I don’t design trips. I design transformations, for people who want to stop being tourists in Italy and start belonging there. Language, culture, identity, woven into one.
A kid in Texas has my confession on tape
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For twelve years I have been the one asking the questions. What did you notice. What made you laugh. What would you say differently tomorrow. My whole work lives inside the right question, asked to the right person, at the right moment. Last month the microphone turned around. My first podcast. Ever. And the host was eleven years old. His name is Leo. He has done more than a hundred and fifty interviews: founders, authors, billionaires, cancer survivors. His father rebuilt an entire company so he would never miss one of Leo’s games, and Leo used the time they got back to start asking grown-ups how they did it. I said yes for a reason I do not say out loud very often. I am shy. Writing to you is easy. Talking into a microphone while someone records it is not. One thing I told him, because it took me twelve years to learn it: You are almost never selling the thing you think you are selling. For twelve years I thought I was selling Italian. Then a mother from Boston started crying in Sicily. Not because of her Italian. Because her kids had talked to her for two hours without stopping. That was the day I found out what people had been paying me for all along. So my advice to an eleven-year-old who wants to build something was this. Before you build anything, watch people’s faces. The thing that changes their face is the thing worth money. He wrote it down. The episode is up. Twenty minutes, one very good interviewer, and me trying not to say “um.”
A presto, P.S. If there is a kid in your life who asks too many questions, show them Leo. He is proof that curiosity is a skill, not a problem. |
Fabiana Stringa
I don’t design trips. I design transformations, for people who want to stop being tourists in Italy and start belonging there. Language, culture, identity, woven into one.
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