I’d like each of you to find all the moments of happiness and pain in my first love story. Every time my books have been translated in a different language—and it has happened fifteen times—I am very curious. I want to see the effect my stories have, stories thought of and written in Italian and full of our atmosphere, on readers from different parts of the world. When I have seen the response in the countries I’ve traveled to to promote my books, I’ve been left in shock. It has been amazing how each love story I wrote multiplied and transformed according to the contexts, the habits, and lifestyles of the people who have read them. It has always evoked a very strong emotion for me; it has been literally a discovery for me. I have seen how far love can go and how, after all, love is a universal language.
It’s now time for the United States to read it, a country that I love for its many facets, always diverse, always surprising. You cannot tag the US with a single label, definitions fit it badly, and that’s what I most love about it. During college, I spent some time working in New York while I was studying at university to become a film director because I felt I needed different perspectives from the Italian ones I was used to. New York City blessed me with the most wild and amazing gifts and helped me grow a lot despite the short time I spent there.
Thinking now that, in that very same city, there will be people reading my stories and—why not?—growing fond of Babi, Step, and Gin (in book two of the trilogy), and I hope telling me what they think of it, thrills me just like thirty years ago when Tre metri sopra il cielo came out for the first time. Babi, Step, and Gin are not fictional characters but three real friends who have taught me so much during these past years and are now about to surprise me once again in the English world.
Q: Step and Babi have been called a modern-day Romeo and Juliet. What other stories influenced you as you were writing this book?
A: Certainly, there have been many because a writer is nothing but a person who learns by reading more than with writing courses. One gets used to writing by reading, by assimilating other writers, by loving paragraphs, sentences, passages, and scenes told in a certain way that help you find your own voice. It’s like having digested their writing and creating your own as a result. Paul Auster, Truman Capote, and Raymond Carver were influences, but also Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, and John Barth were my food, with books like Jack London’s Martin Eden, and especially Tender Is the Night, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Great Gatsby, and The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I loved every sentence, I read every passage, and I tasted all the moments, the pains, the peculiarities, the characters, his love for his wife Zelda, his mental fragility, everything he loved about her and fell in love with. At the same time, I loved a writer who was his most total opposite, Ernest Hemingway, with his hunting and fishing trips, his strong and extreme ways; all these I loved. I loved his writing and how he loved life. For example, in the beautiful book that is Islands in the Stream, I appreciated how Hemingway loved the beauty of the sea and how this somehow confirmed his love for life, bullfights, and people.
Here these writers were fundamental to me. I love to find out where the authors I love will take me. I tie their stories to people, to facts, a normal moment in everyday life. It is a real satisfaction for me to go out now in the States, given my love for great American literature, contemporary and otherwise, which I have always devoured. So often love is intertwined with the social issues of a complex, multicultural country, full of different influences, which therefore produces diverse, poignant, and always surprising books.
With One Step to You, I wrote the story I wanted to read. Two characters of today with two family stories only apparently different, but certainly similar in complications with parents and siblings. Two teenagers who unwittingly found themselves dealing with each other and who continued to choose each day against the opinion of practically everyone, because few have bet on their love. In there, you will find all my passion as a reader, the authors I loved and love.
Q: Rome has the “Moccia route,” where sentences from your books are written on the walls of the city. If we are lucky enough to travel to Rome, can we see three meters above the sky written?
A: Indeed you can. I passed by, just the other day, as I was cycling under the bridge in Corso Francia located in the northern part of Rome known as Roma Nord, which is where One Step to You, Two Chances with You, and Three Times You are set. Still today, under the bridge that takes you from Ponte Milvio to Labaro, heading north in Roma Nord, you can see the Tre metri sopra il cielo graffiti. Both in the movies and in my novels, the bridge in Corso Francia is in important love scenes and moments of our characters, as well as in the races.
Q: Step is a very cool character. Were you part of the cool kids growing up? Or were you studious like Babi?
A: Step is a very interesting and difficult character. My group of friends was a very miscellaneous group because I never liked to hang out with people I didn’t like just because they were cool. I used to spend time, and I still do, with special and worthy people with whom I feel we can share some meaningful time together.
I enjoyed studying things that amused me. I was no nerd; my graduation score in high school was high just because I was more mature than the average guy. At the exam, I debated about the ancient Greek authors I had to translate into Italian. Teachers were amused watching me criticize the school system and pointing out those authors’ different points of view. That’s how I got full marks.
I loved school because I was conscious it was the most beautiful and peaceful time of our lives, with very few problems, unlike the years that follow. I remember many of my schoolmates trying to squeeze two years into one in order to get to college sooner. I used to tell them, “Are you crazy? What for?” Why were they in so much of a hurry if time was passing by anyway? One must enjoy life with no rush and a certain dose of carefulness, savoring the beauty of each moment.
Q: There is a lot of violence in the book. Do you think this is a rite of passage for most young males? Do you think readers have been shocked by it?
A: Sometimes it’s inevitable, mostly during high school, as kids try to assert themselves in any way they can, which often leads to mistakes. That’s how the issue of bullying arises, the need for one to overshadow the other in order to find one’s place and be the best you can be.
I tried to write about how Step is full of anger and resentment toward his mother, something he found out at his own expense and a truth that he doesn’t want to admit or discuss with either his brother or his father. Step is angry toward life until he finds love.
My intention was to explain how love has the incredible ability to cure people of their anger. Love triumphs over violence. Hopefully this message reaches my readers, which can be an important answer to the whole issue.
Q: You convey a wonderful sense of freedom while riding motorcycles. Do you like to ride? Do you own a motorcycle that is a particular favorite?
A: I’m really fond of motorbikes. They allow you to wriggle between traffic and escape chaos easily and quickly, by visiting the coast, for instance. Motorbikes are freedom, wind, speed, and independence. I’ve been passionate about them since I was young.
I used to have a Honda 350, then a Honda 750, and now I navigate the city on my Honda 300. It’s my secret pleasure to get out at night, surrounded by silence, as I watch the moon high in the sky, illuminating the road. It’s wonderful to just drive slowly with no rush, with the low humming of the engine, breathing in the scent of the flowers, especially during this season just before summer begins. Every time, the fragrance of the night amazes me as if I forgot it…I love rediscovering it again and again.