Biography
She has made her passion for sport and travel her profession, dedicating her entire life to explorations in the wildest and most unexplored places on earth, reporting on them through her continuous activity as a photographer, documentarist, columnist and writer. Granddaughter of Raimondo Bucher, the world's first record holder in freediving, she has practised numerous sports (skiing, athletics, diving) and is known for being the first woman to cross vast desert areas on foot, alone, from Amazonia to Borneo, from Papua New Guinea to numerous areas of Africa.
She is the first woman to have crossed the Ténéré Desert alone with the Tuareg in Sahara, following a salt caravan, in 1991. Having joined the “Sector No Limits Team”, in 1994 she completed the solo crossing on foot of the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, the largest salt basin on earth, at an altitude of 3,700 metres. In 1996, after spending four days with a small community of bushmen, he crossed part of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana for 350 km with one of them. At the start, he loaded a rucksack weighing 18 kg and travelled for 15 days completely independent of water and food, feeding only on what the desert offered and finding water along the way. In 1998, he completed a solo, self-sufficient crossing of the Taklimakan Desert in China, travelling 550 km from south to north in 24 days: for the first time a human being had crossed this desert, the second most uninhabitable area in the world after the Sahara, on foot and alone.
In 2003, she realised her great dream: to complete the cycle “A Desert for a Continent”. Alone, with a 25 kg rucksack on her back, she crossed the Simpson Desert in the heart of the Australian continent, on the border between the Northern and Southern Territories, on foot in 20 days. She is the first woman in the world to have completed this feat.
The first three feats are recounted in his book Deserts. The second book Silences of sand contains accounts of the Taklimakan and Simpson Desert exploits.
In 2008, she walked alone across the Akakus Tadrarf desert in Libya. For the first time, a woman was allowed to walk alone across the Libyan desert in the name of peace in Africa.
He walked for a week in temperatures of 45 degrees during the day and 3 degrees at night.
In the same year, he made available his experience gained from many years of desert exploits: for 15 days he guided the blind and marathon runner Fabio Pasinetti in the white Egyptian desert. This experience is recounted in the third book Looking beyond the dunes.
In 2009 he started the Desert Therapy project with which he accompanies small groups of travellers to walk in deserts around the world. He has made nature documentaries for television and collaborated with travel and adventure magazines.