Who is Giorgia? Could you briefly introduce her to people in Turkey?
My name is Giorgia Cerati and I was born in 1996 in a small town in Northern Italy, near Lake Maggiore and about 80 km from Milan. You could say that since I was a child I grew up surrounded by people and inside a shop, because my grandparents founded, around 1962, a lighting and restoration business and in 2012 my parents opened a wine shop. I have always been, in a way, surrounded by craftsmanship and by people — by clients, by that sense of “knowing how to make things,” of creating something with your hands — even if for a long time, perhaps until I was about twenty, it was something I observed from the outside. I used to watch my grandfather working in the workshop, creating brass chandeliers from scratch, and my grandmother taking care of the crystal drops and assembling them.
My educational path began in middle school, where I studied English and French — languages I immediately loved and became passionate about. This is also why I later chose to attend a private language high school, where I studied English, Spanish, and German. German was definitely not a language that suited me, and French has always remained in my heart. Even today, I probably remember more French — which I only studied for 3 years in middle school — than German, which I studied for 5 years in high school. I would really love to resume studying French in order to be able to speak it properly.
After that, I decided to enroll at university in Milan and chose a degree in Cultural Heritage Studies, because I wanted to graduate in art history. Art has always been a passion of mine since childhood: I clearly remember the many trips I took with my parents, especially to France but also to Austria and Germany. We often visited castles, royal palaces, and museums, and I remember being a very attentive and curious child, always wanting to learn as much as possible.
As I always say, I think the most important thing is to be curious. Curiosity is what drives us, what keeps us from being static; it pushes us toward knowledge, culture, and travel, and it opens our minds.
I enrolled at the University of Milan and completed my bachelor’s degree with a thesis on the painting La Tempesta by Giorgione, which is located in Venice in the Gallerie dell’Accademia museum. I then decided to continue my studies with a master’s degree in History and Criticism of Art, again in Milan, where I had the opportunity to explore a wide range of topics, including less “traditional” fields such as photography, architecture, as well as design and industrial production. I became particularly passionate about these areas and chose to focus on them, writing my thesis on 20th-century ceramic production of the Società Ceramica Italiana founded in 1856 in Laveno Mombello (now closed), which is actually close to where I live (now there is a museum called MIDeC).
Through this research, I became involved with the museum in Laveno and started working there on weekends, before eventually moving to a full-time position. Initially, I worked at the ticket desk, but later I became involved in exhibition production, catalogue writing, and collaborated with the curator and the director on updating the museum’s inventory, doing researches in the archive. I worked for a period with the Municipality of Laveno Mombello, which owns the MIDeC museum and now I’m the president of the Friends of the MIDeC Association (non-profit organization).
I worked at the museum for about two years before enrolling in a master’s program in Art Management in Milan, with the goal of achieving a more complete education, not only in art history but also in management and economics. As part of this program, I was required to complete a six-month internship within the art world, in auction houses, galleries, communication agencies, and so on, and I secured a position at Secci Gallery in Milan, where I started in July 2025. I then stayed on, as the gallery offered me a job, and today I work there as a gallery manager.
That said, my interest in the family business, the lighting and restoration shop, as well as the wine shop, is still very strong, and I always try to contribute whenever I can. I can restor antique chandeliers and i would love to open a corner about antiques.
You’ve been to many cities—which one best describes you? Or which city do you feel most “at home” in?
I have to say it’s a very interesting question. As I mentioned before, I have always loved traveling, and I’ve been very lucky because my parents took me to many places. We often traveled by car, even for quite long trips, especially to France, Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. So this interest was probably passed on to me by them.
That said, in me this passion is even stronger — I would say at a much higher intensity. One of the first tattoos I got actually represents traveling, wandering, the idea of moving around in search of new places and cultures.
There is one city that has fascinated me since I was a child, and I don’t even know exactly why: London. I first went there in 1998, so I was very young and I don’t actually remember anything, except what I’ve seen in photos taken by my parents. But I have always felt a strong attraction to this city, and to England in general. I’m also very passionate about films, and seeing London or the English countryside in movies has always deeply fascinated me I love that kind of life.
I think London is still the city that best represents me, or at least the one that comes closest to my personality. At the same time, Paris is another city that has always attracted me a lot. I think these two cities share something in common: a sense of tradition, something classical and historical, combined with elements of modernity and nature. And I don’t just mean architecturally, but also culturally, in the way people live the city.
For example, London has many historic buildings with an important past, but also a lot of green spaces. And this is something I really miss in Milan, where I work. I believe there should be a balance between classical and modern architecture and green areas, parks and gardens where you can slow down, even just during a lunch break. In this sense, London offers a lot.
