Sometimes it's hard to believe your own life.
To the form it has taken, over time.
To the path it took you on, day after day.
To the places where it pushed you, without you really understanding the blueprint of it all.

The border is a thin line, and it doesn't just separate things.
It identifies them.
It gives them meaning, definition, purpose.
From here, it's white.
From there, it's black.
And without the line in the middle, everything would be grey.
Se non ci fosse una linea in mezzo, tutto sarebbe grigio.

The border is a walk between possible universes, like a rope suspended between what you are and what you would like to be.
Between your soul and your art.
Between your dreams and your needs.
Between money and glory.
The thirst for knowledge and the thirst for fame.

The border is the land of the artist.
It’s his Country.
The Nation of the man or woman who, as an artist, by definition has no nation, no obligations towards anything or anyone.
Apart from those towards his own vision of the world.
Those towards his own art.

The artist never goes on vacation.
But he's never really working.
Because in every gesture of his, in every expression of him, public or private, all his essences interact. All together and all at the same time.
Letting their dialogue shape the present.

Every time I pick up a microphone, these two natures merge.
One collapse into the other, until I reach a moment where even the thousands of ears that are listening to me speak, or sing, simply disappear.
Lost in space.
And I go back in time.
And I move forward in time.
Both directions, carrying with me the memory of a past life and the desire for a future life.

Everything rewinds, like a cassette inside the recorder.
The sound distorts, like the image, and puts me back at the center of the journey, suspended on the border between borders, where all my lives meet and talk to each other.

There is the little girl, who every two or three years was forced to move, because mum and dad wanted a better place for her and her brother to grow up.
An intelligent and kind little girl.
But also a little girl who took some time to understand that change is not always a bad thing.
Time to understand that friendships are not suppose to be counted, but weighed.
A girl with a special friend, who could always be with her.

Music has always been on my horizon.
It's always been part of my background.
But only when I started singing, and expressing what I had inside, what I experienced day by day, I discovered my true talent.
My place in the world is not in a city, or next to a person.
It's behind a microphone.

And it’s by letting these parts of me speak, the little girl and the artist, that I arrived knocking at the Harlem Globe Trotter’s doors.
That's how I earned my audition, which was given to me while I was on vacation, drinking a pina colada.
And that’s how everything has found the right space, the right balance.
The answers I was looking for.

It was love at first sight.
And, above all, it was mutual love.

A profession, more than a job, a journey back in my memory, when my dad took me to see the team play as kid.
To that rare moment in which sport and art meet, without stepping on each other's toes, but only and exclusively for the purpose of entertaining people.
To unite people.
To be a bridge between generations.

I have been traveling around the world with the Globe Trotters for years now, dancing on borders and visiting new cities.
In different countries.
With different cultures.
Ways of living, of eating, of communicating, of singing.
Just different.

And in each of these trips I found a piece of myself.
I found a thread that connects me to the little girl in New York.
The one with the suitcase always ready and the smile always on her face.
Undecided between wanting to be an athlete or a singer.
Between wanting to live in New York or to be lost in the world.
Between wanting to be alone or in a team.
Young or adult.
The one that still lives, and always will, walking on the borders.