Old Blogs
Stories from another internet
There was a time, before social media became the dominant way of sharing our lives, when personal blogs were one of the most interesting corners of the internet.
They were slower, more personal and often surprisingly thoughtful. Many developed their own communities of regular readers, with long conversations continuing in the comments and relationships forming between people who had never met. At their best, blogs were not simply places to publish content. They were small independent spaces for writing, experimenting, documenting experiences and exchanging ideas.
These three blogs belong to that era.
Written at different stages of my life and from three very different places, they document experiences of living and working abroad. Looking back at them today, they are inevitably snapshots of another time: of Ireland, New York and Albania, but also of an internet that no longer quite exists in the same form.
Utopie Irlandesi
Dublin, Ireland
I moved to Dublin in 2007. Utopie Irlandesi became the place where I documented what happened next.
More than a diary about life abroad, the blog became a personal exploration of Ireland and what it meant to build a life in another country. Dublin, work, relationships, travel, Irish society and everyday observations all found their way into its pages.
There was curiosity but also criticism, enthusiasm alongside frustration. The idea was never simply to describe Ireland from the perspective of an Italian expatriate, but to understand the country by living in it: walking and cycling through Dublin, travelling beyond the capital, meeting people, following the news and gradually becoming part of the place.
Read many years later, the posts also capture the early stages of a relationship with Ireland that would eventually become much more permanent.
Utopie Newyorkesi
New York, USA
Utopie Newyorkesi belongs to another period and another city.
It is the record of my experience in New York, seen not as a collection of tourist attractions but as a city to inhabit, observe and try to understand from within.
Like Utopie Irlandesi, it was written in the spirit of the personal blogs of that period: part diary, part travel writing and part collection of impressions, encounters and reflections.
Utopie Albanesi
Shkodër, Albania
Utopie Albanesi documented a very different experience: a year living and working in Shkodër, in northern Albania.
I worked for UNOPS, the United Nations Office for Project Services, on local economic development initiatives involving microcredit, rural development, and support for entrepreneurship.
The blog grew out of that experience. It was partly a record of the work, but above all an attempt to describe Albania from the perspective of everyday life: the people I met, the communities I worked with, the contradictions of a country undergoing rapid economic and social transformation, and the experience of living in a place that at the time was still largely absent from mainstream European travel narratives.
It was also connected to an interest that ran through much of my early professional life: how local economies develop, how communities create opportunities, and how relatively small interventions can sometimes produce meaningful change.
Before the Social Feed
These blogs were never conceived as publications in the traditional sense. They were notebooks written in public.
That distinction seems more significant today than it did then.
There were no algorithms deciding which post should be seen, no short-form video feeds and little pressure to reduce an experience to a few seconds of content. A post could be long, digressive or personal. Readers would return, leave comments, disagree, add their own experiences and sometimes become part of the story themselves.
Some personal blogs attracted remarkably engaged communities, and the quality of the writing and discussion could be exceptionally high.
The three Utopie blogs are products of that period. I have kept them not because everything in them necessarily reflects how I think or write today, but because they preserve something more valuable: what I saw, experienced and thought at a particular moment in my life, written while it was happening.
