About me

My name is Mario Ferrari, I was born in 1960 in Modena and I live nearby, in Campogalliano.

I am happily married to Anna since 1986, we have two children – Sebastiano and Camilla – and two cats.

I am a manager, consultant and trainer. I currently collaborate with People Labs, a company in Modena that deals with developing and enhancing the expression of people’s talents in organizations.

In this blog I talk about my passions.

Writing

The latest addition to my hobbies, and the one I dedicate most of my time to today. It’s no coincidence that this blog is mostly about my writing experiences.

I think it was born from my passion for stories : reading them or seeing them in films and series was no longer enough for me, I wanted to create them and tell them.

When my children were very young, I created stories to entertain them while walking along mountain trail. I asked them to invent some characters, then I built stories in which I tried to combine astronauts and princesses, submarines and unicorns. It all started like this, carrying on that game.

Traveling

I love traveling. It is not only a way to have fun or relax in a beautiful place, but above all it represents a wonderful opportunity to explore cultures through meeting different people, visiting the places where they live, tasting their cuisines and getting in touch with their arts and history.

I live in Italy, a country blessed with unparalleled artistic heritage, enchanting places and great food, so of course I spend most of my holidays here. However, I have visited about thirty different countries, in Europe and other continents, usually with my family. Even when my children were very young: traveling is a great way to make children understand that cultural differences are richness, not a problem.

Cooking

When I get home from work, cooking is a pleasant way to take my mind off the worries of the day and relax before dinner. Carefully slicing vegetables, preparing a good pasta sauce, filleting a fish… these manual tasks are a relief after the mostly conceptual activities of my workday.

The reward is the pleasure of sharing food with the people I love: family and friends.

Mountaineering

The mountain is a feast for the senses: the scent of pines and firs; the rays of the sun or the raindrops of a summer storm that kiss our skin; the wonderful views; the silence broken only by the sounds of Nature or the words of a friend; the pleasant effort of the climb; the sensual contact with the rock.

The mind rejoices in Adventure: the exciting uncertainty that lets us not know if the weather will stay good all day; that takes us to places we have not yet been and where we might get lost; that makes us wonder about the difficulty of a climbing route.

Wandering through the mountains is an almost mystical experience, it’s my way of feeling in harmony with the Universe.

Music

I couldn’t live without music. I love listening to it, of course, but I love playing it even more, especially with others.
I play mostly piano and keyboards, usually with Voltarock, a garage band that I’m proudly a part of. Our repertoire consists of covers of famous rock and pop songs from the 60s to today.
Once or twice a year we perform for free at charity events in our area.

Lego

I got my first Lego box in 1964, when I was four years old. Lego bricks were by far my favorite toy for many years, until I thought I was too old to play with them and stopped.

I was wrong. In 1998, the Mindstorms Robotics Invention System set rekindled my passion and Lego became one of my main interests again. It was as if I had to fill a void left in my childhood, not having owned enough pieces (or the right kind of pieces) to build what I had wanted.

For about five years I was very active, building dozens of Mindstorms robots and writing a book – together with my brother Giulio – that illustrated their construction principles and programming.

With some friends we also founded ItLUG, the first Italian group of Lego enthusiasts. 

Since 2003 I have slowed down and now build very rarely. However I still believe that Lego bricks are the closest thing in the world to the perfect toy.

Computer Programming

Writing computer programs was one of my first passions.

I started in the late 70s with the Texas Instruments TI-57 and TI-59 programmable calculators. In the 80s I moved to the DAI personal computer (a rarity, today mine is exhibited at the Ctrl+Alt Museum in Pavia), then to the Sinclair QL and finally to the IBM PC family (or its clones).

Writing software was a profession for only a short period of my career, but I never stopped programming, for pleasure and utility.

Many years ago I released a freeware version of Risk – called TurboRisk – which had many hundreds of thousands of downloads, but is no longer maintained today.

Sailing

My father Manfredo was very passionate about sailing and it was normal for us children to spend part of our summer holidays on a boat. I loved it, but I suffered terribly from seasickness. So when I grew up, I stopped sailing.

Shortly before leaving us, Manfredo bought his seventh boat, the beautiful J92-S that you see in the photos. He kept it on Garda Lake, chosen because he hoped that the calm waters of the lake would create fewer problems for me.

And so it was. Unfortunately we were able to go out with him very few times, because the disease took him away from us quickly, but my brother Giulio and I continued to go (Giulio is the sailor of the family, the one who knows what to do).

For three years we participated in the main regattas of Garda, with modest results but a lot of fun. Now I don’t go sailing much and I miss it.