We lived in a classless society. We’d spend a summer at Gore Vidal’s house in Italy, but we were on and off welfare…

I got into cooking and I went and cooked in Italy. I became a doula for a while. I built stone walls one summer, and I read a lot, and I swam a lot, and I spent a lot of time thinking.

The Vatican is a dagger in the heart of Italy

It was like a Stygian plain, like a vision of Hades: a land of shadows, vapours and water. Everything was going misty and disappearing like spirits. The moon was enchanting and pulling at the plain just as she enchants and pulls at the sea, drinking all that vast earthly dampness from the horizon with her silent, insatiable throat.

A few years ago, the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls… saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality?

Italy hasn’t had a government since Mussolini.

I have spent a lot of time in Italy throughout my career — especially when I was karting, because it’s kind of the world centre of that sport — and I love it.