I still remember my primary school teacher, her sweet, authoritative style and her fundamental teachings. I owe to her my starting reading books very early, though coming from a humble family and from a house with very few books inside. She gave me my first two novels, when I was 7 or 8, Little Women and Cuore, thus giving start to a never-ending passion for literature.
A few years later, I started loving everything British when an extravagant, cheerful, colourful teacher of English entered my classroom. I was 12 then, and I became curious, eager to learn that language so foreign to me and to discover more and more about Britain, which I would only visit at 21 for the first time, but which I started dreaming of since our first lesson together.