It’s a city that has always fascinated me, whether through documentaries, films, or books. I often say that I feel like someone born in the wrong century, someone more connected to the past than to the present or the future. I love antiques, I enjoy reading about past events, I love period dramas such as Downtron Abbey, and I’m very drawn to analog photography and film.
At the same time, of course, I am also a child of my time. I was born in 1996, during the rise of technology, so in that sense I definitely belong to the present as well.
What is your main motivation when taking photos? What factors do you consider when choosing which photo to take?
I wouldn’t define myself as a photographer in a technical sense, I probably don’t have all the skills to fully call myself one, but photography has always fascinated me. I work with images, and my mind has always been very visually oriented. Even my memory works that way: I often remember positions, colors, and visual details.
I really enjoy taking photos. There is probably also a psychological aspect to it, although I’m not entirely sure. My parents did take some photos when I was a child, but not that many. For me, photography is a way of preserving a memory, of capturing a feeling or an emotion. I think it’s very important also as a way of passing something on, photography has a strong emotional connection for me.
I remember very clearly my first real encounter with photography. I was a teenager, still in high school, and during summer holidays I used to go with my parents and my brother to South Tyrol, to a beautiful town called Merano, which I always recommend visiting. One day, walking along the main street, the arcade, the “Lauben” in german or Portici in italian, I noticed a poster of a photography exhibition held inside a former bank. It immediately caught my attention, and we decided to go in.
It was a photography exhibition, mostly black and white, with some color images, featuring portraits of famous figures, especially from the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, but also photographs of dogs with their owners in very particular compositions. The exhibition was by the great American photographer Elliott Erwitt. At the time, of course, I didn’t know who he was, I knew nothing about photography, but I was so fascinated that when I got home I started researching him, learning about photography in general.
That curiosity stayed with me, and I asked my parents for a camera. At the end of the school year, after being promoted, they bought me my first camera, a Canon reflex. I immediately started taking photos of everything around me: my grandparents, my dogs, flowers, plants in the garden, the sky, anything, even what might seem ordinary.
Even today, I still have a photographic project in mind. I love hands, and I would like to photograph the hands of many people, at work, doing things, in different moments throughout the day. When I visit museums, I always photograph the hands of statues or the figures in paintings. I feel a strong connection to hands. There was one person in particular whom I feel I “got to know” through his hands, and this has always amazed me, I think it’s something very intimate.
I never really studied the manual in depth — maybe that’s not ideal — but I don’t have a lot of patience, perhaps it’s my zodiac sign (Aries). I just started experimenting.
I’ve never taken a photography course, and that’s something I would like to do in the future, to learn the technical aspects. But since I got my first camera, I’ve always taken it with me, especially when traveling. Nowadays I sometimes use my phone more, because I chose one with a very good camera, but I still don’t like relying entirely on it.
I especially love analog photography. I have an Olympus camera that uses film, as well as other cameras like a Polaroid and a Pentax. When I travel, I always bring at least one camera with me, digital or analog.
Photography is a fundamental part of my travels, I would say almost 50% of the experience. If I’m honest, I don’t always know exactly which factors I consider when taking a photo. There is certainly an aesthetic aspect, and I don’t know whether that is something innate or something that can be learned. Of course, composition, light, colors, shadows, and lines can be studied.
But I think there is also something instinctive, connected to emotions and the moment I’m living. Many photos might seem simple or even banal, but if there’s a certain light in the sky, or I’m sitting in the garden with a glass of wine and I notice a shadow on the book I’m reading, I feel the need to capture that moment, even quickly, with my phone.
Sometimes I take more time and carefully think about the composition, but often it’s about following an immediate impulse. All the photos I take — even those on my Instagram, which I use as a sort of personal visual diary — reflect what I live and what I love: art, travel, books, my animals, quiet moments by the lake or in the garden, concerts.
They are, in a way, still frames of my everyday life.
You work as a “gallery director” at an art gallery. How would you describe that? What’s it like to do this job?
I work as a gallery manager in an art gallery in the center of Milan (Secci Gallery). It’s a fairly new role for me, as I started as an intern in July 2025 and then stayed on after being offered a position.
I’m still learning many aspects of the job, especially those related to the handling and logistics of artworks, which is a very specific and complex field with many details to take into account. I would say I am still very much at the beginning of this process.
I am quite an organized person and I try to be precise, so my role is mainly focused on the day-to-day management of the gallery — overseeing its daily operations and making sure everything runs smoothly. My colleagues, who have much more experience than I do, are more involved in the relationships between the gallery and the artists, as well as in the development of projects, applications for international art fairs, and the curatorial side of exhibitions.
