Hi, I’m Ziza.
I’m a writer living in a small town in northern Italy. I took the leap in 2024, along with my husband and our three-year-old son, to quit our full-time jobs and dare to choose the invaluable wealth of an authentic life.
For over 20 years I’ve felt a connection to Italy, the way it has settled in my bones and tugged at the strings that have tried to root me anywhere else. It’s been a storied road, growing up in San Francisco, Baltimore, and the Midwest—then living in Los Angeles, Nashville, and Austin. I’ve worked in academic medicine as a one-time premed student, at creative agencies, in magazine publishing, as a freelance journalist, managing editor, and creative director. At every turn I’ve been able to hone my voice, following a nonlinear path that continues to teach me the power of paying attention.
But the older I get, the more I’ve become increasingly uninterested in the metrics of success that require me to live in the future—the ones that separate my head from my heart and both from the moment that’s right in front of me. That moment is all any of us have. I’ve been wrecked (and yet reborn) through that reality many times in the last year alone. I’m sure the metamorphosis will continue.
In the meantime, I’m learning to replace external validation with the inner awareness expanded through letting go.
Words are my medium.
I hear sentences in my head in the way some singers hear harmony (at least, I’m assuming they do; I got a C in high school choir). Words come to me. I go in search of them. They often feel like friends, guiding me between worlds of experience and ethos, revealing forgotten spiritual connections, and knitting head back to heart. I write for those who crave a similar kind of connected life.
I also love to travel.
I’ve been fortunate to go to some incredible places on assignments of making the specific universal—seeing the value in sharing stories so that different ways of life can be preserved, not eroded. I’ve written about:
barrier reef regeneration in Belize
peace-promoting coffee in Colombia
climate-change resistant crops in Hawaii
foraging five-star ingredients in Montana
historical (and newcomer) grappa-makers in Italy
resurrecting lost grapes outside of Los Angeles
farming communities in small-town Germany
the importance of soil health across the globe
Mass tourism is not the way and I don’t aim to perpetuate it. But, I am passionate about seeing the world and letting it change you. My travel posts are written with that in mind: To go is to come home, to discover our true selves apart from label and form.
If you’ve read this far, thank you. I’m excited to connect with you here. For all of the internet’s ills, I believe its redemption exists in its potential for relationships. If you’d like to reach out, subscribe, or just say hello, please do! May our humanity continue to soften, evolve, and prevail.
