By Dr Max Caruso

We are the one
We are the few
We are the many
We are the other

(Musings, Caruso, 2025)

I have many powerful memories of my birthplace, Rome. The images are not clear; they are quasi-memories… more like feelings.

In my forties, I had occasion to return to Rome, the city that gave me life. On this particular day, standing at the bottom of the Spanish Steps, I gave in to a feeling—an urge to climb the stairs and then follow the road to the left, following these echoes of my past up the rise… as the magnificence of Rome unfolded to my left.

With each step, layers of memory peeled away.

Upon reaching the summit of Il Pincio, the Pincian Hill, I stood before Rome, open and splendid, eternal, as far as the eye could see, with the Borghese Gardens behind me. Images, memories, feelings and a deep sense of knowing flooded me as my eyes gazed from the terrace over the ochre-domed chaos of Piazza Del Popolo.

I decided to call my Dad in Melbourne. ‘Where am I?’ I asked. “I seem to know this place.” My father, a practical man shaped by the horrors of war as a boy and hardened further by the tough politics of Italy in the 1960s, simply replied. ‘Massimiliano, don’t you
remember? As a family, we came here often…’

A wave of deep emotion and terrible sadness swept over me… tears coursing down my cheeks, people staring… It was that awful sense of loss, me standing at that most magnificent point, seeing the city of my birth not as a citizen, the proud Roman I have always felt myself to be, but as a lost tourist with vague memories of a life… lost.

That moment, on that hill, was a turning point. The beginning of a lifelong search for a frequency that had led my family across oceans, through a life of dislocation in Australia, and finally to an unexpected harmony in the ancient bustle of modern Shanghai.

My family left Italy in 1969, part of the great post-war exodus—yes, we too were searching for the promised land. We sailed from the Port of Naples on the famous SS Marconi, in the footsteps of countless thousands. No steerage class for us! Somehow… and my father never explained… we secured the comforts and grace of Second Class, a small but significant act of dignity for the journey ahead. 

Our route was dictated by global tensions; the Suez Canal was closed, forcing us on a month-long odyssey around the Cape of Good Hope, with a stop in apartheid-era Durban. We were leaving behind what The Economist of the time would describe as The Italian Muddle: a political landscape of permanent crisis, a state paralyzed by clientelism, and a society cracking under the strain of its own initial post-war Economic Miracle.

My parents, who loved their country deeply, sought stability and a future for their children. They could not have realized they were removing their youngest son from the deep, resonating frequency of his civilization.

In March of that year, we landed in Melbourne, a vibrant, conservative city that was the antithesis of layered time. Our new life was bewildering, raw, new and defined by a different kind of struggle. In those early days Dad worked for the Good Year tire company, through its relationship at the time with Pirelli. Later, like many men of his time, he sought work in the building industry… the allure of better pay, despite more cavalier conditions. My blessed mother, after an initial stint in the workforce, decided to dedicate herself to her family, her children… a liberating, yet conversely imprisoning, decision.

Wogs… that ubiquitous, biting slur still rings in my ear… identifying us as the perpetual other… No matter. I would exact my own revenge on this racist attitude through my own success. 

Australia in the 1970s, for all its promise, operated on a different wavelength. It was a young nation, energetically building itself, indeed, seeking her own rhythm and place in the region… an outlier in Southeast Asia. My Roman imprint—that sense of history as a living, stratified presence—had no translation here.

This ancient resonance (my term) became a source of dislocation. I felt like a ghost, an anachronism, carrying a silent, heavy stone of history in a land that prized the new.

What drives from within? For me, this dislocation became a powerful engine, driving a compensatory discipline. I found solace as an athlete, achieving State and National success. I learned to channel focus into clear, measurable outcomes. My revenge journey began to take form.

It fueled a voracious intellectual curiosity, leading me into education, first in the classrooms of Melbourne’s Catholic schools and later as a principal on the international stage in China and the Middle East. My professional recognitions—being featured on magazine covers and named a “Top 50 Global Leader”—were, in a way, a search for a new language of belonging, a way to build an identity that could span worlds, cultures and time. Yet, the fundamental psychic frequency remained untuned.

The pivotal, unexpected harmonization came not from professional accolades, but from the most personal of choices: building a life with my Chinese, Shanghainese wife. Decades after that moment on the hill in Rome, I found myself living in Shanghai, at the heart of another
ancient, continuous civilization. Superficially, nothing should have felt familiar. The language, the food, the social rituals were unique. And yet, a profound sense of recognition settled over me. It wasn’t that China was like Italy; it was that it was like Italy in a specific,
profound way. It possessed the same depth.

I had a word for it now: Ancient Resonance.

This is not a term I found in books, but one I coined from lived experience. It describes the psychological and spiritual comfort an individual, imprinted by one ancient culture, can find in another. It operates on several levels. Psychologically, it speaks to Carl Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious—the Roman “genius loci” and the Chinese sense of timeless, cyclical history both act as archetypes, triggering a sense of meaning and belonging in a deep part of the psyche. Sociologically, it aligns with Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus: the ingrained “feel for the game.” The social games of Rome and Shanghai are different, but they are both immensely complex, subtle, and played on a field shaped by millennia of unspoken rules. A child of Rome is prepared for that depth of play in a way a child of a younger
culture may not be.

Walking through the Yu Garden in Shanghai, I feel the same gathering power of time I felt on Il Pincio. Negotiating family dynamics, I recognize the intricate, high-stakes choreography of respect and obligation. Sitting at a banquet, food is not fuel but a sacrament of connection, just as it was in my mother’s kitchen. The dislocation I carried for decades was not a flaw in me, but a sensitivity. I was not tuned for the bright, clear note of a young nation. I was wired for the rich, complex chord of a civilization.

This lived experience is more than a story of immigration and professional success. It is a map of a psychic journey. It argues that in our globalized age, we must expand our understanding of home. Home is not always a return to a point of origin. Sometimes, it is a resonance—a
finding of the same fundamental frequency in a different place. The Roman and Chinese civilizations, for all their vast differences, share a conversation with deep time, a prioritization of family and ritual, and an understanding that history is not a book but the very soil in which
the present is rooted.

I went from one ancient homeland, through a necessary and fertile dislocation, to find a resonant home in another. In doing so, I did not become less Italian, nor did I become Chinese. I became something else: a living bridge, a synthesizer, a person whose identity is finally coherent because it is built on the bedrock of ancient resonance. The splinter of Rome I carried in my soul for fifty years didn’t belong in Australia. But when I finally placed it into the deep, flowing river of Chinese civilization, it didn’t stick out as foreign. It was absorbed.

The two ancient cultures recognized each other. And at long last, so did I.

This discovery of self has fueled my vision, purpose and values as an educational leader, thought leader and executive coach. I will explore this further in Parts 2 and 3 to come.