It's a family that's loaded with grudges and passion. We come from a long line of robbers and highwaymen in Italy you know. Killers even.

You go to a restaurant in the States and kids have these game boards at the table. You don't see that in Italy or Spain. It's not because they can't afford to buy them it's because that's not what eating together as a family is about.

As they say in Italy Italians were eating with a knife and fork when the French were still eating each other. The Medici family had to bring their Tuscan cooks up there so they could make something edible.

Recently I was in Bernalda my dad's ancestral home town in Italy. He has just refurbished a palazzo and turned it into a hotel so we had my sister's wedding there. It was beautiful.

I just went off for two months traveling around Europe on a motorcycle and pretty much turned my phone off. I did 5 000 miles with my dad. We went through Holland Germany Austria Slovenia Croatia Bosnia Montenegro Italy... and then I did Spain and France by myself.

Bologna is the best city in Italy for food and has the least number of tourists. With its medieval beauty it has it all.

After about the first Millennium Italy was the cradle of Romanesque architecture which spread throughout Europe much of it extending the structural daring with minimal visual elaboration.

Italy is full of historical buildings. And Europe holds a great history of philosophy from Greece until today. I read all those books and see these buildings and I think of where I stand when I design my architecture.

I once asked a hermit in Italy how he could venture to live alone in a single cottage on the top of a mountain a mile from any habitation? He replied that Providence was his next-door neighbor.