Because I think folklore is at the roots of who we are, it is the blood and bone of our lives lived in the light of the collective. Both the human and the inhuman collective, the link we have with the rest of the creation.

I do. I think every life is a biography, that is, the story of a life. I think it is important we see ourselves as a narrative, as movement from the real to the unreal, from fact to tale. We are (mostly) what we choose to tell.

Both, but I think you mean if I wrote The Secret Market in English. I did, the story was conceived in that language.

It would have been much harder to translate it, as my ideas are formed in the language they are conceived in.

This is a tough one. I think that by living abroad almost a decade I was able to “see the bubble” that culture really is. Italian culture, but also culture in general.

I owe to my living in England if I became fascinated with storytelling. My Beyond The Border experience, in Wales, was my first exposure to oral tradition and it was rather glorious.

I then had my own storytelling association in Genova for five years.

Oral traditions emphasize different aspect of storytelling, they try to make contact with an audience trough rhythm, but also directly addressing it in the story.

I think Basile and Boccaccio understood this well. It is one of reason why I like telling folktales, as the audience is embedded in the telling.

My family comes from Avellino, a mountain side town near Naples, where there tales of witches and ghosts are the common. As a kid I heard stories about talking foxes and dead princessess. The Monacielli –the Little Monks, a kind of Bogles– were told as factual beings my father’s aunts met while moving out.

As for the ever-present history, to make places into stories is what made me into a writer. Sometimes a story is like an abandoned town or dilapidated villa you want to move your characters in…