I would like to call Australia home but there are times when a remark, an innuendo or a gesture conveys to me the message that I don’t belong. And occasionally someone, unable to decipher my accent, will ask, ‘Where is home?’ I then have to stop and think. Should I explain that although I know where I come from, I’m not so sure where home is?

We live in a period of mass dislocations with millions of people on the move from one country to another; many are unable to settle anywhere. this wasn’t the case with me. Circumstances were different and I was lucky. I left Italy because I wanted to travel, to live in another culture and learn to function in it. Otherness appealed to me.