Category: Society

Earthquake in L’Aquila

14 April 2009

I would like to answer all the messages I have received asking whether my family and friends were involved in the earthquake in L’Aquila. Thanks everyone for the interest!

My family lives in Tortoreto, which is a small town on the Adriatic coast, about 100 km far from the epicentre of the earthquake. My parents were only woken up by the vibrations and spent the rest of the night in their caravan, but the distance was enough to avoid any damage there.

Many of my friends who live in L’Aquila, however, are without a roof now: the lucky ones are sleeping at some relatives or in hotels, the unlucky ones are sleeping in tents. At least all of them seem to be in good health and relatively confident about the future.

What makes me sad is to see the city where I studied for six years transformed into a sort of city of ghosts. I am sincerely sorry for all the victims of the earthquake. But I know that people from L’Aquila are strong, and I am sure they will manage to recover from this disaster.

Norge-Italia-Norge-Россия

6 August 2008

This year for the first time I had to apply for 20 days vacations… It made me realise even more that I am a full-time worker now. 🙂

Planning my vacations was not easy. I wanted to go home in Italy, but at the same time, I wanted some action somewhere else in the world… And I had to make it fit with some deadlines at the University. The final choice was the following: Italia at the end of June, and Россия—it just means Russia, but I could not resist writing it in Cyrillic :)—at the end of July.

A journey to Italy always gives me a mixture of contradictory feelings. On the one hand, it is pleasant to come back to my home-sweet-home after a long while: family, friends, sun, sea, tasty food, good wine. On the other hand, the provincial mentality of some Italians can easily piss me off.

My hometown is not that big, and I did not do that much there except sunbathing and swimming. But at least one day I was brave enough to hike the Gran Sasso mountain up to the top (2912m). This was the most exciting moment of my vacation in Italy, and I have to thank Antonio for being my guide.

If the first vacation was calm and relaxing, the next one was thrilling and exhausting. I visited St. Petersburg and Moscow, together with Diego and Federico, probably the best—or the worst depending on the point of view—travelling companions I could ask for.

St. Petersburg is a lovely old-fashion city, similar to other Eastern European capital, but still with a Soviet touch. Full of art, it was a good place to practice photography. Moscow is metropolitan and dynamic, somehow too big for my taste, but magnificent. Exhilarating nightlife, even though we had only a couple of chances to experience it. It is hard to compare these two cities, they are considerably different, but I was fascinated by both.

One thing I noticed is that Russian women dress up on more occasions than many European women do. Even to go for a casual walk, a Russian woman could wear high heels and feminine dress. A hardcore feminist might have the wrong impression that women do this because they are objectified, but Russian women themselves explained it this way: “We only live once; I want to look and feel at my best”. I could not agree more. 😉

What else can I say? I will probably be back in Russia one day! I uploaded pictures from my trips. Check my Flickr photostream, and do not forget to leave comments!

До свидания.

Changes, changes, changes…

14 December 2007

It has been about five months since I moved to Norway, and I can say that “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe…”

Well, let’s start with my social life. My goal of having a network of (mainly) local friends has been a partial failure yet. People here seem to need more time to get confident with someone, although girls appear to be more open than guys. Of course, this may very well be just because an Italian man can be quite exotic to them, as my local friend Mikal pointed out many times. 🙂 I still feel confident about the future though, especially once I will be able to speak Norwegian fluently.

In the end, I managed to create a little network of international friends around me. Lovely persons, who helped me in the difficult moments and who gave me a lot of good memories. My special thanks go to Mikal, Federico, Silje, Petra, Sonia, Valentin, Enrichetto, Diego, Fabio, and Regine, (merely ordered by who I met first) for all the moments shared together.

I finally started studying Norwegian. Here the approach with the local languages is completely different from what I am used to having in Italy. There are two official standards of written Norwegian: Bokmål, which is the one I study (literally “book language”, used by 85% of the population) and Nynorsk (literally “new Norwegian”, used by 15% of the population). On the contrary, there is no officially sanctioned standard of spoken Norwegian. My course is a 48-hour intensive course, and I although my Norwegian skills improved considerably, it is still impossible to jump into a conversation for me. I am mainly trained to listen to the spoken dialect of Oslo (or urban upper class Eastern Norwegian, as someone would call it), but in real life, Norwegians use to speak their dialect with each other, and the differences can be significant. You can imagine how challenging this can be for someone who is only at the beginning of the learning process. Anyway, I will continue with an intermediate course the next year, not only because I want to improve my skills but also because I have to be ready to speak Norwegian fluently as soon as possible.

The reason is that another big change is going to happen again in my life. I was a bit unsatisfied with my work lately, so I decided to come back to my original plan of continuing my studies. Becoming a researcher has been one of my biggest ambitions, so I applied for a PhD research fellowship position at the University of Bergen, and I got it. The position consists of three years of research and one year of teaching, meaning that I will live in Bergen for a long while. I will start in January, and I will probably be travelling several times to conference and spending months abroad as visiting researcher, hopefully in some sunny, warm place where I will be able to charge my batteries. 😉 I will do research in the field of model-driven engineering, under the supervision of Uwe Wolter and Khalid A. Mughal. It was a difficult choice, but I feel it was the best for my life, and I am looking forward to starting this new experience.

