Andrew Graham-Dixon: Five places that changed me

Andrew Graham-Dixon, art critic, author and BBC presenter reveals how Italy wooed him with its art and Japan with its sheer beauty.

ITALY

When I was young, I visited Bologna and the surrounding area with my parents. I was seven years old, and I remember eating vast mounds of spaghetti and huge ice creams in between visiting more churches and museums than I ever knew existed. When we got home my mum and I made a huge scrapbook, writing all the names of the places, artists and paintings down next to the postcards we'd collected. I think it was my first art history training. When I was 17 I went to Italy again, to do a proper art history course. I spent three months travelling around Tuscany and fell in love with Italian art all over again. I remember immensely long journeys on very inefficient trains, with the reward of a wonderful town like Assisi or Arezzo at the end of it. My younger daughter is called Florence, partly in memory of those times.

JAPAN

I visited Japan in my early 30s, and I was entranced by the country. Not so much Tokyo, but Kyoto, with its temples and shrines and extraordinary landscape. I also went to Hiroshima: such a beautiful place, with all these little islands spreading into the sea, that it is hard to imagine the terrible thing that happened there.

CENTRAL ASIA

I've had too many memorable work journeys to describe in brief, but two that do stand out are the three-month journeys I took around Russia and China to make documentary series for the BBC. I found both places exhilarating and depressing by turns: exhilarating for the wonderful art and architecture, often in very out of the way places, and depressing for the social conditions in which many ordinary people still have to live.

GREECE

Some of my favourite holidays have been to economically beleaguered Greece, where I've always found the people tremendously hospitable, the landscapes and seascapes ravishing – especially on some of the smaller islands – and the art, of course, out of this world.