 "Pincio" is a hill in the center of Rome whose name comes from one of the families that occupied it in the 4th century AD, the Pincii.He claimed that he chose "Tommaso Pincio" as pseudonym just because it comes from his fiction (Tommaso Pincio is a minor character of his first novel); also, he claimed that the name "evokes a place (...).I stole its name because I love the sound of it".