Hello!

My name is Barbara but everyone calls me Bobbi.

I live at Cat Cottage, an old house in the Italian countryside with my cats. I’m an illustrator and a designer. Most of all I am a cat rescuer and an animal rights activist. I adore all animals and I’ve been a vegetarian almost all my life. I’m almost 100% vegan now.

I was born and raised in downtown Milan but I knew I wouldn’t live there forever. Ever since I was a little kid, I strongly needed to be in nature. I needed space, and city life felt like a cage I had to escape from.

I began drawing before I could walk and had a dream of becoming an illustrator. I planned to leave the City as soon as possible, buy a small farmhouse near a lake or the sea, rescue animals, and work as an illustrator.

But, you know, Milan is the city of fashion and I was told illustrators starve! I had no will to condemn myself to a life of misery, so I studied fashion and began to work in the industry. I thought it was a good compromise between the need to eat, and my desire to draw for a living. Boy, was I wrong. At some point, I even reconsidered being a penniless artist as something less painful than working in fashion.

But those years full of glitter and poison somehow lobotomized my dream: I forgot about it.

In 2002 I resigned and accepted a job in an emerging interior design company based in Veneto. Interior design was always a passion of mine, but I accepted the job mostly because it gave me the chance to leave Milan and the fashion world. So I moved here, in the countryside near Lake Garda, and found this little cottage. It’s been 22 years.

One spring day, I looked out from the window, saw the countryside, heard the cows moo, and all of a sudden I remembered my dream!

After 10 years the design company closed down. I was 40, had very little savings, a rent to pay, and 8 cats to feed. So, I followed rationality, aka ‘what everyone else thinks you should do’ and I opened a shop. I sold handmade items, but after a promising start, it was a disaster. According to Murphy’s Law, if something can go wrong it will, and… it did. In every possible way. That shop almost killed me. After four years I closed that shit down and faced a few months of total despair. I had no idea what to do.

Until one evening when I began doodling cats on a piece of paper. It felt so good, as if all planets were aligned.

I thought, fu** it, I’m doing it, what else can go wrong? Well, I had no idea of how many thing could still go passionately wrong…

But the thing is: jobs I hated went wrong, too. I might as well do something I love.

And so here I am! In a country cottage next to a farm and near a lake, drawing from home, rescuing animals. It’s not exactly as in my dream, but it’s close and it already feels good.

Note to self: dreams and desires are guidance. You should always become what you thought of becoming when you were a child!

Bobbi

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