Everything started when my father decided, very carelessly, to teach me how to read. I was just just five years old and my destiny was marked.

I read comics, books, magazines, newspapers...whatever, at any time. When I was forbidden to read at the table, I stared at the labels of the mineral water...fascinated. Then, in the evening, I would slip under the covers with a book and the lamp taken from my bedside table, and read, not only were my eyes burning, but the bulb burned the sheet.

That was not enough. I confess that from time to time I stole the change that my father forgot (on purpose?) from his pockets and used them to buy comics or after having a particularly big haul, books (and sometimes even a small bar of chocolate). The real punishment was not delayed, arriving, in addition to various pimples (chocolate does not forgive), I found on my nose my first pair of glasses!

I should have learned my lesson, you say?

Even more wrongdoings were coming. After a while my father decided that his books were not suitable for a bespectacled twelve-year-old and he locked them in a glass cover bookcase. Even now, I do not know what the real reason was that he did this; was it to stop my voracious reading, or a very clever plan to make me even more book dependent, but it certainly had an effect. Soon I became a very good burglar and plunged headlong into the books and worlds of Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hemingway, Hugo, Gadda, Miller...

My criminal career which started in Taranto many years ago, then took me to Florence, and finally ended on an island long considered a land of exile and confinement: Sardinia. But for me, this is a land of magic, where myths and dreams have left their mark on the fields and on the stones, and on the mistral curves of the trees and tells me countless stories. More precise, I live in Santu Lussurgiu, a town nestled in the crater of an ancient volcano, in the company of two pestiferous cats and a patient husband. And do you know something? I keep reading, and writing, without feeling the slightest remorse for my criminal past!