first full-time permanent office job at a kitchens factory.

Most of my school friends went to Uni, while I was one of the very few to start working a permanent job almost straight away. I had been working on and off in hospitality since when I was 15, I had always wanted to go Uni, but I was eager to earn my first serious money and become independent more.

Oh, did I hate that job. I still remember our big boss’ surprise office appearances… everyone was scared of him. You’d see people having a coffee in the lunch room run back to their desks, pretending to work extra hard, with their had down. He was seen like a dictator.

Meanwhile, I kept having this thoughts of travelling in the back of my head and I was 110% sure that there was more to life than working a 9 to 5 job for a dictator. 

After a not so very long desktop research I thought I had the best plan. I had found out that the easiest way to travel, and be paid for it, was working in holiday resorts. That seemed a no brainer, so I drove 3 hours to some 2 day recruitment event and, guess what, I was recruited. There and then I felt as if I had won the lottery and solved my boring life’s problems.

If I thought that telling arrivederci to the big boss was the scary part, I was very wrong. Telling my older brother and my dad was the absolute worst… Of course they told me that leaving a permanent job to – their literal words – ‘be a clown’ for 5 bucks in a resort, was the stupidest mistake I had ever made and that I would have regretted that my whole life. 

So, in an attempt to save me from any more immature mistakes, they offered me to join them and work in the family business.

To be continued…