I firmly believe that forcing yourself to master everything will end up making you good at nothing, and the perfect example I can offer comes from my early school years. In those years, I cannot help but recognize two main patterns in the school system I grew up with: As someone fitting in the second category, it felt good to be patted on the back and being brought as an

When you work with cell lines, the scariest thing that can happen is to find a contaminated plate on a random Monday morning. Even worse: if you work with stem cells and you have spent weeks, maybe months – weekends included, treating these cells to generate a desired cell type, the sight of a sandy or murky culture medium hovering over your precious darlings, makes you want to cry a

Some people chill with Netflix. I relax with shiny glass beads, tiny pliers, and a messy workbench full of raw materials. On paper, jewelry making has nothing to do with my day job in the R&D side of big pharma. Yet, the more time I spend crafting, the more I realise this hobby quietly makes me a better scientist. When I design a piece of jewelry, I start with a

Every single year, as soon as the Halloween decorations are down, Christmas starts invading shops, streets and home decor. It is consumerism at its highest peak, and yet, I immediately start feeling festive. I was born in Italy and – by accident of birth, as Dr. Charles R. Hurst wrote – I couldn’t help but being raised catholic. That meant hours spent in churches, listening to the true meaning behind

It might sound like an obvious question, but I discovered that the answer, at least for me, has been a constant evolution. And what better than a jewellery crafting session to reflect on it? According to the Ipsos Global Happiness Index 2025, the top 3 drivers of happiness are: relationship with family, feeling appreciated and loved, and feeling in control of your life. And -oh – how much it resonates!

I have never been fond of those ONE size garments. First of all, I probably do not fit the “average” body shape – as if there even is one. Second, I am not a fan of shrinking and blending in, not in clothing, not in crafts, and definitely not in my life. That is probably why, when I created and did the Halloween crafting challenge, something didn’t feel completely right.

That is what I asked myself on September the 30th, one day before the Halloween season started. Actually, I don’t know if October the 1st qualifies as the official start of the All Hallow Eve, but that is how it always feels for me – whether this is a consumerism-induced belief, still hard to decipher. But I digress: as I was saying, before October started, I dusted off the Halloween-themed

In my corporate life, productivity is the ethereal fabric that keeps all things together. You can think about impact, deliverables, milestones, values: at the end of the (working) day, and at the end of the year, the performance review is inextricably linked to what you have “produced”. During my years in academia, the recipe to measure productivity – and my academic palatability – was somehow straightforward: perform how many experiments

I am a Fall – as in Autumn – girl. I love everything about it – the colours, the smell of damp leaves on the ground, the chillier air, the seasonal produce, Halloween. The days become shorter, the schedule longer, work gets busier after the slower summer haze. Unlike what happens in nature, this season is nothing like a pause for me; on the contrary, it has always brought a

When my friend Silvia convinced me that my crafts were worth selling, I asked myself whether I could turn my hobby into a side hustle. To be completely honest, the sole thought gave me a little bit of anxiety, and sparked the usual self-doubting questions: what if my pieces are too basic, what if they break, what if they look cheap, what if “insert any other deprecating adjective or expression”,