I grew up in a city on the Northeastern Italian region of Veneto famous for the prosecco wine. I love reading (and listening to) books, learning new languages, riding my bike, swimming, watching movies, and hiking. I have always been fascinated by geography and astronomy. I spent hours as a kid poring over my big atlas, and I relished the summer nights when I could stare at the starry sky and wonder about our own existence. When it was time for me to decide on my major, two very bright comets appeared in the sky, visible to the naked eye: Hyakutake and Hale-Bopp. That’s when I decided I had to study Astronomy. Soon after getting my PhD, I moved to the U. S., first in Colorado and then in Texas, where I’ve been living for the past 12 years. I study Solar System objects with very tenuous atmospheres, also called exospheres. I use a combination of spectroscopic observations (from the ground as well as from space, from the EUV to the Visible) and computer simulations to understand source and loss processes of atmospheres at very different environments: Mercury, the Moon, Jupiter's moon Io, etc. I am a team member of Strofio, the only NASA instrument on the BepiColombo mission, and Project Scientist of LAMP, the UV imaging spectrograph on board NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). Over the course of my career, I realized how Astronomy is a subject that opens one’s mind like few others. It is multi-disciplinary and thus very complex, but its manifestations are truly awe-inspiring. The existential questions it poses have been with us since we descended from the trees and started walking (and perhaps even earlier), no matter where we lived. The fascination for the cosmos is thus something that connects us to both our distant ancestors and the other 8 billion peers living all over the world. It’s perspectives like these that I like to share with the broader public.