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When I was as little as four years old, my mom would give me a pen and paper and tell me to write a story to keep me busy.

I come from a family of storytellers. Growing up, my father would make up these stories about how he and my mother met and fell in love, and my mother would tell me these elaborately visual stories of growing up as a kid in New York, and I was always so enrapt.

It was my mother who got me involved in gymnastics, sending me to classes when I was six just to stop me doing back flips on the couch and destroying the furniture.

As a little boy of 3 or 4, I became lame. Something was wrong with my right leg. There are pictures of me being pulled around in a little wagon. The doctors didn't know what to do. So my nanny took me to the miraculous Madonna at Sacro Monte in Varese, the priest blessed me, and I walked.

My mother is a special story. She went through so much to bring us up, four men at home, especially when our country was going through really difficult times.

At first I could not believe what I was reading. I got up from my seat and walked away, talking to myself that I may have found my mom.

My mother praised me when I did something good, and then the next moment, she would say, 'Don't float.' She put me in a balloon and then pricked it.

My mother talked about the stories I used to spin as a child of three, before I started school. I would tell this story about what school I went to and what uniform I wore and who I talked to at lunchtime and what I ate, and my mother was like, 'This girl does not even go to school.'