Many important things in life begin almost by chance, and my path in the art of Wing Chun was no exception to this rule. In fact, it was during a normal afternoon in 1999 that I found myself fascinated by a picture on a flyer that portrayed Sifu Cuciuffo (even though at that moment I had no idea who he was) hitting one of his assistants. In that image there was something that attracted me in a very particular way and it was just for this reason that I decided to participate in the subsequent demonstration which, for a further coincidence, would take place in my city. The following Saturday I showed up with a friend (he was already a Martial Arts practitioner) to the demonstration… which totally disappointed me! 

Obviously, it was I who hadn’t grasped the substance of what I had just seen, At that moment I thought of giving up immediately, also considering that the lessons took place in Savona, more than 40km from where I lived. Going 200km a week for something I didn’t like didn’t even seemed pointless. But my friend insisted and, contrary to what was logical for me, I ended up enrolling anyway: perhaps I felt some distant call, but more likely it was a simple yield to the insistence of my friend (ironically, he later left the course after a few lessons). About a month of practice was enough for me to realize that this discipline hid much more than what I first perceived: highlighting my own limitations and weaknesses, it began to carve out its own space in my heart. 

Eager to discover more and more, I soon began to integrate the normal lessons with weekly private meetings with my first instructor, as well as follow all the stages and instructor courses I had the opportunity to participate in. So, a couple of years passed in which I assiduously attended the course in Savona until great news arrived for me: my instructor decided to open a course in Loano, my town, asking me to be his assistant. Despite my enthusiasm it was not actually an easy period, we struggled to find members and we found ourselves several times having to change location (in fact we did not have a real academy, we were hosted by different gyms and fitness centers). To further complicate things, my Sihing was at one point forced to give up teaching due to his father’s health conditions, so I found myself having to take care of the leadership of the Loano group. At that time my mentor in Wing Chun was Sifu Emin Boztepe, founder of the EBMAS school, with whom I studied for several years. Having no experience in managing a course at the time, the difficulties were great: I remember evenings waiting for someone to show up at the gym, then pick up my bag and go home disappointed. However, after many years, today I see those moments with nostalgia and I think it is precisely in that period that the desire to “make it with Kung Fu!” sprouted in me. 

For an instructor, which I had become in spite of everything, the most important point is to never stop learning and always keep improving. In the following years I decided to go in search of what, martially speaking, I was really looking for. I therefore attended different teachers and experimented with the systems of various associations, trying both to broaden my technical skills as much as possible and to develop an overall vision on my path. Among these experiences, I remember with pleasure the two intense years spent studying under the guidance of Sifu Michael Fries (among the first students of Master Keith Kernspecht), the period with Sifu Massimo Giammarinaro, with Sifu Nunzio Nastasi and many others that I had the luck to meet and to have as teachers for a long time. Each of them has given something precious, a little or a lot, to what I am today. In that period, despite the many stimuli I received from many good teachers, there was a particular image that remained fixed in my mind: a young Sifu named Sergio Iadarola, who in some videos found on the internet moved like no other teacher I had ever seen. I tried to contact him for months, but in vain: to receive lessons from him the only way would have been to move and enrol in his academy in Amsterdam, which was impossible for me at that time. However, I managed to find someone who had studied GM Leung Ting’s system with him: Sifu Franco Giannone, from Novara. I practiced with him for a year, despite the 300km I had to travel every time I went to class (I had 3-hours lessons twice a week, without skipping a single one), and I had the opportunity to study the entire Leung Ting program from Sifu Sergio Iadarola. 

A great dream of mine had always been to travel to Hong Kong and practice with a local teacher, so in 2009 I decided to go there. I was thus able to take lessons from a large number of local teachers; among these I want to mention in particular Wan Kam Leung, a Master who represented the pinnacle of what I had seen up to that moment. In fact, from the first moment he impressed me with his skills and I decided to take several intensive lessons from him. In Hong Kong I also began studying Yang family Taijiquan and Qi Gong with Master Cheng, a practice that at that time I considered only complementary to my path, but which later became a fundamental part of it. Precisely during this journey, I learned that Sifu Sergio Iadarola was also preparing to arrive in Hong Kong: I took courage and I asked him to meet, thus finally managing to know him in person. What I had imagined about him up to that moment was true: he was a master without equal, who made me discover an incredibly wide and complete perspective. I realized that he was the Sifu I was looking for. 

However, becoming a student of Sifu Sergio Iadarola was not a simple thing as his commitments left him little time to teach privately. But my trip to Hong Kong had convinced me to dedicate my life to study, practice and teaching Kung Fu: I did not give up and with insistence and sacrifices I managed despite everything to place myself under his guidance. In 2011 I decided that the time had come: I opened my own Academy entirely dedicated to Wing Chun in Loano. A few years after my first experience of that kind, I found myself again in the situation of having to launch a school of Kung Fu. Once again the difficulties were not lacking, but these soon made room for great satisfactions: my Academy was growing, soon the members became many and I also began to train a staff of very valid people who helped me to carry on my dream towards always new milestones. In any case the management of the Academy did not make me neglect my studies: with Sifu Sergio I continued to deepen the Internal Arts and I also undertook the study of ancestral systems such as the White Crane, so as to increase my understanding of Wing Chun in general. 

Those were really intense and hectic years, between managing my school, taking care of the students throughout Italy who were taking an interest in the System and above all keeping training intensely. I had a really demanding pace: I went to Hong Kong for about 20/30 days, returned to Italy to spend 3 months working on the territory and practicing what I learned and then leaving again to Hong Kong for about a month. Having a solid base in Hong Kong became essential and in 2013 I got a house there to make my travels easier. 

This was the cadence of my training under the guidance of Sifu Sergio for about 10 years and leading me to make incredible experiences in Hong Kong, China and throughout South East Asia. 

In 2016 I inaugurated the Oriental School in Savona: I thought it was necessary in the Kung Fu to create a center to teach and disseminate quality Oriental Martial Arts and Disciplines, basing this project on the knowledge that I had the opportunity to accumulate. In this phase full of ideas, the following one was to make these teachings more easily available on a large scale: therefore, the Online Oriental School was born in 2019, in which with great work I poured all this path into a long series of educational videos.

The ambitious project of dissemination and sharing of this knowledge still leads me to travel often in Italy and Europe to teach in seminars and to organize training courses for instructors. However, still today I have that spirit and that desire that I had just finding myself alone in the gym, without students and saying to me: “You will have to do it with Kung Fu!”