BIO

I write, mostly. This is my portfolio.

Angelo Zinna is a writer, photographer and editor currently based in Florence, Italy. He is the author of ten Lonely Planet guidebooks and has contributed with words and images to BBC Travel, National Geographic, New Lines Magazine, Condé Nast Traveller and more.

Over the past decade Angelo has lived and travelled extensively across three continents. Besides travel, his main interests lie in history, European borderlands and the relationship between collective memory, place, and identity. In Italy, Angelo has authored the travelogue Un Altro Bicchiere di Arak and two award-winning podcasts, Cemento and Kult.

Connect via hello@angelozinna.com or Instagram.

I was born in 1989 in a Swedish-speaking town in southern Finland. I grew up in Tuscany and have been based in Florence since 2021, following 12 years abroad. I first left Italy in 2010 with the idea of spending a few months in Australia. Those few months turned into a five-year journey through Oceania and Asia. After a year in Australia, I moved to New Zealand, where I lived for two years. In 2013, I set off to East Timor intending to cross Asia overland to get back home.

Due to border closures and bureaucratic obstacles, my plan to avoid flying ultimately failed, but I spent nearly two years in Asia, moving from Southeast Asia to India and Nepal, then to China and Central Asia before returning to Europe via Iran and Turkey. In 20 months, I took 234 buses, 104 trains, and 54 ships. I slept in 209 different beds. The final stretch of this trip was documented in my first book, Un Altro Bicchiere di Arak, published in Italy in 2016.

Back in Europe, I moved to London, then to Amsterdam. In Amsterdam, I graduated in literary studies with a thesis on the relationship between environmental activism and ideological apparatuses. After nearly a decade of hospitality work, I switched to writing for a living in 2017, juggling communications, translation, and journalism projects. My first steps into freelancing were precarious, but location-independent work allowed me to feed my curiosity about the former Soviet space and indulge in a series of long overland journeys I would not have been able to undertake otherwise. From Amsterdam to Yerevan via Ukraine and the Black Sea, then from Murmansk to Kerman via Georgia and Azerbaijan, and from the Kazakh side of the Aral Sea to the Tien Shan mountains of Kyrgyzstan, year after year, I traveled east to Europe's edges and beyond in an attempt to understand how imagined borders impact the identity of places and how material traces of the past are reinterpreted today. It's an ongoing process.

In 2018, one of my early English-language articles won a silver medal in the historical travel section of the North American Travel Journalists Association (NATJA) Awards. The following year, I co-authored the podcast Cemento (in Italian), a 24-episode exploration of cultural symbols of the post-Soviet region. Cemento reached more than 500,000 streams and led to the production of a second podcast, Kult, an audio documentary that tells the story of the last bust of Lenin still standing in Italy through the voices of the people living around the monument. Kult won the Pod24 award for Best Independent Reportage in 2023.

In 2020, I started working with Lonely Planet. My first pitch was a photo essay on the industrial complex of Dolní Vítkovice in the Czech Republic. It was followed by four years of inspiring guidebook assignments: I have been the lead author of the past two editions of the Lonely Planet Florence & Tuscany guidebook and reported from the Caucasus, the Baltic region, and Finland. Meanwhile, the pandemic brought me back to Italy: I left Amsterdam behind, lived for a year in Rome, and finally circled back to Florence. Besides Lonely Planet, I have contributed to New Lines Magazine, National Geographic, and to both BBC Travel and BBC StoryWorks. My architecture photography has appeared in Condé Nast Traveler and been exhibited in galleries in Tokyo and Seoul as part of the Accidentally Wes Anderson project. Currently, I am also working behind the scenes as the editor of Wayer.