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 [...]
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 [...]
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 last blacksmith
Over the last 20 years, I have been living in Presicce, a village in Salento (in the far south of [...]
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!
It was a late August day in 1924, shortly after dawn, when my paternal grandfather Giorgio left Alezio, his native [...]
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 [...]