About Us
ALEX BELLINI
I have been an explorer for twenty years. I have planned and completed expeditions, mostly solo, in all kinds of environments.
My curiosity to learn and to know myself often spurs me to test my limits, experiencing many joys and just as many disappointments.
Having spent so much time alone and the perspective I have gotten on the world have let me appreciate the how it is a single whole. My exploration has taken on the new form of bearing witness to the limits of our natural ecosystems.
I am not alone in this new phase, this new beginning. Francesca, my wife, is by my side. I owe her the original intuition to tell about how the world is changing, especially as caused by human activity.
We human beings have the chance to put a stop to the environmental catastrophes that we are driving. The first step is to connect human beings to nature. We hope that this will encourage the emergence of a new ecological perspective that can work against the dominant idea of nature as a practically inert material that can be molded at will by people.
FRANCESCA URSO
A businesswoman, I have worked and lived alongside Alex for fifteen years, coordinating exhibition teams, managing planning, communication, and logistics. By finding excellent partners that share our vision, I make our projects feasible.
I have been traveling through the eyes of an explorer for fifteen years, all without leaving home. I travel to places that inspire us to think of the meaning of everything we do. It is this inner exploration that we need to take care of what is most valuable: ourselves.
I feel a powerful drive to a make positive impact on our path so that the journey is not an end unto itself but one that can lead to collective change. This is change in the name of respect for the environment of which we are guests, whether the city, the countryside, the sea, the desert, or the mountains. Everything in nature is interconnected and the things we want to get rid of — if we don’t do so correctly — come back into our lives in another, often unpleasant, form.
I have been married to Alex since 2007. We have two daughters (Sofia and Margherita) who every day heighten the meaning of what we are doing.
The 10 Rivers 1 Ocean project was born of Alex’s need to explore and Francesca’s need to have a positive impact on our common world. The goal is to navigate the 10 most plastic-polluted rivers in the world to try to create a new global ecological awareness on an issue that affects us all, now more than ever. Because we are all in the same boat.