Gaia Pianigiani’s defining moment occurred 3 years ago when she was eating dinner at a friend’s house in Berlin one night, They were talking about where they saw themselves in 10 years, and her friend, a Dutch painter, asked, “What do you want to do?”
“‘I want to write’, I responded automatically,” Gaia recounts.
Her friend said he never knew that about her.
“Neither did I”, Gaia responded.
Gaia came to Berlin from Italy to write her Master’s dissertation on a 20th century German Jewish poet named Paul Celan that would lead to a PhD. Gaia had spent her whole life planning to be an academic. It is what her parents expected, what her professors expected, and what she expected. Yet when Gaia arrived in Germany, she soon found that she enjoyed reporting on the present more than the past. After publishing a few feature articles on happenings around Berlin, Gaia realized writing and reporting articles was the part of the day she looked forward to the most.
Yet until that fateful night at her friend’s apartment, Gaia never thought about what that meant.
“I never thought I could do something else,” Gaia said of academia, “ I never knew that I wanted to do something else.”
After that Gaia knew she wanted to make the leap into the world of reporting. After leaving Berlin at the end of the year, Gaia worked in the PR department of the Italian embassy in London to gain media savvy. She then worked for a publication called Steel Business Briefing. She gained writing experience, but soon realized that her future did not lie in covering developments in the steel industry.
For Gaia, New York is great, not in the “Sex and the City” way Europeans think of it, but because of the different neighborhoods and boroughs— each with their own unique mix of people. Gaia’s favorite New York moment came when she was visiting the city in the summer of 2007. She got lost in the subway system and an unknown man helped her, and another passenger volunteered to lend her his cell phone. Instead of sensing the dangerous New York she had long heard about, she felt “the more human side of the city.” The 26 year old— whose last name references the Tuscan god Giano — has roots in Italy that stretch back centuries. She was raised in a small town between Siena and Florence called Castellina in Chianti. The town has only 2,600 residents but receives 150,000 tourists per year. Gaia hopes to return to Italy and cover politics or culture, perhaps as a foreign correspondent for an English-speaking publication.
