Maddalena is Italian, Gunther German, Lavinia is five and Valentino three. Enea is a 2024 Etrusco A 7300 DB and has been carrying us around Europe for over a year.
We left because otherwise the dream would have stayed a dream. Here is how we got there and what came of it — including the parts that don't tell well.
We are Maddalena and Gunther. She is an architect and art director, a qualified yoga teacher, and comes from Friuli. He is an engineer, studied Chinese medicine and comes from a village in Hesse. We met in Madrid in 2009, and then came fifteen years of Munich.
For many years we kept setting off again — with a rucksack, usually three weeks at a time, often far from anything we knew. We were looking for places where people live differently, closer to what feels to us like the true nature of things. Every journey brought back a piece of the puzzle. And every time, afterwards, it was back to the treadmill. Munich gave us good people and a great deal of growth; the right place, though, it never was.
The dream of something else had been there for years and stayed vague. The courage was missing, and so was the plan. Why leave good work and settled surroundings if you don't know what you want to do, or where? Then came Covid and the birth of our children. And after that the stories of families who had simply set off, and of children who learn differently. The dream became concrete.
At some point the question was there: do we do it, or do we go on dreaming about it. We didn't change our life because we had understood something. We changed it because we stopped waiting to understand. The pieces had been lying there for years — leaving meant putting them together. Against the doubts, our own included.
We planned it so that we could work if we wanted to, but wouldn't have to. We saved beforehand — and it takes less than we thought. The open question is a different one: back to the old life or all the way into the new one, and if all the way, doing what? We are looking for a place to stay. We haven't found it yet, and for as long as that is true, we tell the story of the looking.
Design, photography, storytelling. A qualified teacher of ashtanga yoga and pranayama; on the road she doesn't teach, she practises, as regularly as she can. From Friuli — where the journey made its first long stop.
Routes, engineering, numbers, website — and the kitchen, yeast and sourdough included, as far as a camper allows. Trained in traditional Chinese medicine: needles, moxa, cupping glasses and his own notes travel with us. They come out less often than expected, usually when something is up with Maddalena.
The camper. An Etrusco — hence Enea, after the man in the Aeneid who had to find a new home. For as long as we are looking, he is the home.
About Lavinia and Valentino we tell what they experience, not who they are. No surname, no school, no address: photographs where faces are recognisable go up only after we have looked at them together with them.
One long piece we publish nowhere else, plus a summary of what happened. You can leave whenever you want.