This is what Mario writes about himself:

My full name is Mario Francesco Giuseppe Rinvolucri, the middle names being Italianised versions of Franz Josef, the last emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is odd that my father should have christened me thus, given that he risked his life fighting the Austrian armies across North Italy in WW1, ending in the Hemingway-famous Battle of the Piave.

My mother was a Liverpudlian, of half Cumbrian and half German extraction.

I have no family in Australia, S Africa, Canada, the Great Satan or New Zealand. I am one of those rare Brits who focuses East from the UK off- shore islands, not out around the world. I feel totally in tune with the ideals of the EU and am a European of the new mixed blood sort.
  

There will be many more like me.

My greatest professional joy has been to belong to the extended family of the Pilgrims net work of teacher trainers and writers since right back in mid 1970’s and to have written some 20 teacher resource books with some of these exceptionally talented folk. In writing a book like Imagine That with Jane Arnold and Herbert Puchta (Helbling and CUP, 2007) we produced something broader, wider and deeper than the three of us working separately would have come up with. In collaborating with many different colleagues I have found a sublimation of my own egoism and some understanding of the WE ideal that is  normal in a  society like that of Japan. I find the juvenile egoism of the West tiring, and particularly my own.

 The major professional influences in my life have been John Morgan, Once Upon a Time, CUP 1986, and Bernard Dufeu, Teaching Myself, OUP, 1994. I regard these two men as people who have shaped my being as well as my doing in the professional realm and I thank them.