About a year ago, Luca called me: “Hi Gianni, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we leave?”

“Ok” I said. “a journey is what I need. Where?”

“Around the world... without taking planes. What about it?”

I think about it a little while and: “Is that all? Well, it’s perfect!”

Luca had just come back from Chile, with that world in his eyes, that South America that he travelled round for two months, once he finished his one-year Erasmus in Santiago. I was here, trying to carve out a piece of future as a young penniless architect with a published book behind that nobody knew. It was not easy, as you would imagine. And that seemed to be the usual Luca’s folly, his way of facing the mess of his homecoming. I did not attach any importance to that in the beginning.

But let’s go on neatly, because everything has the very beginning during the afternoon of several years ago, out of a classroom in Polytechnic of Milan. It was our first year of university, Luca approaching me, I did not know him yet, he asking me if I am ready for the exam of History of Architecture next day. “I haven’t opened a book yet”, I answered sincerely. “Perfect!” he says, “Me neither, come to my house today and let’s try making up something for tomorrow.” I went. Obviously, we did not pass the exam that day, but thereafter, everything began. The university, the evenings, the exams, the travels, the friends, the girls, the degree, the first works, other travels, the world that starts becoming a goal, or better, a need. The first actual stage was in 2005, when we decide, together with another friend, to start and go around Europe up to North Cape in a car, a tent and fewest money in our pockets, for 14 thousands kilometres. An unbelievable journey, that left a mark.

Once we come back, we went on, we did other things, but that mark remained. We left again, both of us for an Erasmus experience. Me in Seville, Luca further, in the already mentioned Chile, going down to Cape Horn. From the cold North of the year before till the deep South of Argentina, an uninterrupted line, keeping on choosing instinctively and travelling with our mind. Me choosing the face of a boy, with some rails behind, as cover of my book that in the meantime came out, with the world in the dark about it, in February 2008 (by the way, it is called “Con le mani in tasca”). A book that does not talk about journeys, but maybe the cover is the prolongation of that mark that remained on us. Because writing is travelling, and travelling not to write about the trip, but travelling to see, to know, to understand, to feel and to live these emotions. Luca and I, two boys, two fellow students, two fellow travellers, two true friends, two different world view, a world to pass out, a whole world to travel, around the whole world, slowly, without taking planes, trampling the earth and ploughing the sea, throughout the five continents.

The unforgotten Terzani said: “A country is also a whole diversity of its own and you must even have the time to get ready to the meeting, must even find it difficult to enjoy the conquest”. This is why we do not want to take any plane. Because we want to see the real world, because the planes, “being a comfortable shortcut of distances, they end up by shortening everything: even the understanding of the world”. And so, here we are again, nowadays. Luca and Gianni, two Italian graduates around the world, ready to say what we think, to live our life in a single journey, everything can happen now, because we are now on the go. And this is the short story of this crazy idea, because this is not the time for heroes, but for men and we are looking for them and them we want to be, in every part of the world we decide to live, work, grow up and love.