At the moment, my work is more connected to organizational and administrative aspects, a kind of daily management of the gallery.
That said, the environment I’m in has taught me — and is still teaching me — a lot of things I didn’t know before. I have to say that I probably have more of what you might call a “bookish” personality: I really enjoy research, I’m very curious, and when I worked at the museum I spent a lot of time in the archives, constantly looking for new information. That is something that feels very close to my natural inclination.
However, working in a gallery is allowing me to discover new things and meet new people all the time. It is quite extraordinary, almost surreal at times, to think that I can actually handle works by artists like Giorgio de Chirico, Lucio Fontana, or Mario Schifano — to be physically in contact with art history.
At the same time, I also have the opportunity to meet contemporary artists, to speak with them, and to understand how they arrived at creating a particular work. I can also observe the entire process of setting up an exhibition, all the elements that need to be considered.
So I think it is a very interesting job, one that is helping me grow and better understand the organizational structure of a gallery and also the art market.
What are your favorite movies and books?
These are my favorite kinds of questions ! I am a big lover of cinema — I even took two courses in film history at university — and it has always been one of my main passions. Calling it just a “hobby” almost feels reductive, because cinema has had a very significant impact on my life. It has often been a form of company during moments of solitude, even since I was a child. And when I was little, I wanted to become an actress. I used to create my own stories and perform them on my own at home, but I was — and still am — definitely too introverted and shy for that kind of career.
It’s difficult to choose just a few films or books, but there are definitely some that have marked me more deeply and have accompanied me through different periods of my life. They have become what we might call “comfort movies” or “comfort books,” although I tend to rewatch films more often than I reread books.
One of my ultimate comfort movies is When Harry Met Sally (1989), directed by Rob Reiner and starring Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal. It’s a film I constantly go back to — it makes me feel good, at home, calm, and at ease. I even have a framed poster of it in my room.
It also reflects something I mentioned before: this sense of nostalgia for a past I never actually lived. There’s a line from another film The Wedding Date (2005) with Debra Messing and Dermot Mulroney (yes, I love 90s vibes comedies like Notting Hill and 4 weddin and a funeral) — “I would have missed you even if I had never met you” — and I feel that it expresses something I often experience: a kind of nostalgia for something unknown.
I love the aesthetics of the film — the clothes, the interiors, the objects. There’s a scene where Harry moves into a new apartment, a large open space with huge windows, and Sally helps him unroll a carpet. It’s that attention to detail that fascinates me and that I often try to recreate in my own space. Or the beautiful scene at the MET museum where you can see through the glass windows the autumn’ leaves on the trees.
Another film I absolutely have to mention is Pride and Prejudice (2005), with Keira Knightley, along with Becoming Jane with Anne Hathaway. Both are connected to the world of Jane Austen, who is one of my favorite writers. These are films I rewatch often — they give me a sense of comfort and I watch them with full attention, not just as background noise.
They also reflect that bucolic English countryside atmosphere that I love so much. Again, I find myself focusing on details — interiors, furniture — and thinking, “I would love to have something like this in my home,” which then leads me to search antique shops.
This connects to all my passions: design, antiques, art, and travel. In fact, I often build my travel itineraries around films or books — visiting locations that have become meaningful to me.
Another film that had a strong impact on me is À bout de souffle by Jean-Luc Godard, part of the French New Wave of the 1960s. I first saw it during my film history course and fell completely in love with it — with the aesthetics, the atmosphere, the actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, and even the music.
I also deeply appreciate the cinema of Wim Wenders. I was actually the only student in my class who wrote a full thesis for my final exam instead of creating a multidisciplinary presentation, starting from his filmography and connecting it to literature and art.
In his films, places become protagonists — as in Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin), where Berlin itself is central. He creates a balance between presence and emptiness within the city.
One of his most recent films, Perfect Days (2023), truly captivated me. It’s a quiet film, almost made of silences, but incredibly powerful. It’s also connected to photography: the protagonist carries an analog camera and repeatedly photographs the same scene — sunlight filtering through leaves. This reflects exactly what I was saying before: photography as a way to capture an emotion, even in something simple.
As for books, I wouldn’t define myself as a very fast reader, tut I try to read a few pages every day. I need the right mood and a high level of concentration to read.
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen was the book that truly marked the beginning of my reading journey.
Another very important book for me is Arch of Triumph by Erich Maria Remarque. I read it during my first year of university, on the train during my long commute.
I discovered it in a very special way: I once accompanied my grandmother to visit an elderly family friend, a very cultured man with a huge personal library. He told me he would soon move to a retirement home and offered me to take any books I wanted. I chose several, including this one, probably because of its connection to Paris — a city I love.
