Andrea Loreni is the only Italian tightrope walker specialized in high-altitude crossings. He graduated in Theoretical Philosophy.
In 1997 he began to do street theater, moved by the need to know a type of truth different from the speculative logic proposed by western philosophical thought. Since 2006 he has been walking by cable to great heights where he experiences that kind of objective truth, given by the absolute presence of himself, in the here and now.
Andrea Loreni has traveled kilometers by cables stretched in the skies of many Italian cities, including his city, Turin, and then Bologna, Rome, Venice, Florence, Genoa, Brescia, Trieste and abroad, he has walked the skies of Switzerland, Serbia, Israel, Thailand and over the Sogen-ji temple lake in Japan.
The intuition of the absolute that he had walking on the wires brought him closer to the practice of Zen meditation that he would deepen in the Sogen-Ji monastery in Okayama in Japan, under the guidance of Shodo Harada Roshi. In his research path, Andrea Loreni combines Zen and tightrope walking, as privileged access routes to artistic and existential authenticity.
After years of walking on wires and Zen meditation, the need to share experiences and reflections was increasingly present in Andrea Loreni. Trainer and speaker at various TED events, universities, banks, multinationals and companies, Andrea Loreni offers motivational talks, theoretical and experimental workshops, on the management of imbalance and change, on the acceptance of fear and risk and on efficiency under pressure .
He is collaborating with Giulia Schiavone, PhD in the Department of Human Sciences for Education “Riccardo Massa” of the University of Milan-Bicocca, to deepen his research on the most transversal aspects of the tightrope, to study its value as an instrument not only of «performance» but also of transformation, used as a vehicle for growth and personal transformation. In this sense, he has also started a collaboration with the Center Européen de Funambulisme in Brussels.
Andrea Loreni is the author of the book “Zen and Tightrope walking” (2019) and in 2020, “Short tightrope walking course for those who walk with the wind. Seven steps to go through life“.