26 Ott Personal life

My personal/family life has had a primary impact. With Rita, we started to travel together back in 1980 (in Mexico and Guatemala). Beyond any doubt she has nurtured my curiosity and the pleasure that comes from travel and discovery. There has not been a single journey that we have not shared in every detail and enjoyed together. She always copes with the inevitable discomforts, bringing to each new situation the balance, profound judgment and smile that always characterize her. I took the pictures and Rita wrote the diaries of our journeys. In the postface to Deserts, referring to the diaries, I said “that one day we may use”. And this has indeed been the case with Alaska Dreaming, a diary of an 18 day journey with the family by car from Vancouver to Alaska and back (driving along the famous Alaska Highway). I would only add that life as a couple is the key component to personal growth and to the achievement of certain goals, which would be impossible to reach alone. So, to her go my warmest and deepest thanks.
A very special thought goes to our two boys, Stefano and Alberto. They have always been with us, from their earliest days. I believe they have got used to travel. We never left them at home. One of them hated travel when he was very small. He held his mother’s hand for hours – Rita often had to sit on the back of the car – asking endlessly, as children around the world are prone to do, ‘are we there yet?’… Now he travels all over the world. I am sure that we have given them both the travel bug and some sense of the pleasure that comes from getting acquainted with other realities and other people. Alberto, at 16, told us that he wanted to spend the second last year of high school in the US. He organized everything himself. Stefano has developed his own passion for photography and he has already had his first exhibition, here in Rome.
Together with Stefano, we have published Nature and Man where the work of man and the beauties of nature are compared, with the background idea (mine) that nature has in fact done it all and has been/is – if we can grasp it – the inspiration for architects and artists. And who knows, we may repeat the experience…