Every day is different when you do a job like mine… on a normal June morning, while I’m sitting at the taxi stand correcting a couple of photos on my laptop this woman gets into my cab.
‘Università Nuova, I don’t quite know where, Im looking for a bag that a friend lost’.
‘Maybe I can give you a hand, what color is the bag?’ I ask.
‘It’s a black bag with MANFROTTO written on it’.
‘OMG, I’ve got a black Manfrotto bag, are you a photographer?’ I ask.
‘Not exactly’, the client replies.
We get to the University and find the missing object and Mikaela (the client) tells me about the Can’t Forget It{aly} project, I tell her I’m an amateur photographer and she invites me for a bite to eat at Bepi Sciavo where the rest of the digital crew was having lunch.
Under normal circumstances I would have said no, but there was some kind of strange serendipity connected to the whole encounter. So I put the meter off and joined the fun.
After the hello’s and typical meat based lunch at Bepi, with a digital reflex on wheels rolling up and down the table recording every memorable second, we decided to show Jan, a German guy on the team, the skate park on the outskirts of Trieste – a location decidedly off the beaten track. I call a couple of mountain biker friends to meet us there and come and show off for us.
George, a half Greek- half Irish guy on the team decides to tag along and we are off. Jan, George, Till (Jan’s skater friend) and myself. We head for the social housing complex in the Melara neighbourhood, nicknamed “Fort Apache”. It is a huge concrete block with a breathtaking view over Trieste that has been abandoned for years. The endless corridors are a skaters dream and Till does his thing.
Next we head for the 3 camini ski slope where me meet up with the MTB team: Stefano, Willy, Lorenzo, Luca and Alberto.
We get to the area known as the “cascatelle” where the guys do some more filming and lastly get to the Altura skate park, where ‘crazy’ Erik and Diego, wild dirt bikers improvise a Jump session – Till joints in for the fun.
I take my new friends back to the hotel where the rest of the team was waiting, Mikaela asks me for a receipt and smiles widely when I ask for €10 the afternoon. Unlimited mileage. A day like this is priceless.
I am now officially a taxi driver by day – extreme sports consultant on the Digitaly Diary crew by night, scouting for crazy sportsmen and wild itineraries, loving every second.
Here are a couple of pictures that I took…