The adjective that most suits Manfredi Roesler Franz @manfredi_rfafter just a few minutes of chat is “hungry for life”. If you are traveling to Italy, you could come across a boy who, accompanied by his faithful Van Mistraljust like the free wind, is following his dream around the peninsula. His personality is reckless, but respectful of nature, his spectacular videos, his life nothing to envy to the plot of a Hollywood film. It was born and growing in Rome, studies to Sapienza Data Science (artificial intelligence applied to the world of data) – which demonstrates a brain that is certainly not indifferent, studies six months at New York University. In 2019 he moved to Milan and from there something begins to change. After the first year of aperitifs, parties and clubs, the first doubts were born. He replaces social life with mountains travel, but this can only do so on weekends, the rest of the week remains dedicated to the exhausting and tight rhythms of work.
“In the company where I worked I earned very well, the company paid me the house in the center of Milan, I had a very high state of comfort, even if I call it the” comfort cage “, a golden prison from which it was difficult to go out. I always loved sports, outdoor life and the video Making, but I could give them only two days out of seven: the other five simply, I wanted to” live “. resumed studying video editing (my love since I was a child) to take advantage of this passion of mine and make it become a job “.
Then that accident, perhaps better to call it “decisive episode”, in which you clinging furiously (in all senses) to life.
“While I was climbing a mountain, on a decidedly little desirable day, I slipped, remaining hanging only with the stick of my Go Pro (which providentally, that day, was in carbon) that I had managed to skewer the ice. In addition, I had a glove messed up and I started not to perceive my fingers anymore. Fortunately, the survival instinct prevailed and I managed to go up again.”
“Once the danger was up and escaped, it was whole minutes to fix the emptiness and to think how life can really change at any moment. The idea of not wanting to die unhappy, without at least having tried, it had made concrete and from there I was unleashed something that I would not even know how to define. That evening I called my parents saying that I would have to inform them about a very important decision:” As soon as I take the fourteenth. I go, I leave the job and change life ”.
How did they react?
“Very bad! They tried to convince me in all the way, suggesting rather than taking a expectation, not to take such a rash step. But my desire to unplug was so strong that I didn’t even want a mental link, a bond that would only delay the net cut.”
Did you already have the idea of the van?
“In reality the first idea was to take a backpack and leave, travel the world, but to chase my passions, bring me behind the equipment (those to make the videos, as well as those to climb the mountains for example) was fundamental. I understood that I would have served a mobile house and I started looking for used van. The thing that gave me a smile, but above all a strong emotion, is that it was my father, a message of the end of July An announcement of a used van for sale. I had found Mistral! Within a few days, I went to withdraw it and I communicated to the company, my intention to resign. ”
However, in order not to lose you, a company proposed to work for a year remotely.
“I took the ball: I worked from where it seemed to me, gaining. I simply slept little: the working rhythms continued to keep the same, and to have time to devote to the life that I had set myself, I stole it from sleep.
I left on August 7, 2023 without even knowing where I was going. I took the van and started. I headed for the Dolomites, then in the Balkans. I ran at random, for me what mattered was only the desire to travel and feel free. Then I started to better structure the trip. My first idea was to travel around Europe, but then, the more I saw Italy, the more I realized how wonderful it was, to be able to visit it out of season, it made it even more attractive. After six months from the trip, the companies and the tourism bodies have started to take an interest, making new jobs take over. In August 2024 I officially fired myself, not without some doubt that I had not made the right choice “.
How is it like to live in van? You have to give up many comforts.
“It is a life, however, made of sacrifices; a life that gives a lot, but at the same time, it takes away the same. The blanket is short, you have to choose. It is an experience that has a lot to teach: first of all, to adapt you. I before lived in a very comfortable apartment in the center, with a wardrobe full of clothes. The essential: today I am of the idea that the less things have, the better one is.
In summer life in van can be fascinating … but in winter?
“In winter it is very hard! I spent the first winter in the Dolomites at -20 degrees. It is very hard because you are dealing with frozen pipes, trivially you don’t find the water because all the fountains are frozen. And then the gas cylinders! Every now and then I ended the gas at night. Once I woke up at two in the morning with the temperature inside the van that had come down to -15 degrees! Do not make the pipes freeze: consequently I consume a lot.
Have you ever wanted to return to your steps?
“It is very difficult to go back. The first phase that you cross is that of enthusiasm, and then cross a very difficult one of solitude: you have to deal with yourself, every day. After two months from the start I entered crisis, a collapse right for solitude. Then you understand that the human body adapts, that you can feel good even like that. And solitude becomes a danger because when you get used to being alone, you are difficult to share”.
Even if with your extroverted character you know people wherever you go …
“It depends a lot from the location. When I did two months in the winter Dolomites, I opened the door in the morning and around me there were only chamois! I then move so much: I have never been for more than three days in the same place and this implies greater difficulty in knowing and building friendly relationships of any kind”.
Never more than three days in the same place?
“It’s my character. When I see and taste a place, I have the desire to find out what’s after. It is the curiosity that moves me. This in a certain sense a little worries me: if I continue like this I will never stop!”
What does he keep you company?
“I read, I work, I have many content to create. And I have a lot of time simply to listen, to listen to the nature or the sound of the rain. It is me and me.”
Have there been unpleasant situations?
“When I travel to Van, there is the security theme: I never had problems or situations in which I did not feel safe. Unfortunately there was only an unpleasant episode, in Sicily. I had moved away about ten minutes from the van to go for a dip. In that little time, they opened it to me, stoleing everything inside. It was November 2023, just three months after my adventure had started. It was the saddest and darkest moment.
And the most beautiful thing, apart from freedom?
“The possibility of detaching from the anxiety of the future. I remember that when I worked in the company, I did not sleep, I rolled in the bed with a thousand thoughts. Today I support my head on the pillow and in a second I fall asleep. I am extremely serene. Then, of course, I sacrificed everything: my career, not seeing my grandchildren grow, the affections, aspects that often underestimated people.”
This adventure has also become a book “I leave everything and I leave with me”.
“In the book, I tell the process that brought me to here. The important part of this path is that one imagines that one person can change life from one day to the next. That from one day to the next he says: I give up everything, I leave and I go away! In reality it does not work like this: to change life you need an awareness. Mine was a process that lasted years, I created a sort of plan B, and then I threw myself. Nonetheless, but not from one day to the other.
Is this what you want to do when you grow up?
“Here, this is a difficult question, because I, from the day I had the accident, I stopped thinking about tomorrow. For me what matters is today, tomorrow Boh, you will see. I only know that in a few months I will start shooting Europe, looking for situations of” disconfort “. I like to wallow in the uncomfortable area!”
On June 12, 2005, at the University of Stanford, Steve Jobs recited in a memorable speech: “Death is the best invention of life, it is its exchange agent: it makes a clean square of the old man to open the way to the new”.
Manfredi seems to have fully married this philosophy, and if we still want to bother the American visionary, browsing in the life of this Roman boy to date, we clearly perceive those dots, united backwards, one after the other, who have transformed his life into something that probably (the innate passions for videomaking, the mountain, the life in the open air), was already predestined.
