TRAVEL: IN CONVERSATION WITH GIANLUCA GOTTO

MANGIA VIVI VIAGGIA is the blog that Gianluca Gotto launched in 2016 together with his girlfriend Claudia. We will discover extraordinary journeys, life changes, personal growth and alternative lifestyles. Everything you find on Gianluca’s blog has been produced with love. You will never find hatred, violence and negativity, only positive vibrations. Life is a journey, and it is wonderful.

”I like to consider the world as my home. When they ask me where I live I answer: anywhere and nowhere! Although I left my heart somewhere between Bali and Bangkok and I often go back to pick it up.”

– Gianluca gotto

Gianluca believes in optimists, rebels, dreamers and lovers. For many years he believed that life did not go beyond the small square of his city, Turin ( Italy ), so one day he realized that life could not be “all there”. And looking at the traditional, normal and safe path he was taking, he found himself hoping with all my might that there was an alternative. In the end, instead of continuing to hope, the alternatives came to him. And when he didn’t find them, he built them himself.

”I preferred flip flops to shiny office shoes all year round.
To a house full of objects I preferred a minimalist life and always on the go.
To a prestigious job I preferred a remote job that I love.
To a life of great appearances, I preferred a life of great freedom.
For degrees and certificates, I preferred two Working Holidays between Australia and Canada.”

– GIANLUCA GOTTO

A TALK WITH GIANLUCA GOTTO X 33 MAGAZINE

How old were you when you got the first itch for travel?

I started traveling when I was 20 years old, but initially I was not driven by love for discovering the world. In Italy I was a university student who felt trapped in a life he already didn’t like and I was sure that with the passage of time, continuing on that path, he would become even more unhappy. So I decided to leave school and go to Australia with a one-way ticket. The idea was to work, set aside some money and build my independence. But then my girlfriend and I took a trip by car from Perth to Melbourne during which we ate, slept and lived inside our old Mitsubishi. We fell asleep under immense starry skies and woke up every day overlooking the ocean or in the middle of the desert. That experience transformed me from tourist to traveler and made me understand how happy it made me travel. From that moment, many of the choices I made in my life were heavily influenced by my desire to discover the world.

What got you into blogging and how was your life before this activity?

Before launching my blog I was a digital nomad, i.e. a person who works remotely on the computer and can therefore work from anywhere in the world. Specifically, I was and still am a web writer: I write articles for websites. I was a full-fledged freelance, just like my girlfriend Claudia, with whom I then decided to open Mangia Vivi Viaggia. The reason why we launched the site is very simple: in Italy, every time we looked around, we saw many boys and girls of our age who were unhappy and strongly discouraged from the future. We had found the coordinates of our happiness in a very alternative existence, in which travel plays a central role. So we said: why not create a blog where you can share a bit of positivity since there is nothing but pessimism around? Thus was born Mangia Vivi Viaggia, a meeting point for dreamers, travelers, rebels and people in love with life.

Can you talk a little bit about the business you started, #MangiaViviViaggia? 

Mangia Vivi Viaggia is a blog that deals with travel, alternative lifestyles and personal growth. Each content is produced with positivity and love. Our goal is to spread an idea of alternative happiness, far from what is continually proposed to us in this society marked by consumerism and materialism. For us true happiness is achieved through those experiences that give you unforgettable memories and make you feel alive, like traveling.

We launched Mangia Vivi Viaggia in 2016, when we both worked remotely as digital nomads. Thanks to Claudia’s excellent work on social networks, we have grown much more than we imagined and today the blog is our main project, what we dedicate more time and energy to. Especially since the book “Le coordinate della felicità’’ / ‘’The coordinates of happiness” which tells our story and has become one of the most read self-published books in Italy.

Can you talk a little bit about your longest trip away from home? How did your family feel about it?

Thanks to the lifestyle I “invented”, today I consider the whole world as my home. I don’t have a base to return to, but there are several places where I have my interests and where I spend several months of the year. Bali, for example, but also the less exotic (yet beautiful for me) Timisoara. I have a nomadic life and I hardly ever spend more than three months in the same place. Today my family members understand that this lifestyle makes me happy and they are happy to know me smiling, even if I’m far away. In any case, being a digital nomad allows me to drop everything and go back to Italy whenever I want, another big advantage.

