MANILA - Looking frail and having lost 20 kilograms (44 pounds), freed Italian hostage Eugenio Vagni said Tuesday thoughts of his family, football and Tuscany kept him alive during his six-month ordeal in the Philippines.

The 62 year-old aid worker for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), who walked free on the remote southern island of Jolo last weekend, described his Abu Sayyaf captors as outlaws who did not adhere to extremist Islam.

Clad in a formal brown jacket and dungarees that accentuated his weight loss, he recounted his time in captivity after he and two other Red Cross aid workers were kidnapped on January 15.

Asked if at any time he had lost hope, the soft-spoken engineer said: "Hope is the last thing to die.

"Sometimes I meditated. I thought of the good times," he told reporters after meeting with Philippine President Arroyo at Malacañang palace in Manila.

Asked what the good times he had thought about in captivity were, he said: "I come from Italy. I missed football. I missed my family and my Tuscany."

Vagni was seized by the militant Abu Sayyaf with ICRC colleagues Andreas Notter of Switzerland and Mary Jean Lacaba of the Philippines in January while on a humanitarian mission on Jolo island.

Recounting fleeting phone conversations with his wife while held in various jungle hideouts, he said: "My wife kept telling me 'We are waiting for you. You have to come back to us'."

He said happy moments while in captivity were few and far between and came when he and his fellow-prisoners would be given fruit to eat, breaking the monotony of the rebels' staple diet of steamed rice and dried fish.

Vagni said he was used to a difficult life but was bothered by a hernia when the kidnappers forced him to march to a new jungle hideout as security forces sent to rescue the hostages closed in.

Notter and Lacaba were freed separately in April, leaving Vagni as the remaining hostage.

He said the kidnappers, who publicly threatened to behead the captives in March unless government forces effectively ceded most of the island to the gunmen, never told them anything about negotiations for their release.

"Nobody told us that they were going to cut our heads but they just told us they were going to sacrifice one of us," he said.

Asked if he thought the threat was serious, Vagni said: "I don't know. Only God knows."

Western intelligence agencies have linked the Abu Sayyaf, blamed for the worst terrorist attacks in the Philippines, with the Al-Qaeda movement and of having ties with Jemaah Islamiyah militants responsible for the deadly 2002 Bali bombings in Indonesia.

However, Vagni said the gunmen never showed any hint of ideology and did not attempt to convert him to their world view.

He said he did not speak the local dialect and did not know what was happening or whether foreign Islamist militants were with the kidnappers as the Philippine government had alleged.

"They were just kidnappers to me," he said. "They took away six months of my life."