My poetry covers a range of topics, but can be divided into poems about love, childhood, Italy, poems inspired by myths (Greek, Eskimo, and so on) and by stories in the Bible (Jonah, Job. Hannah, Elijah); Oriental poems, that is, in the style of Classical Chinese poetry and Japanese haiku; and two special collections, one about a dear friend, Francesco, who died at the age of thirty-three some thirty years ago, and In the Sparrow’s Beak, dedicated to my wife’s son, who died of cancer at the age of twenty-two, just two years ago.  Poetry has become a way of coping with the tragedies of life, but it has always been a spontaneous celebration of love and the mystery of life, the wonder of existence. Needless to say, another fascination of mine is the illustration of texts. If I were to choose one picture to sum up how I feel about our world and our place in it, it would be Hubble Space telescope of the Cat’s Eye Nebula, with its intricate concentric shells of glowing gas.