Italian photojournalist Gabriele Torsello was released in southern Afghanistan on Friday after being held three weeks by abductors who demanded the withdrawal of Italian troops from the country.
"I never saw the light during my captivity," Torsello, 36, told the web-based news service PeaceReporter.
"At first they kept me chained all the time, but at least I had a Koran that I could read," the Muslim convert told PeaceReporter, which has links to a hospital run by the Italian aid agency Emergency in the troubled Helmand province.
He added: "I thought constantly about my family, so much that sometimes I was able to imagine that I was somewhere else. 'I'm fine. I send kisses to you all. We'll see each other in Alessano, I'm coming soon.'"
Torsello made an emotional phone call to his family in Alessano, a town in Italy's southern Puglia region where church bells rang on the news of his release, ANSA reported.
"Gabriele called us a little while ago," his sister Valentina told the Italian news agency. "He was very emotional and just kept repeating, 'I'm fine, I'm fine, I love you all'."
Torsello's mother told ANSA: "We never lost faith for a second. ... I was never discouraged, and we always had faith in the Lord, in Gabriele and our government."
The photographer's abductors had called the hospital in the town of Lashkar Gah on Friday to say they had released him at 1:30 p.m. Afghan time (0900 GMT) and left him on the road to Kandahar, Emergency said in a statement.
Italian Foreign Minister Massimo d'Alema addressed "special thanks" to the Italian military intelligence service SISMI which he said played "an essential role" throughout the crisis, a statement said.
Italian ambassador Ettore Francesco Sequi told AFP in Kabul that no ransom was paid, "according to my information".
The abductors' identities are not clear. They had initially claimed to be from the insurgent Taliban group, but spokesmen for the movement said they were not involved and reportedly even called on the kidnappers to release him.
Torsello was seized on October 12 by an unidentified group who threatened to kill him unless Italy withdrew its 1,800 troops from Afghanistan.
The abductors had also earlier demanded that an Afghan convert to Christianity, who has taken refuge in Italy, be returned to Kabul. Under Islamic Sharia law, the man could face the death penalty for his religious conversion.
They set a deadline of October 22, but in their last telephone contact with the hospital in Lashkar Gah, on October 23, they said simply that the Italian photographer was well.
"An Afghan member of the staff of Emergency ... found Gabriele Torsello and handed him over to the Italian government. Emergency immediately contacted the family, the foreign ministry and the Italian embassy in Kabul," said the aid agency, which had been the conduit for all news about Torsello since his abduction.
On Thursday he called to say he was well after a lull that had been worrying to his family.