That’s all at the moment. Please, keep the finger crossed for me once more. 🙂

One month in Bergen—Life of a software engineer in the most beautiful city of Norway

26 August 2007

26th of July-26th of August. I have been in Bergen for exactly one month, and my life has changed dramatically…

I live in a cosy flat in the city centre, close to all the attractions of the city. It has three rooms, one bathroom, and two little storage rooms. The kitchen has gas stoves instead of electric hot plates, something rare here in Norway since cities have no gas networks, and this makes me feel a little bit at home. Unfortunately, there is no living room, but my room is large, about 16m², and has a sofa.

I share the flat with other two nice Norwegian guys, Thorolf and Willy. The life at home is a bit different from what I am used to having in Italy or during my Erasmus. People spend most of the time in their rooms. Sometimes they come to the kitchen to prepare some food, but they even eat back in their room. Kind of weird to me, but I was told that Norwegians tend to be reserved and that this behaviour is normal…

The company where I work is not so big, and sometimes I feel like I work in a family-managed business. It is located in the city centre so that I can be at work in 10 minutes with my bicycle. I have flexible working hours, but in general, I work from 9:00 to 17:00.

I work closely with Mikal, the guy who helped me in finding this position. We will have to develop an entirely new project about surveillance systems starting almost from scratch. The way is long, but we want to do the things in the right way, as Ian Sommerville teaches in the Software Engineering book. 🙂 We agree on the goals of the project, but we have diverging opinions about its implementation. As you may know, I am a believer and advocate of free software, but Mikal is an enthusiastic Microsoft fan. While I recognise that some of the Microsoft solutions could do better than the free/open source alternatives, I am a bit concerned about becoming a locked-in company. Anyway, the final word on the technology is always up to the technical leader so that we will see.

Soon I will receive my first salary, and I am looking forward to feeling some economic stability in Norway. Here the cost of living is a bit higher than in the rest of Europe. The rent of the room costs 3000 NOK (about 375 EUR) per month, which is not so much more than in other countries, but a half litre beer, for example, costs 50 NOK (about 6 EUR). The salary, however, even normalised to the cost of living, can be considerably higher than in the rest of Europe.

My parents sent me a package of 30 Kg, which took almost one month to be delivered. It was stopped by the customs at the Italian border because of some “missing documentation”, but it made it through in the end. Now I can finally eat some decent food. 🙂 I do not like a lot of things about my home country, but I still believe that Italy has the best cuisine in the world.

I came to Bergen with few contacts left from my Erasmus exchange and the short trip I had here in Easter, but this was more than enough to get to know lots of new people. The bad news for me is that most of them have just left or are leaving soon. Thank you Mauro, Silje, and the other guys at the “Auberge epagnole”, you have been very gentle. I hope to keep in touch with you and to see you again, maybe here in Bergen or maybe somewhere else in the world.

And by the way, Silje taught me a little bit of Norwegian (and I taught her a little bit of Italian). At the moment I can only say childish sentences like “Jeg heter Alessandro og kommer fra Italia” (My name is Alessandro, and I come from Italy), but I hope to improve my skills soon.

I have also registered to Facebook, a social network which is popular here. Everyone I met so far has a profile there, and it seems like this media is going to be a usual means of communication in the future, at least here in the North. I see Facebook as a useful tool, but I still prefer to get to know people the old way: face-to-face, possibly in front of a glass of wine. 🙂

Anyway, I see that I have written too much this time, and my stomach is reminding me that it is time to eat something. I will keep you posted!

5×1000 all’Università degli Studi dell’Aquila

18 June 2007

Dopo aver trascorso sette anni all’Università degli Studi dell’Aquila, ho deciso di donare il 5×1000 all’ateneo che mi ha fatto laureare in Informatica.

Pensavo che la procedura fosse complessa, invece per una volta la burocrazia ha funzionato a dovere. I dati di riferimento sono:

Codice fiscale/Partita IVA : 1021630668
Ragione sociale: Università degli Studi dell’Aquila

Un commercialista dovrebbe impiegare pochi minuti ad inserire questi dati nel sistema di comunicazione con l’Agenzia delle Entrate. In ogni caso su tutti i modelli per la dichiarazione dei redditi (Modello Unico, 730, CUD, ecc.) è presente un riquadro dedicato alla destinazione del 5×1000. In questo riquadro sono presenti tre aree di destinazione: si deve barrare quella dedicata alla “Ricerca scientifica”, scrivere il numero di codice fiscale, e firmare.

La ricerca è notoriamente snobbata dai nostri governi, indipendentemente dallo schieramento. La devoluzione del 5×1000 da sola non sarà sufficiente ad arrestare la fuga di cervelli, ma quantomeno potrebbe dare un messaggio a quei politici che da diversi anni contribuiscono al rallentamento dello sviluppo del Paese.