I went to Italy as a 21-year-old when I could easily have stayed in Argentina, playing for the biggest club in the land, River Plate, and having a nice, comfortable life.
My wife Yolanthe and I love Inter, the Italian fans, and Italy.
I could have stayed in Argentina but because I wanted to grow as a player, I went to Italy. I had the same idea in my mind when I came to Tottenham.
I’m from Italy, but when I’m in L.A., I dress a little bit rock and roll.
In 1987, when I was 19, I was studying musical theater at Boston’s Emerson College. My sister, Tricia Leigh, told me about a summer acting retreat in Italy. Mom paid, so off we went.
Everything in Italy that is particularly elegant and grand borders upon insanity and absurdity or at least is reminiscent of childhood.
Modeling, for me, was not fulfilling. I didn’t see the point – although I was able to travel a great deal. I lived in Italy, Germany, and Spain, but I wasn’t devoted to it.
I got married in Florence, Italy. My husband and I were in love but totally broke, so we eloped and got married in Italy, where he was going on a business trip. We had to pull a guy off the street to be our witness. It was incredibly romantic. Florence is still one of my favorite cities in the world.
My mom loved fashion. We loved to travel and go to Italy and Paris.
Everyone’s second team in Italy is Leicester. In Thailand, the first team is Leicester. I’ve received letters from Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil – everywhere ‘Leicester, Leicester, what a legend.’
People say the English players don’t come to Italy because they look down on Serie A, but that’s just not true.
We had just recently moved to California from Italy, and while we were driving around, we saw a billboard ad for McDonald’s on Olympic Boulevard in Los Angeles. The word ‘guess’ was in the ad, and my brother decided that that would be the name of our company!
But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don’t. Don’t evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.
I have dual citizenship with Italy.
My father was a steelworker who’d come over from Abruzzi, in Italy. He played in the band and he encouraged me to be a musician.
Before I started my company in 1998, I worked for big companies traveling a lot and saw firsthand how much waste there was. I was flying across the world in first class to places like Italy or Hong Kong, where I was staying in 5-star hotels, only to nickel and dime someone over a sweater price.
Can a film really change anything? I mean, what was the last time? Maybe the Italian neo-realists, where they became the voice and the heart and the soul of Italy, a nation that had been destroyed. I don’t know.
Initially when I was looking to enter football I was looking at clubs in Italy or France or Spain, a mid-table club where I could develop players and eventually sell them.
Van Basten went directly to the national team without coaching any other clubs. It’s not the norm in Italy.
In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
In Italy, the Milanese are well organized but follow bourgeois taste. They adhere to certain codes of elegance, but not to individualism.
I do quite like sightseeing. I like churches, museums, galleries and all that stuff. I love the smell of a church in Italy or the smell of an old greasy spoon somewhere. I like markets and little funny shops in the backstreets of Florence.
I try to dress well. Not just now at Chelsea, but all my career, at my clubs and the national team in Italy, I like to wear a nice suit on the touchline.
I was playing the best football of my career at the time, finishing top scorer in Italy three year’s running. There were other good players around but I think I was the best at that time.
In Italy, I had an Afro, and a lot of the kids came up and felt my hair. It really was funny. I wish I had understood Italian.
Scoring lots of goals in Italy is much more difficult: they are experts in defending.
Buffon is fearless and has no obvious weaknesses. He has been outstanding for Juventus and was one of Italy’s most important players at the 2006 World Cup finals in Germany, where they were victorious, but what is amazing is that he has been playing like that for years. He never seems to make a mistake.
I was playing in a tournament in Brazil and an agent scouted me. He took me to his soccer school. The idea was he used it to scout players and anyone he thought was good enough he took over to Italy. That’s what he did with me when I was 15.
It is normal to be under pressure in England and Italy when you arrive in the last two months of the season. Every manager is talked about, and their squad is examined.
A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority.
When I come to reflect on the subject, in no country have I received such honors or been so esteemed as in Italy, and nothing contributes more to a man’s fame than to have written Italian operas, and especially for Naples.
I’ve done a road trip across Italy with a girlfriend, and that was very romantic. I think that road trips are probably one of the romantic things you can do. To take your girlfriend and just stay wherever; don’t have a destination and just drive and see where the road takes you is pretty cool.
Everything is global now. It’s not London, it’s not Spain, it’s not Italy – everything is everywhere. So you have to be everywhere, I guess.
I started out doing commercials, like Diet Coke and Pizza Hut. And I started to find there was a different life for me, in a different field. From there, I got a call from a director in Italy, and we did ‘Indio’ I and II, and that’s where it started.
I want to go to the World Cup with Italy, but I know the competition will be fierce.
We go to Italy every winter, and my husband’s mother has a bingo party on Christmas. Every woman brings a dish: lentils, cavolo nero, tons of beans, polenta, every type of cheese, bruschetta, fresh vegetables, and local olive oil and wine.
The sneaker comes from sports, but it’s couture now. It’s not made in Asia: it’s made in my little village in Italy. I can customize everything. I use silk and diamonds and crystals. I think my sneakers have a lot of good vibrations.
Italy has turned its back on its political class, and a new language of community, identity, and honesty is filling the gap.
You could see how money is different all of a sudden in Italy when they had the lire and now they have the euro. So they, in a revolutionary way, have gone from bad money to good money comparatively. But what about the rest of the world?
I buy the best fabrics from small mills in Italy. That is the basis for my clothes.
We became the first political movement in Italy, and the media didn’t even realize it.
The problem of Italy is not really a question of age. Japan has an older population, and it is now in full economic recovery. The problem is that Italy is old in the structure of the society.
People talk about the speed of the English game, but in Italy, referees blow their whistles very often, so you cannot build up speed. In England, referees wave play on, and so it becomes faster.
I live in Dublin, God knows why. There are greatly more congenial places I could have settled in – Italy, France, Manhattan – but I like the climate here, and Irish light seems to be essential for me and for my writing.
I have never moved away from my mainstay – trying to address all the environmental issues that come to me. I consult with law firms in the U.S., Australia, the U.K., Italy, Greece, and India to begin to address environmental disasters. I do motivational speaking.
My brother and I have matching tattoos on our arms. It says, ‘Humility is strength,’ in Portuguese and Italian, because my genius brother taught English in both Italy and Brazil.
A few years ago, the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls… saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality?
The two great cultural and political currents of Italy have always only been concerned with the masses.
I think Ancelotti really likes London and he likes the way football is played over here. That doesn’t surprise me because, after Italy, if you come here, you really enjoy the culture.
In Italy, food is an expression of love. It is how you show those around you that you care for them. Having a love for food means you also have a love for those you are preparing it for and for yourself.
Every country in the E.U. should make a personnel and a financial contribution in that area. We shouldn’t leave alone countries like Italy and Greece that have external borders; rather, we must make the external borders safe together.
Everybody in Italy cooks. They have a better knowledge of the kitchen – that’s the place around which the whole of Italian society revolves.
I’m from Italy, the home of Vivaldi, Rossini, Puccini. When I stopped playing and became a manager, football became like a beautiful piece of music to me – and the players, an orchestra.
