Biggest drawing in world: four steps between Heart and Mind

Making Heart and Mind work together is a goal toward which we are push by gurus, philosophers, religious leaders – and scientists, much more rarely. Balancing humanistic and scientific disciplin…

18 november 2013

50 years after JFK’s death: the sad story of the forgetful mentalist

Exactly 50 years ago, in November 1963 William D. Crowe aka Bill DeMar was performing as a mentalist at the Carousel Club in Dallas, run by Jack Ruby.

16 november 2013

Past, Present and Future in three magic experiences

Being a magician does not require a stage, a strange hat or a bag full of tricks. Daily life offers lots of opportunities to create unusual (or even impossible) situations, breaking into reality with…

12 october 2013

Kavita Parmar and the stories fostering gratitude

I met Kavita Parmar in Milan during the TEDxNavigli conference I helped to organize in March 2013. The Indian fashion designer gave birth to the IOU project, a Spanish startup whose acronym sounds lik…

22 august 2013

Becoming Spider-Man? Yes, in London you can

…and I suffer from vertigo! I have almost reached the top of the building, but there is something that makes me stick to the wall with safety. No radioactive spider bite: it is the force of gra…

19 august 2013

Circlemaking does whatever it wants

One of the most beautiful crop circle of this year appeared in Italy, in Robella (Asti), on the night between 29 and 30 June.

25 july 2013

Rennes-le-Château, an open work

Like the old saying goes, we should not trust two kinds of people: those with mustaches and those without.

22 july 2013

Raining money, from Bulgakov to “Now You See Me”

I can find just a single strong symbolic point in Now You See Me – the latest film by Louis Leterrier: the idea of gifting spectators with actual money.

16 july 2013

Precognitive shadow

Have you ever seen a shadow anticipating a future action? Look at the green disk and its shadow in this non-Photoshopped image:

1 july 2013

The naïve and the sentimental spectator

Mentalism is the branch of stage magic closer to reality. It is easy to interpret demonstrations of a good mentalist as rigorous experiments in social psychology. Many “positivist” mentali…

30 june 2013

Transposable aphorisms from Pitigrilli to Marty Hines

During a recent interview held in Italy during the event La Repubblica delle Idee, Dan Brown paraphrased a well-known quote by Alfred Hitchcock. The next day, the newspaper Repubblica cited the aphori…

27 june 2013

Kierkegaard and the dual nature of anxiety

“La fuga e il silenzio” (“The escape and the silence”), a solo exhibition of Miro Gianola, will be inaugurated in exactly one month. The exhibition catalog will offer this brie…

16 june 2013

We were used to cut along the edges

Magicians are not the only ones cutting women. Advertisers do it in a more subtle way, persuading them to do it by themselves.

14 june 2013

Eco, Bartezzaghi and the irony of adverbs

Bilocation? Today it is possible. On the evening of June 8th I was in the Teatro Verdi in Florence, to see “Ferite a morte” by Serena Dandini, and at the same time in the Palazzo Vecchio,…

11 june 2013

Serena Dandini’s two creative wavelengths

I was moved to tears and laughed at the same time. Then I speculated about the trick. How did Serena Dandini produce in me – and in the other 1,500 spectators – such conflicting emotions?

10 june 2013

Fellini, Sorrentino and magic as a metaphor

Exploring Italian decadence through magic. We can do it thanks to two movies released half a century away.

