A Year Hitchhiking Boats
"Usually, people who decide to leave everything to take a trip around the world do it because they're not happy with their life or because they're running away from something: it wasn't like that for me." Soon after his thirtieth birthday, Alberto Di Stefano, a Bocconi graduate who began his career in international investment banking, decided to leave everything to take a year off: his goal was to cross the Atlantic and then continue traveling, with whatever means and wherever. "My work was rewarding, it was the late '90s, the golden years for the derivatives market, I had a good salary. I was professionally happy, I was riding the right wave," explains Di Stefano during an event at Bocconi organized by the University Sailing Club. "Even if my job took up all of my time." Five years of this lifestyle, without many vacation days and some long days spent at the office, took their toll on Alberto. He wasn't sure whether to change jobs or take a break, and so decided on the second option and quit his job.
"I thought about it a lot, and I'd wanted to travel around the world by boat since I was a child, but it was a complicated choice. I didn't have any real sailing experience, except for a course I took in Italy." The original idea was to get on a boat crossing the Atlantic, then continue, visiting other continents and maybe going along with a person he would meet in the area, without a real schedule. Along the way, things changed, because anyone who loves sailing loves traveling the most, leaving without worrying about arriving who knows where. "In the Caribbean I discovered a completely new world, which I didn't know existed: there were people with their boats doing long and adventurous journeys welcoming travelers who would make up the crew. You chose which boat you wanted to get on, based on the destination, and then you left," explains Alberto. "After the leg of the trip is over, you change boats and go somewhere else, like a sort of boat hitchhiking."
That's how in the end Alberto Di Stefano arrived in Polynesia, at the Marquesas Islands, and even more remote islands, sharing everything with his traveling companions. "Life on a boat is difficult, sharing everything in such a small space." He met people, even Italians "who had been living there for maybe 15 years and always say they're about to go back to Italy, but they never will." Alberto, however, came back and wrote a great book (Around the World by Boat Hitchhiking, Feltrinelli) and went back to his life, though it wasn't without difficulties.
"In Italy people who take a sabbatical year are looked at with a certain distrust, it's not considered a positive thing like it is in Anglo-Saxon countries or in France. It took a year to find a new job in the field of finance, but I'm very pleased with the choice I made. What I wanted was to leave and then come back again." Even if he was tempted to follow "those people who are always about to come home, but never do. After 15 days at sea we arrived in Niue, a beautiful island between Tonga and the Cook Islands. There I met a dignified man at a bar who was actually the Prime Minister. We saw each other a few days during the time I was there and, in the end, he made a proposal: a nice house right on the beach, a generous pension for me and my family members in the future as long as I stayed there to help launch a tourism business. I have to admit, I was thinking about it."