Apulian Days
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!
Columnist Aldo Magagnino recounts the there and back again of his grandfather who left his native Italy to become a builder in Argentina.
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 [...]
Stranded (now and then)
She was there, on the other side of the huge round pond, a sort of lagoon separated from the sea by a wide strip of golden sand dunes. It was, [...]
Enemy of your enemy
The modest amount of insight I have come to acquire about the tortured history of Afghanistan in recent decades I owe to a translation project that, over time, stopped being [...]
Journalists in the crosshairs
One cannot be worried enough about the future of journalism. The profession is becoming a riskier business than ever before, and the pursuit of investigative journalism in particular is increasingly [...]
The “homecoming” that wasn’t
Before the Euro 2020 final that pitted England against Italy, English fans upped a chant that in the days before the July 11 final increased in volume if not conviction. [...]
From one Down Under to another
Ages ago, one of the features in the still popular "Reader’s Digest" magazine was a feature called “My most unforgettable character.” Aside from our (more or less close) relatives, we [...]
Life before lenses
It took me the first twelve years of my life to discover glasses, or at least their full utility. Not that I hadn’t seen them before, but they were always [...]
The English on the hill
Thirty years ago, on March 8, 1991, the eminent English food writer Patience Gray published “South to the Salento,”for a "New York Times" supplement known as "The Sophisticated Traveler." The [...]
The Hungarian connection
As a youth in the 1960s, I became intoxicated with listening to the wireless, as radio was called in its early days. I was enthralled by that magic box from [...]
My debt to Ol’ Blue Eyes
When you learn a foreign language by teaching yourself, what you miss the most is the possibility of speaking in that language, whether just to practice it or to train [...]
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, two dogs and a variable number of cats.