9 june 2013

The “ballerina ballot”: the trick revealed by Roberto Saviano

How do criminal organizations monitor the election results? With a magician’s trick. It is one of the revelations made by Roberto Saviano at “La Repubblica delle idee” event. The method has a specific…

8 june 2013

Orhan Pamuk and the stories shaping reality

During the Presentation Speech for the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded to Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish writer was praised for his ability to recreate – in his novels – “credible&…

7 june 2013

I sawed her in half for love

Today La Repubblica delle Idee event has hosted the presentation of the book by Michela Murgia and Loredana Lipperini L’ho uccisa perché l’amavo (“I have killed her for love”), edited by Laterza (Rome…

6 june 2013

Dan Brown’s re-enchanted world

When asked why there is no sex in his novels, Dan Brown replies that it would be a dirty trick to capture readers: good novels should be emptied of all that is redundant and gratuitous. In order to st…

5 june 2013

A magician at “La Repubblica delle Idee” in Florence

Today, the illusionist is an old-fashioned figure. With his balloon sculptures, gaudy handkerchiefs and doves, his aesthetic evokes the pastimes of childhood and village feasts. David Metcalfe frankly…

3 june 2013

Women in half

My documentary about femicide and magic.

1 june 2013

On Dante’s tomb

Dan Brown’s novel Inferno has been released on May 14th.

29 may 2013

Magic, what a therapeutic tool– not!

In his autobiography Nothing Is Impossible, English magician Dynamo describes magic as a tool to emancipate from playground bullying, racial abuse and a difficult family. This kind of narrative is rep…

25 may 2013

A thought on happiness by Raymond Smullyan

Raymond Smullyan was born 94 years ago in New York.

22 may 2013

Train of thought

Is this train coming into or leaving the Charing Cross station? Focus on it and you’ll be able to change its direction!{Source}

15 may 2013

Checking identities: is RealMaxMaven the real Max Maven?

«On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.», says a dog to another in a popular cartoon.{Peter Steiner, The New Yorker, July 5, 1993.} It is particularly true on Twitter, where a n…

9 may 2013

Magic as something which defies verbalization

My video tutorial “How to create two linking rings out of a newspaper” got viral (more than 50K visits in a couple of weeks) also raising some disappointment. Because the tutorial... was a…

6 may 2013

Accumulation of faith creates its own veracity

Orson Welles (1915-1985) was born exactly 98 years ago. In an interview by Kenneth Tynan, published in Playboy on 1967, he comments about his alleged clairvoyant power and his idea that “accumul…

3 may 2013

Maurits Escher and mentalism

What is really mentalism? Wikipedia limits it to

21 april 2013

How to create two linking rings out of a newspaper

Do you want to get two linking rings from a single page of a newspaper? This tutorial will teach you how to do it:

10 april 2013

Ferdinando Buscema and the Glass Bead Game

Hermann Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game tells the story of an order of monks, the Castalians, devoted to a recreational and intellectual activity by the same name. Each and every “move” in the ga…

9 april 2013

How to create chocolate out of nothing

Do you want to solve world hunger with magic? Slice a chocolare bar into 4 pieces and rearrange 3 of them: you will get the original bar plus a square, appeared out of nothing. Repeating the procedure…

2 april 2013

The secret codes in Dan Brown’s Inferno

Inferno, the new thriller by Dan Brown, will be released around the world on May 14. The date has not been chosen at random: it is written 5-14-13, which read backwards 3.1415 – the value of pi.

31 march 2013

Happy Good Friday with Jesus the Magician

Happy Good Friday with “Jesus performing Cups & Balls Trick”, from an idea by Pat Patterson Lyons.

22 march 2013

The 16th century computer and the book that kills

Designing and recreating a wood-and-glass computer used in the 16th century? A funny activity with a certain amount of thrill, especially because the mathematical secret at its core could lead to deat…

14 march 2013

Moleskine “The Power of Love” official promo

Istituto Europeo di Design has released the official stop-motion promo of my Moleskine “The Power of Love”:

6 march 2013

My Moleskine® “The Power of Love”, a meditation tool

On March 20th, during TEDxNavigli, the Moleskine® notebook created by me and Ferdinando Buscema will be officially released. It is a meditation tool on the necessary balance between Power and Love…

9 february 2013

Valentine’s Day Equation

Valentine’s Day is coming. Go to Wolfram Alpha and input this equation: