Fatherhood is a very natural thing; it's not something that shakes up my life but rather it enriches it.

Because, in opera, I have to sing for people that are very far from me, instead of, when I sing a song, I try to imagine to sing like in an ear of a child.

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.

When I hear that young people have come to the theater for the first time to listen to opera, I'm very happy. Because it's the same thing that happened to me as a child. When I first heard the tenor voice, I immediately fell in love with this kind of music.

I studied to be a lawyer, and after that I did something, obviously, completely different. With change, you learn something. If you do the same thing over and over again, you never learn anything.

I like reading... French, Russian classics - Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert. I also like Hemingway, Virginia Woolf.

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