From Rome to the World: How Growing Up in Italy Shaped My Building

People ask me where I am from and I say Rome, and they immediately want to talk about the Colosseum or the pasta. Fair enough. But growing up in Rome gave me something more fundamental than an appreciation for ancient architecture and carbonara. It shaped how I think about building things.

I've been reflecting on this lately because after years of living in different countries, surrounded by different approaches to technology and startups, the contrast has made me realize how much of my building philosophy is rooted in where I grew up.

The Culture of Craftsmanship

Rome is a city where you can walk past a building that has been standing for two thousand years on your way to buy bread from a bakery that has been operating for four generations. Longevity is the default aspiration, not disruption.

This seeped into my thinking in ways I didn't recognize until recently. When I build a product, my instinct isn't "how do I grow fast?" It is "how do I build something that lasts?" These are different questions that lead to different decisions.

The growth-first mentality says: ship fast, measure everything, optimize for metrics, raise money, scale. The craftsmanship mentality says: get the foundation right, make it beautiful, make it reliable, and growth will follow.

I am not saying one is better than the other. But I know which one I gravitate toward, and it's very Italian. When I built Aviation Infinity, I spent what most people would consider an unreasonable amount of time on the question database -- verifying every question, perfecting every explanation, ensuring accuracy. An American VC would have told me to ship faster and fix errors later. But in aviation education, errors aren't just bugs. They are broken trust. The craftsmanship approach was right for that context.

Design as a Non-Negotiable

In Italy, design isn't a department. It is an expectation. Everything is designed -- the coffee cup, the street lamp, the bus ticket. Growing up surrounded by this level of aesthetic attention gave me a permanently high bar for visual quality.

This has been both a superpower and a liability in my career as a founder. A superpower because my products tend to look polished from day one. Users notice. In a market full of ugly SaaS tools and half-baked interfaces, a product that looks and feels well-designed stands out immediately.

A liability because I sometimes spend too long on visual details that don't matter to the business. I've lost hours adjusting spacing, typography, and color values that 99% of users will never consciously notice. The Italian in me says these details matter. The entrepreneur in me says I should be doing customer development instead.

I've learned to manage this tension by front-loading design decisions. I spend significant time upfront on the design system -- typography, colors, spacing scales, component patterns -- and then move fast within that system. The system ensures consistency and quality without me agonizing over every pixel in every feature.

The Multi-Lingual Advantage

Growing up in Rome, I spoke Italian at home, learned English in school, and absorbed fragments of a dozen other languages from the international community around me. This multilingual upbringing shaped my products in practical ways.

Every product I build supports multiple languages from day one. Not as an afterthought. Not as a "Phase 2" feature. From day one. Aviation Infinity serves students across Europe who speak English, Italian, French, German, and more. ClickAi generates websites in whatever language the user needs. This isn't because I am particularly enlightened about internationalization. It is because it never occurred to me that a product should only work in one language.

The multilingual perspective also shaped how I think about LLM integration. When I test a prompt, I test it in multiple languages. When I evaluate content quality, I evaluate it across languages. This has caught issues that an English-only developer would have missed entirely -- like the language drift problem I wrote about previously, where the model switches languages mid-response.

The Relationship with Food (Yes, Really)

This might sound like a stretch, but bear with me. Italian culture has a specific relationship with food that translates directly to product building: ingredients matter more than technique.

The best Roman carbonara uses four ingredients: guanciale, egg yolk, pecorino, and black pepper. The technique matters, but no amount of technique can compensate for bad guanciale. The quality of the output is fundamentally constrained by the quality of the input.

I think about this constantly when building products. The quality of an AI product is constrained by the quality of the training data. The quality of a marketplace is constrained by the quality of the supply. The quality of an education platform is constrained by the quality of the content. You can build the most sophisticated system in the world, but if the inputs are bad, the output will be bad.

This is why I invest heavily in content quality for Aviation Infinity, in data quality for my AI features, and in supply quality for Babonbo. Get the ingredients right first. Then worry about the technique.

What Rome Did Not Teach Me

Growing up in Rome also left gaps in my entrepreneurial education that I had to fill elsewhere.

Italy isn't a startup culture. When I told people in Rome that I was building tech products, the most common response was confusion, not encouragement. The concept of a solo technical founder building multiple products wasn't part of the cultural vocabulary. In Rome, you become a doctor, a lawyer, or you join the family business. Building a software company wasn't on the menu.

I had to learn the language of startups, venture capital, and technology business models from scratch. Moving to London helped. Living in Tijuana and San Diego, close to the California tech ecosystem, helped more.

But there's something valuable about coming to startups as an outsider. I never absorbed the dogma. I didn't learn that you have to raise venture capital, or that you have to grow at all costs, or that profitability is a secondary concern. I came with fresh eyes and a different set of assumptions, and that has led me to build differently -- bootstrapped, profitable, sustainable.

The Nomad's Perspective

Rome, London, Tijuana, San Diego. I've lived in very different places, and each one has added a layer to how I build.

London taught me about enterprise and professionalism. The expectations of UK businesses using my products forced me to level up my approach to reliability, support, and communication.

Tijuana and San Diego taught me about hustle and resourcefulness. The border region has an entrepreneurial energy that's raw and infectious. People build with whatever they have.

But Rome remains the foundation. The appreciation for craft. The attention to design. The belief that quality ingredients matter more than clever technique. The conviction that things worth building are things that last.

I don't think I'd be the builder I am today if I'd grown up in San Francisco or London or anywhere else. Rome gave me a perspective that's unusual in the tech world, and unusual perspectives are competitive advantages.

Looking Forward

I've been building web products for about seven years now, and software overall since 2008. The Italian approach to craftsmanship has served me well, but I am learning to blend it with the velocity that the tech industry demands. The ideal, for me, is to build things that are both fast and beautiful, both innovative and durable.

That balance is hard. But so is making a good carbonara. And Romans have been doing that for centuries.