He said he could not bear the thought of being sent back to jail for a crime which he continues to claim he had nothing to do with.
He and Miss Knox spent four years behind bars before being freed on appeal in 2011.
Lawyers for the American student and her ex-boyfriend have vowed to lodge a further appeal against the reinstated guilty verdicts, referring the case to the Supreme Court in Rome.
That process is likely to take at least a year and remains Mr Sollecito’s last hope, he said.
On Thursday, as the court was preparing to hand down its verdict, Mr Sollecito and Greta Menegaldo, his new girlfriend, slipped away from Florence and drove 250 miles to the far north-eastern corner of Italy, close to its borders with Slovenia and Austria.
They crossed the Austrian border and spent a short time in the town of Villach, before returning to Italy and spending the night in a hotel in a mountain village about 25 miles from the Austrian frontier.
The mysterious trip has yet to be explained properly but there has been speculation that Mr Sollecito left Italy in order to see what the court’s judgment would be – had it ordered his immediate arrest, he may have stayed abroad, it has been reported.
In the NBC interview, he confirmed that he was in Austria when the verdict was delivered but insisted that he never had any intention of fleeing Italian justice.
“As soon as I got the news there was a guilty verdict, I came immediately back into Italy,” he said.
Miss Knox, 26, who did not attend the trial and was at home in Seattle when the verdict was delivered on Thursday, has also said she will fight the reinstated conviction, which she said “hit me like a train”.
The judge who presided over the retrial in Florence gave his first interview about the controversial case, saying that as a parent himself he found it very hard to reconvict the two young defendants.
“To inflict convictions of 25 and 28 years on two young people is emotionally very tough,” Alessandro Nencini told Corriere della Sera newspaper.
He said the jury, which consisted of six jurors guided by him and another judge, took 12 hours to reach a decision not because it was divided but because of the vast amount of evidence to consider.
The court has 90 days in which to release its reasoning for upholding the guilty convictions, but the judge shed some light on their thinking.
“We became convinced (of their guilt) and we will explain that in due course. Right now I can only say that up to 8.15pm on the night of the murder, the young people involved all had different plans... had Amanda gone to work that night, probably we would never have reached this point.”
Miss Knox had been due to work that night at Le Chic, the bar owned by Patrick Lumumba, the Congolese man whom she later falsely accused of being the murderer. But he sent her a text message saying it was going to be a quiet night and he did not need her services as a waitress.
The judge who presided over the Perugia appeals court that overturned the original convictions in 2011 said he remained convinced that Miss Knox and Mr Sollecito were innocent – or at least that there was not enough evidence to find them guilty.
“There was not enough concrete proof against them,” said Claudio Pratillo Hellmann. He said he did not blame Miss Knox for refusing to return to Italy.
The Kercher family said that if the reinstated convictions are confirmed by the Supreme Court in Rome then they would expect Italy to request the American’s extradition.
“I imagine it would set a difficult precedent if a country such as the U.S. didn't choose to go along with laws that they themselves uphold when extraditing convicted criminals from other countries,” said Lyle Kercher, one of Meredith’s two brothers. “It probably leaves them in a strange position not to.”
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