1989

30 years old. Massimo Sozzi nights.

Back in Italy, I started working on the largest ad campaign of my life, branding Monocibec floor tiles as the artistic choice, representing the culture of Italian creativity and excellence and using images from fine art, instead of the same old interiors showing floor tiles.

At night, I went out to the discos, birrerias and nightclubs with my best friend Massimo. At first I had tried to get Betty to come along, but she refused so often I stopped asking and we grew apart. Massimo had to go out every night, even Monday, because he couldn't stand staying in the house with his parents watching TV, which is more or less what every young Italian I knew did also.

At 9 or ten o'clock we would meet up with Giacomo, Tito, or even Stephane Leveque if he were in town and have an espresso and discuss which clubs to hit. By 11 or 12 we'd be in some club or the other, chatting up girls and prowling around looking at everyone looking at us.

After successfully launching the big Monocibec campaign, my boss gave me a trip to Ibiza he'd been offered as a reward for placing so much advertising that was supposedly a symposium but was actually just a blast. This was the height of the Ibizan house music craze and I danced at all the legendary Ibizan discotheques, amazed at the swirling chaos of sexual provocation around me yet still essentially solitary.

I became a legal worker instead of a freelancer at work this year, and we started on a suspicious little job promoting these stupid little singing globes for the World Cup Soccer tournament next year.

Massimo and I took a trip to Hungary, where Massimo assumed we would be able to have all of our eastern-bloc sex fantasies fulfilled by impoverished communist girls begging for silk stockings and chocolates. We ended up wandering around stymied by the local language and never really getting anywhere, but Budapest was beautiful, and as I had no illusions about crazy sex romps, I was more than satisfied with this brief look behind the Iron Curtain just before it finally lifted forever.

From one of my many Italian IDs