Although I’ve been Americanised for the past 60 years, I love Europe and we always tend to vacation there. I’m pretty religious about taking time out every summer, and over the years we’ve done Scotland right down to Greece. My favourite place has to be Italy — when God made it, he’d got to the point where he was just showing off.

It’s such a ridiculously beautiful country. We like to spend a week in Capri before moving on to Tuscany, Rome or Portofino. In Capri, we stay at the Casa Morgano hotel, a beautiful place on a street with one of the most panoramic views on the island.

The closest I’ve ever got to active watersports is snorkelling in the bathtub, but I do like to be on the water. If I had my way, I’d happily divide a fortnight between doing absolutely nothing and eating great Italian food, but the family like to get out and explore, so we tend to go for a day of total relaxation and then a day of sightseeing.

One of my favourite hotels is the Villa San Michele, just outside Florence, which is pretty much one of the most romantic places in the world. It’s a former monastery, on a hilltop, surrounded by beautiful gardens overlooking Florence. The 15th-century monks who first took up residence there must have thought they’d already died and gone to heaven. I certainly felt that way.

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Sometimes I think it’s the places that you don’t know much about that really grab you. That was the case for us with Portugal. A few years back, we flew to Madrid then drove down to the Spanish Med, before crossing the border and heading up to Lisbon. I knew nothing about Portugal, but it was incredibly beautiful — and very different.

The first thing that struck us was that nearly everyone there was Portuguese, whereas the rest of Europe feels increasingly international, and that everything about the Portuguese seems different. Their language looks European when you see it written, but when they speak, it sounds like Russian. Perhaps it has something to do with being on the very western edge of Europe, but to me Portugal really felt like an independent world.

Although we tend to vacation on the beaten track, work has taken me to some unexpected places, and one in particular made a huge impression. I visited Ethiopia when I was mayor of Cincinnati. We’d set up a group called Cincinnati Reaches Out, which funded various projects around the world, including the building of a small clinic on the Eritrean border.

Going there was a complete eye-opener, partly because the effects of poverty and famine up close are worse that you can possibly imagine, but also because some parts of the country are physically more beautiful than I ever would have thought. Ethiopia is a vast country, and as well as the areas ravaged by drought and famine, there are some areas of outstanding natural beauty, such as the Great Rift Valley, with its two vast lakes surrounded by savannah plains and heavily forested land in between.

When I was growing up in the States in the 1950s, we used to holiday in the Catskills, a mountain region in upstate New York, and we used to stay in a camp-style resort, which I thought utterly wonderful. By day we’d swim in the pool or hike in the woods, and at night they laid on great entertainers. Those holidays were where I developed an interest in going on the stage. I just loved watching the comedians and got my first taste of the entertainment industry.

My greatest adventure came in 1966, during my first summer break from law school. I got a ship to the UK and spent two months travelling though Europe. It was the first time I’d been to another continent, although I felt pretty much at home. The UK was like the States but with different accents, and France was like the films — though trying to speak confirmed that my language teacher had been right to give me the grades he did.

The best part of it was the boat journey there and back. I went on board a student ship called the Aurelia, which took 1,100 people from New York to Southampton. You had to be over 18 and under 25 to go on it and, depending on your moral perspective, it was eight days of heaven or hell.

Jerry Springer talked to Lizzie Enfield

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