I wanted to be a skinny little ballerina but I was a voluptuous little Italian girl whose dad had meatballs on the table every night.

And we have a little herb garden which survived the winter thanks to global warming. It makes me feel like a cool old Italian housewife that I kept my rosemary alive outside all winter.

Italians know about human nature - they understand human nature perhaps better than anyone else does. They know that people are weak and greedy and lazy and dishonest and they just try to make the best of it to work around it.

Italian men do appreciate beautiful women. They're not afraid of the beauty which is nice.

The anger that Uncle Junior has comes from my background. My father was the son of an Italian immigrant and I've seen the fire of the Italian temperament. It can be explosive sometimes in ways that are both funny and tragic.

In fact it is amazing how much European films - Italian French German and English - have recovered a certain territory of the audience in their countries over the last few years.