The last blacksmith
Gone are the days of carpenters and farriers and tailors, but in the village of Presicce a lone blacksmith continues to practice his craft.
La poubelle agréée
My last task of the day is to carry out the garbage bin or, as the French call it in [...]
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 [...]
Stranded (now and then)
She was there, on the other side of the huge round pond, a sort of lagoon separated from the sea [...]
Enemy of your enemy
The modest amount of insight I have come to acquire about the tortured history of Afghanistan in recent decades I [...]
Journalists in the crosshairs
One cannot be worried enough about the future of journalism. The profession is becoming a riskier business than ever before, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Life before lenses
It took me the first twelve years of my life to discover glasses, or at least their full utility. Not [...]
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 [...]
The Hungarian connection
As a youth in the 1960s, I became intoxicated with listening to the wireless, as radio was called in its [...]