Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts.

How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?

Books are solitudes in which we meet.

At a certain fork in the road of automatization, Europeans chose to have more time, and they work far less than we do and get much longer vacations. We chose to have more stuff, the stuff sold to us through those beckoning adjectives-bigger, better, faster: Jet Skis, extra cars, second homes, motor homes, towering slab TVs, if not the time to enjoy them or to enjoy less commodified pleasures.

No one is born a writer; literacy is a peculiar mode of being, but I was all about stories from a very early age, before reading.

We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.

Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts.