01 - The crossroad

Ciao a tutti,

my name is Domenico Vizzari and I'm from Rosalì, a small village close to Reggio Calabria, in South Italy.

My land is an area with a high seismic risk and for this reason I decided to study civil engineering.
I took my bachelor's and master's degree at University Mediterranea of Reggio Calabria and I got interest about road engineering collaborating with the laboratory of materials.

Thanks to that experience I realized that I wanted become a researcher and in Italy there are just two reasons if you want be a researcher: 1) you are crazy and masochist or 2) you really like the world of research and you want make your contribution in your field of interest (I like to think that I'm in the second group!).

For a couple of months I collected some failures but I didn't give up and around 1 year ago I was at an important life's crossroad: choose a job in a small company close to my hometown with a good salary and continuing to enjoy my mom's Sunday dishes, or leave family, girl, friends and a beautiful sunset on the sea of Reggio Calabria to follow my passion, for the desire to change, to risk, to not make the obvious decision, to see what is on the other side.

Well, the other side was Nantes, a nice rainy city in the North-West of France and the opportunity to give my life a twist was a European project called SMARTI ETN, which involved 15 early stage researchers specialized in road infrastructure.

In June 2017 I applied for the vacancy and I had my first interview. After few weeks, when I was to the sea with some friends,I recived a calling:

"Figghioli c****o vado a Nantes! mi hanno preso!!!" (guys s****t I go to Nantes! They chose me!!!)

I leave to your imagination how I finished the day!

Since that day many things changed: now I'm a PhD student in IFSTTAR and I'm involved in one of the SMARTI projects called RA2ROAD. 

My objective is to realize a hybrid prototype able to harvest energy from the sun through the road.

If you want know more about my job and my idea, feel free to follow my blog!

See you soon

Domenico

“The research presented in this report/paper/deliverable was carried out as part of the H2020-MSCA-ETN-2016. This project has received funding from the European Union’s H2020 Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement number 721493”