My website: http://www.ruzzier.comMy blog: http://www.ruzzier.com/category/blog/I was born in Milan, Italy, in 1966. I grew up reading comics and picture books. Among my favorite books were the Minarik/Sendak's Little Bear series, Bruno Munari's "Cappuccetto Verde" ("Little Green Riding Hood"), and Dino Buzzati's "La famosa invasione degli orsi in Sicilia". As a young teenager, I discovered and fell in love with the old American comics: Krazy Kat, Popeye, Dick Tracy, and many more.At the same time, I was surrounded and fascinated by Medieval and Early Renaissance art, especially Giotto, Simone Martini, Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti, and many other wonderful, lesser-known painters and illuminators. But before all this, my first, true love was for Hieronymus Bosch. I spent hours studying his paintings in a book that now shows more wear than any other, in my father's well-supplied art library.In 1989 I started to collaborate to the Italian leading comics magazine "Linus", with a series of comic strips, and then I went on to create the character Bruno, for "Lupo Alberto Magazine".In 1994 I came to New York, where I immediately had the fortune to receive my first editorial commission from The New Yorker. That very drawing, an imaginary portrait of Dante Alighieri, was chosen the same year by American Illustration. From then on, I began my career as an editorial illustrator. But what I really wanted to do was picture books, and I tried to enter that world. Compare to Italy, the American market offered an incredible quantity and variety of books, and I was excited to discover Arnold Lobel, Edward Gorey, James Marshall, William Steig... It was not easy at the beginning getting the attention and the trust of editors and art directors, but then I had the luck to meet Frances Foster, and later Laura Geringer, Christy Ottaviano, Neal Porter, and others, who believed in my sensibility and graciously gave me the opportunity to show my ideas and my imagination on the printed page.In 2011, Maurice Sendak invited me to spend one month at his place in Connecticut as one of that year's Sendak Fellows.