Right before the summer of 1985, while movie theatres were screening The Goonies and Madonna was topping the radio hits with Like a Virgin, in the Italian town of Chivasso, not far away from Turin, Fil was born, which would cause him a few annoiances from then onwards.
Since childhood, his mother introduced him to the love for reading, which lead him to develop a passion for fantasy and sci-fi, as their home library was stocked with such books.
At school, the kid is actually pretty good, but teachers had not doubts: he had no talent for drawing, writing essays was not his cup of tea and, speaking of tea, neither was the English language. As of today, it is still unclear if the teachers were right as far as the lack of talent for drawing and writing is concerned, but a university degree in the UK following a period of studies in Germany should give a hint that maybe he was at least not that rubbish with foreign languages.
If the love for reading bloomed early, that for writing came much later, around the time he was 16 or 17: teenage years, one couldn't be more obvious. Just to make sure to be a proper cliché of sensitive teenager with artistic vocation, FIl begins to write down pieces of poetry, achieving frankly embarrassing results that made him realise he was probably slightly less worse with prose. With this self-knowledge, he went on with a series of literary experiments, consisting of a large amount of short stories and novels started and never finished, screenplays and similar, fortunately never published. Then, in 2007, when he was close to obtain an extremely useful Bachelors' degree in Literature, few characters and stories that were wandering aimlessly inside his mind started to gather together to give a first semblance of what could become a fantasy novel making a bit of sense. This was the beginning of the composition of the novel La porta (The Gate), which he would finish two years later and would remain inside a drawer taking some dust for another three years.
Since 2008, Fil has been leading a somewhat international life, first by living and studying in Cologne in Germany, then attempting an unlikely career as an Italian teacher in the Czech Republic, followed by a permanence in the green Scottish meadows, more specifically in the bonnie city of Edinburgh, where he studied and worked as a marketing consultant. After all of those pilgrimages, he then returned to Prague, in which he has been employed in the procurement departments of a couple of big corporations, actually with pretty good results. For a guy who dreamt to be an artist, having as his biggest career achievent a successful project related to Italian tax and invoicing is probably not the exact definition of coherence.
The long stay outside of his native Italy is also the reason why, unable to stand anymore to see his first name butchered in the most improbable ways, he decided to simply refer to himself as Fil: three letters only, getting it wrong requires some effort and talent (as a side note, his surname on the other hand keeps being constantly butchered, even by his own countrymen).
During the time in Edinburgh, he decided, supported by some friends and classmates at university, to publish his first and second novel, choosing the book on demand option to avoid that boxes of unsold books ended up lying in a corner of his parents' house in Italy while he was living in (not so) far away lands.
Moving (back) to Prague in 2014, Fil found himself in the position to balance his passion for creative activities with the commitments of a full-time job.
He continued working on the fantasy series of novels that he had started a couple of years prior, but he eventually faced a standstill, struggling to complete what was meant to be the last volume.
So, he decided to go back to his first love, comics, and from 2016 until 2023 a large portion of his time off-work was spent writing, drawing and inking the superhero and magical girl inspired series That Spooky Girl.
It is towards the end of 2023, after concluding the third arc of his comic, he realised that the time was ripe to go back to writing. However, more than a decade had passed since last working on his novels, a decade during which he had also been making increasingly less use of his native language.
That brought to the decision to have a fresh start. Having also matured as a person since writing La porta in his early 20s, he begun to completely rewrite the series from scratches, this time in English.
And of course, since three volumes did not represent a sufficient effort to undertake, he came up with the idea to expand the series to a total of five installments instead.
And so, now juggling a reasonable successful corporate career and his never extinguished passion for writing, Fil continues to walk his path towards seeing one day his works finding more readers after getting published.