
The perfume of roses
It was a rainy spring this year in Salento and in much of the rest of Italy. It was also [...]

My tender bar
I spent my childhood and adolescence in a small village. It was not one of those one-bar places you sometimes [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

Street voices of yesteryear
There was a time when the village was alive with voices, voices of artisans who sang while working, voices of [...]

Discovering English literature
Since my early teens, I had free access to my father’s bookshelves. I have been an avid reader since childhood. [...]

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 [...]