Apulian Days
My tender bar
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 [...]
Life with cats (and dogs)
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 [...]
The joys of southern bureaucracy
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 [...]
Street voices of yesteryear
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 [...]
Discovering English literature
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 [...]
Sue, New York, and I
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 [...]
Under the rainbow serpent
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 [...]
Gypsies at the fair
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 [...]
The last blacksmith
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 [...]
La poubelle agréée
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 [...]
America, America!
It was a late August day in 1924, shortly after dawn, when my paternal grandfather Giorgio left Alezio, his native village on a hillock in the Salentine peninsula in southern [...]
An Apulian love story
One late spring day in 1940, a day on which the southern Italian sun was already pounding down, Rocco came out from the tollhouse opposite the church of Our Lady [...]
Author
Aldo Magagnino was born in Alezio (Apulia). After a career as a teacher of English he now works fulltime as a literary translator. He now lives in the Apulian town of Presicce, a few miles from Santa Maria di Leuca, land’s end of the Italian boot, with his wife Pina, two dogs, and a variable number of cats.