When the mood takes me, I like to be a man of action. I like to windsurf and ski, and most of all I love to ride horses. The wilder and faster the better!

To sing a song is like whispering to a child's ear. It is an art heavily relying on improvisation.

When a little more than a teenager, I was a piano-bar pianist in the land where I was born and raised, Tuscany.

Opera singing is in every way of inestimable value; a real heritage for all mankind that has been reached over centuries of studies, attempts, flights of the spirit.

For me, riding a two-wheeler bike was very risky. Counting the pedal strokes before turning a corner and learning to hear the sounds coming from buildings, grass and the climbing frame made all the difference to basic survival and ensured that I didn't end up head-first in the sandpit.

Probably the first time I left Italy was to travel by train to Lourdes. I went with my mother and my grandmother - who was a very religious person - so it was a pilgrimage of sorts. I remember it as a very intense, but beautiful experience.

A career is like a house: it's made of many bricks, and each brick has the same value, because without any one of them, the house would collapse.