Home is a topic we can all relate to. One presented by the multifaceted Peter Fallon in a conversation with literary critic Piero Boitani. The author, editor, publisher and translator allowed the audience gathered in Mantua's Conservatory a personal glimpse into his life story. Over the course of a fifty-year career, kick-started by an "unlikely" friendship developed with poet and playwright Seamus Heaney, Fallon has published hundreds of works, including his own poetry, which he tells us is heavily influenced by his multiple homes.

Born in Germany, where his father was stationed, Fallon learned German, later English and then Irish after moving to an uncle's farm in County Meath, Ireland. At university he learned Latin and French, calling these his academic languages, before returning to the countryside where he relearned the agricultural language remembered from childhood. Through this journey of linguistic and cultural expansion, Fallon learned the value of different ways of seeing things, and consequentially of writing about them.

Fallon's poem The Lost Fields was written about this time, depicting the moment he discovered the home he knew would be his, and the transformation from longing for, to belonging in a place. Boitani read a second poem, The Heart's Home. A lengthy homage to wildflowers, plants, and wilderness, which makes the connection between natural and Biblical creation. On Fallon's translation of The Georgics, Boitani described the work as transcreation rather than translation. Sometimes, Fallon tells us, ideas are not lost in translation, but found.