Apulian Days
Meeting the General
In 1976, when I received the draft card, I was working as a teacher in a small village in the south of Apulia. It was a temporary post, the school [...]
The days of penmanship
Over the millennia, humans have used written language to communicate, to pass information, to narrate a story, an experience, to leave a mark of their passage on this planet, or [...]
Of books and other things
If you are a reader, and a voracious reader, you will probably never know how many books you have hoarded in your house over the decades, until the time comes [...]
An artist in Italy’s heel
Apulia’s land’s end, Italy’s south-easternmost tip, is known as Capo di Santa Maria di Leuca. It is a roughly triangular territory, about 16 miles long north to south and about [...]
Key under the pumpkin
Between 1995 and 2002, I worked as a volunteer for the Comunità Emmanuel (CE), a charity in Lecce, in the south of Apulia. A Calabrian Jesuit priest, Father Mario Marafioti, [...]
The kidnapped bucket
It was on a hot and sad Monday morning that I discovered the disappearance of my wet waste “poubelle agréée,” as I call, à la française (and after the title [...]
The perfume of roses
It was a rainy spring this year in Salento and in much of the rest of Italy. It was also warmer than the average, so that, in our garden, roses [...]
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 [...]
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.