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I think you learn a lot about a country from its art. To me, it's part of the drama of life. It teaches you that there are places, moments and incidents in other cultures that genuinely have a life of their own.

For a country is not merely a piece of earth; it is, above all, a compendium of social, cultural, and historical factors which begin to acquire sense and order through the process of writing.

If some countries have too much history, we have too much geography.

People from different parts of the world can respond to the same story if it says something to them about their own history and their own experience.

History is another country and might be full of fascinating incidents and places to go visit - but as a destination for emigration, it has some problems!

I find that other countries have this or this, but Italy is the only one that has it all for me. The culture, the cuisine, the people, the landscape, the history. Just everything to me comes together there.

A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.

I think it's also the case that I'm not as widely travelled, or as well-educated in history, as most of the other novelists I meet: so I have to write about my own country, at the present time, because it's more or less all I know about!

It's very important to always put things in their historical contexts. It teaches important lessons about the country in question.

For a long time, I've been interested in cultural memory and historical erasure.