Reading it was one of the best decisions I made. It’s difficult to explain why it affected me so deeply — it’s more a feeling than something I can describe.
Another book I really appreciated is The Children Act by Ian McEwan. It’s a short novel but very powerful, dealing with ethical and social issues. It tells the story of a judge who must decide whether to override a minor’s refusal of a life-saving blood transfusion for religious reasons. I found it incredibly thought-provoking. There i salso the movie with Emma Thompson.
From our perspective, we see Italy as a “cool” country. As a Turkish society, we’ve always felt a sense of closeness to Italians. So, how do Italians view Turks?
I don’t think there is a single, very defined idea of Turkey in Italy, but in general there is curiosity and also a certain sense of closeness.
Many Italians perceive similarities in values, especially when it comes to family and the importance of sharing time together. In Italy, too, the family plays a central role, and being together — especially around the table — is fundamental. Meals are not just about eating, but about talking, sharing time, and strengthening relationships.
From what we know, this is very similar in Turkish culture, and this creates a feeling of connection. Food itself also plays a role: it is rich, varied, deeply rooted in tradition, and strongly tied to the pleasure of being together.
At the same time, Turkey fascinates us because it is seen as a bridge between different cultures. Istanbul, in particular, is very intriguing for many Italians because it brings together Europe and Asia. Personally, I have wanted to visit it for several years, especially after seeing it in the film Inferno directed by Ron Howard. I would love to visit the Basilica Cistern (Yerebatan Sarnıcı), which I find incredibly fascinating.
I am also very curious about your tea culture — how it fits into daily life and how it is prepared. I love tea, and every time I go to London I buy particular blends that I can’t find in Italy, so this would definitely be something I would explore and bring back with me.
What are some must-do things in Italy? Like, “Visit this city” or “Try this dish” And which three cities would you definitely recommend our readers visit?
This is a question that feels like being a tour guide, and I really like it. When I organize my trips, I always look for the most traditional and less touristy places, as well as local dishes to try.
It’s not easy to answer as an Italian, because many things that feel ordinary to me might be very special for someone visiting from abroad.
Of course, I would recommend the classic cities — Milan, Venice, Rome, Naples — to be seen at least once in a lifetime. But I would also strongly recommend Turin, which is often overlooked. It’s a beautiful city with important historical significance and architecture from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, influenced by French models.
In the Veneto region, I always recommend Treviso — a smaller, very charming city, perfect to explore on foot. And of course Venice, where I suggest visiting places like the Peggy Guggenheim Museum or the Scuola Grande di San Rocco with frescos made by Tintoretto.
Mantua (Mantova) is another city I love — very livable, human-scale, with a beautiful historic center. Palazzo Te is a must-see.
I would also recommend the area where I live, around Lake Maggiore, between Lombardy and Piedmont. Towns like Laveno Mombello, where the MIDeC museum is located, as well as smaller villages like Caldè and Angera.
On the Piedmont side: Arona, Stresa, Pallanza, and the Borromean Islands. Also the Castle of Agliè, which is less known but stunning.
Piedmont is also one of Italy’s most important wine regions — I would definitely recommend visiting Alba, the Monferrato area, and trying wines like Nebbiolo, Barbera, and Barolo.
Finally, Tuscany is one of my favorite regions: I would suggest an on-the-road trip, stopping in small towns like Montepulciano and San Gimignano.
As for food, in Veneto you should try baccalà (both mantecato and alla vicentina), moeche (soft-shell crabs), and schie with white polenta.
Final question, what is your spirit animal and why?
I think this is a beautiful question, because animals are definitely better than people, and if someone asks this, it probably means they love animals too.
I have always grown up with dogs — I’ve always had two — and I cannot imagine my life without them. Unfortunately, their lives are much shorter than ours, and losing them is always very painful. I lost my dog Nala two years ago, and I had a very deep connection with her. She helped me through a difficult period in my life, and her loss was a huge blow. I even have a tattoo of her on my arm.
Another animal I’ve always felt connected to is the horse, which symbolically represents freedom and instinct. It reflects my own desire for freedom, especially from emotional constraints.
But if I had to choose my spirit animal, I would say the elephant. I don’t remember exactly how this connection started, but I have always felt a deep bond with this animal, even though I have never seen one in real life. I collect elephant-shaped objects and have them all around my home.
The elephant symbolizes wisdom, loyalty, sensitivity, family, and a quiet, non-aggressive strength. It is also very protective of its group. It is one of the few animals that seems to mourn its dead, showing complex behaviors such as staying with the body, touching it gently, and even covering it.
This emotional and social awareness fascinates me deeply. I truly hope that one day I will be able to see them in person — one of my dreams is to travel to Africa.