Apulian Days

I spent my childhood and adolescence in a small village. It was not one of those one-bar places you sometimes came across driving along the “strade statali,” the old Italian [...]

The animal world has charmed me since childhood. I remember leaving breadcrumbs on the windowsill for sparrows, goldfinch, and robins. My father later taught me that not all birds were [...]

I was born in 1950, a full-blown boomer, on the edge of a village in southern Italy. Mothers did not go to hospital to deliver at the time, so I [...]

There was a time when the village was alive with voices, voices of artisans who sang while working, voices of housewives leaning out of windows and balconies and chatting with [...]

Since my early teens, I had free access to my father’s bookshelves. I have been an avid reader since childhood. My father kept feeding me books of fables and fairy [...]

Our daughter Laura and her long-term fiancé, Alessandro, got married a few weeks ago. The newlyweds traveled to Miami and embarked on a fifteen-day cruise in the Caribbean. Later, they [...]

The poet arrived at my doorstep on a rainy winter’s night, like the traveler in Italo Calvino’s story, led by a dear friend of mine, a professor of English and [...]

They materialized every year on the dawn of August 14 in my native Alezio, at the southernmost tip of Apulia. The day marked, and still marks, the beginning of a [...]

Over the last 20 years, I have been living in Presicce, a village in Salento (in the far south of Apulia), whose old town is numbered among the “borghi più [...]

My last task of the day is to carry out the garbage bin or, as the French call it in their own more poetic way, la poubelle agréée. Every evening [...]