What are your biggest obstacles in travel-blogging activity? 

The biggest obstacles for a blogger are related to the mindset. If you do manual and repetitive work, you make the same way that you are happy, bored, angry, elated or tired. When, however, you dedicate yourself full time to a blog or to any online project, you have no boss to answer to, there is no one to keep you in line and your emotions have a huge impact on your work performance. You must be the one to discipline yourself and set rules to work well, otherwise you run the risk of getting lost and throwing away years of work. Constancy is fundamental, but professionalism is fundamental too: if you choose to make a blog your job, you must consider it as a real job. Only then will you find the right motivation every time you turn on the computer.

Do you have any social media tips and tricks for beginners?

Be original. We live in the era of media overexposure: we are literally bombarded with content, from morning to night, on the PC and smartphone. If you are not original, if you do not have something different from the mass to offer, you will hardly be able to emerge in the infinity of the web. And whenever you want to produce content, ask yourself: why should people care? If you don’t find an answer, then maybe it’s better to start over.

What are the best tips you can give for someone who is trying to start a business?

As I said, an online business requires a great deal of discipline and a lot of constancy. To be able to develop these two skills, the best thing to do is plan. Do not embark on a project without first having made some sort of programming, without having defined your medium-term vision. It is very important to have clear ideas, to know which direction to take and what type of work will be necessary. Because every now and then you will feel lost and in those moments it is essential to have an overview at hand. Improvised projects hardly work, especially online.

How would you like to inspire and motivate  people to travel more? 

I would like to make it understood to as many people as possible that traveling does not only mean visiting beautiful places around the world. The real journey, the one that changes you, starts inside you and develops parallel to what you do in the outside world. I believe that sometimes a trip is really all you need to find those answers that you cannot find in everyday life. But it must be a conscious journey, of those you do with an open heart and without any fear of the unknown. Those journeys in which you immerse yourself completely in a new reality, leaving your fears and prejudices at home. When you are able to travel like this, in total freedom, a process is activated in your head that leads you to generate a great awareness. In those moments you understand a lot about your life and what makes you happy.

We know you wrote a book about the coordinates of happiness, can you tell us more about it and what made you to write it? 

“The coordinates of happiness” / ”Le coordinate della felicità” is my first book, I wrote it last year while traveling around Asia and it tells about my alternative life path in search of happiness. It starts right during the dark days at university, when I started to wonder if the life I was building would make me happy. Then I tell about my experiences in Australia and Canada and finally about my transformation into a digital nomad who can travel full time and live his passions. Thanks to this lifestyle, I was able to visit much of Asia and therefore develop a very specific idea of ​​what it means to be happy for me.

I wrote this book for the same reason I opened the blog: to show people that alternatives exist and are often much better than the road traveled by millions of people. But it is also a travel book, as I tell my adventures around the world. And there is a strong component related to personal growth, an activity to which each of us should devote ourselves but of which few know the value.

Who is the most important person in your life and why? 

My fiancee Claudia. With her I shared dreams, plans, failures, victories and lots and lots of happiness. Without her, all this path would never have been so bright and colorful and surely there would never have been Mangia Vivi Viaggia or the book. I owe her a lot and I am grateful to have her by my side for many years.

Is there any secret to overcome the negative thoughts arrived from people who can’t understand you activity or you just don’t care? 

I am convinced that people who have nothing but negativity to offer do not deserve our time. Not only do they bring you down and demoralize you, but they make you waste energy, because their idea does not change it in any case. On the contrary, I always gladly answer anyone who is really interested in understanding what I do and how you can embark on a life path similar to mine.

Is there any person in particular that you would like to meet in your life? 

There isn’t one in particular. I like meeting dreamers and travelers, people like me who have chosen to build their own way in life without passively accepting what everyone else takes. Also for this reason I live for part of the year in Bali, because here there are many souls similar to mine.

Where is your next dream destination?

I have a list of destinations but I haven’t defined a hierarchy yet. To find out, is better to follow and subscribe on https://www.mangiaviviviaggia.com