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PAOLO MAIETTA
Ziner in the Spotlight!


Paolo Maietta was born and currently lives in Trieste, an historical town nestled at the upper corner of the Adriatic Sea. A former Hapsburg Empire main shipping port, Trieste sits at the crossroads of West and East, mixing together people, languages and architecture of Italian, German and Balkan worlds. It is the perfect environment in which to develop a curiosity about the world and a love for travel.

Paolo works as a supervisor for a leading air courier company, a very good place to learn geography and practice language skills which then come very useful when applied to leisure trips. His first taste of travel came at the age of 17 on a memorable trip to the Swinging London of the 70s. He was able to tour the city alone for a full week and experience the wonders and the troubles of a teenager in a strange land.

The weak exchange ratio of the Italian lira kept Paolo mostly inside Italy for many years, excluding the trips to neighbouring countries like Austria and former Yugoslavia. But in 1983, a mixed business/pleasure trip brought him to New York with a visit to relatives in Connecticut. A new world opened for him. In the following years, alone or with his wife Gabriella, Paolo extended the range of his trips: Egypt (the only group tour so far), India and Nepal, Peru, Bolivia and eventually Tanzania.

Paolo and Gabriella would have kept going, but the romantic nights of Africa brought at the end of that year their first son. Absence of exotic travels did not mean staying at home of course. The three of them took car trips in Europe, visiting France,The Netherlands and Belgium. When a little girl followed four years later, they reverted to farm holidays or countryside rentals in Central Italy where children played in swimming pools while mom and pop planned the next excursions to surrounding art towns. Eventually the kids grew up enough and they started to appreciate themselves the joys of travel, so the family visited London, Greece and Denmark. In more recent years, Paolo and his family have seen a lot of Europe - Sicily and Sardinia, Normandy and the Loire Valley, Scotland, Dalmatia, Burgundy and Germany.

The World Wide Web has made travel planning easier. Mailing lists became a good way for Paolo to become acquainted with people around the world. In 2000 one of these friends invited the Maietta family to Florida. It was a very exciting trip for them - the theme parks, the nature, the food, the people. The only problem was the mis-sorted baggage on both ways. Four people living three days out of a small hand baggage with only 3 toothbrushes and no summer shoes was an heroic task. Paolo has also used the Internet as a resourceful tool to give him a lot of ideas about where to go. For him, TheTravelzine is one of the best forums to learn about new places, share experiences and make friends.

Paolo, thank you for being a friend of TheTravelzine and travelers worldwide for almost 10 years!


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