Marc Cinanni

Author, Musician, Entrepreneur…

Marc Cinanni was born in Ottawa to Italian immigrants. He grew up between two worlds — accordion-filled family picnics and the rhythms of Canadian school life. His relatives were teachers and principals, which he describes as both a blessing and a curse. The household ran on education, argument, and long meals. Consequently, Marc developed early fluency in the art of navigating expectations while quietly forming his own direction.

Toronto

At 20, Marc moved to Toronto to study arts. The city gave him room to stretch — a wider cultural scene than Ottawa, more friction, more possibility. After his studies, he bought a one-way ticket to Europe. No return date. No plan beyond arrival. He landed in Switzerland and started building from there.

Switzerland

In Switzerland, Marc applied for a position at the United Nations in Geneva using a visualization practice he had developed — a method of holding a specific outcome in mind with enough clarity and consistency that it shapes your decisions toward it. It worked. He got the job. For seven years, he coordinated global infrastructure contracts from Geneva, negotiating with governments and funders on projects that included water pump systems in Ethiopia. The work connected him to communities across multiple continents. It was also, eventually, too much.

Burnout came gradually and then completely. Marc resigned from the UN and returned to Canada. Health issues accelerated the decision. Back home, he started writing — a fiction novel drawing on Italian-Canadian life, the kind of story that could only come from someone who had lived across multiple cultures without fully belonging to any one of them.

Oxford

The writing earned him acceptance into the MFA program at Oxford. Before he could start, illness intervened again. Recovery took time, and during that period Marc went to an ashram in the West Indies for a month. The experience was direct — meditation, yoga, body awareness as a daily practice rather than a supplement to a busy schedule. He came back with a different relationship to his own health and a clearer sense of what he wanted to make.

Mantranima

At the ashram, Marc was drawn to the chants — the specific texture of Sanskrit vocals over rhythm. Back home, he and his partner Esther Pallejà began working on music together. They formed the band Mantranima, blending world music with Sanskrit lyrics and Mediterranean elements. The sound came directly from what they had been living through — it was not a genre exercise but a record of where they were. Consequently, the music sits outside easy categorisation, which is part of what makes it specific.

Canada

In 2018, Marc and Esther sold everything and moved to Hornby Island, British Columbia — a remote island of around 900 residents off the east coast of Vancouver Island. The island offered sea lions, storms, isolation, and a pace of life that bore no resemblance to Geneva. They homeschooled their daughter. They harvested rainwater. The album Trees and Shadows — a record shaped by the landscape, the quiet, and the long process of slowing down after years of moving fast. The album reflects a specific moment: two people rebuilding their relationship with place, nature, and each other.

The pandemic ended the Hornby Island chapter. Moving with a young child through the logistics of island life during a global shutdown made staying untenable. Furthermore, the pull toward a warmer climate and a larger creative community had been growing. They decided on Barcelona.

Muntanya Màgica

In Spain, Marc and Esther established Muntanya Màgica — a forest retreat in the Penedès wine region outside Barcelona. The retreat is built around wellness and creative work. It runs writing residencies, live performance events, and couples retreats. The philosophy is practical: get closer to nature, reduce the noise, eat locally, slow the pace down. Marc grows food. He barters with neighbours. He considers children among the most reliable teachers available to adults, specifically because they have not yet learned to stop asking direct questions.

The retreat also sits at the centre of the NAO documentary Muntanya Màgica — directed by André Quesnel, it follows the project and the people behind it in the Penedès landscape.

Marc’s view of how a life should be built has been shaped by repeated interruption — illness, burnout, a pandemic, several countries, and the necessity of starting again each time. The visualization practice he used to get the UN job in his twenties remains central to how he approaches new work. The idea is not positive thinking in the soft sense. It is the discipline of deciding clearly what you are building toward, then making the small daily decisions that point in that direction. In short, it is a practice forged from specific experience rather than borrowed from a shelf.