February 11, 2025 | Rome, Italy

Chance encounters

By |2025-02-11T21:45:17+01:00February 5th, 2025|Apulian Days, Home|
The Rome Daily American was an English-language newspaper published in the Eternal City for nearly five decades, from 1946-1984.

I came across The American  | In Italia for the first time in 2019, while I was searching for something different on the Internet. I read a few interesting articles, and I remember being surprised that it had none of the log-in credentials and subscribe requests and advertisements popping up as soon as you read the first few lines of a piece, as is now the rule with almost every online paper. I wondered how it managed to survive when papers all over the world were gasping for lack of adequate funding.

Marilyn Monroe, featured on the cover of Life magazine.

I explored the various sections, including the one named “The Team,” listing the contributors, and when I read the name of the editor, something suddenly clicked in the most recondite region of my mind. For some reason, the name Christopher Winner had remained stapled to my memories of the eighties. He had been the last editor of The Rome Daily American during the last years of the newspaper’s life, before it folded in 1984. Twenty years before that date, in my early teens, I had already started to teach myself English, supporting my efforts with the BBC “English By Radio” courses broadcast daily by the World Service on the shortwaves. But to keep up-to-date with real, everyday English, I would buy the only two publications in English available in my remote corner of Italy: Life, the most iconic picture magazine of all times, and The Rome Daily American, which I kept buying until it ceased publication.

When I saw Christopher Winner’s name as the editor of The American magazine (TAM), I wondered whether he was the same person whose name I recalled from three decades ago. And he was. I wrote him, and we talked on the phone a couple of times. He kindly sent me a few printed copies of The American Mag — In Italia, the very last issues before the magazine migrated to the web in 2004. Christopher explained that it was a “pro bono” publication, so they did not need sponsors and could offer the magazine for free to their readers.

I occasionally wrote for a couple of Italian newspapers, and I have published a few essays in English in a couple of academic journals, but writing for a real American magazine was a completely different kettle of fish. . . .

Then, one evening Christopher asked me to write something for TAM. I was taken aback. How could I dare? I occasionally wrote for a couple of Italian newspapers, and I have published a few essays in English in a couple of academic journals, but writing for a real American magazine was a completely different kettle of fish (seeing the list of its contributors, I felt even more inadequate, almost intimidated, as I would be the only non-native speaker of English). And what would I write that could be of any interest to TAM readers? Winner dismissed my hesitations. “You CAN write,” he told me, “Write whatever you feel. I am thinking of a column for you.”

And that’s how it was that “Apulian Days” came to life and I timidly started to contribute my first pieces. Memories of my younger days and my childhood, of people I met and who left their mark in my life, who helped shape my life as it is, started to surface from unsuspected wells of my subconsciousness. I also found that I could write about places I had traveled, whether on a holiday or for work, or books I had translated.

Winner kindly, but energetically, edited my first pieces. Writing for an American magazine, he instructed me, is not the same as writing for an Italian publication. An American reader needs details that an Italian reader would simply infer. So when I finished writing a piece, I took up the habit of reading it, trying to put myself in the shoes of an American reader. I still have a lot to learn, but perusing the articles of my informed native colleagues, I trust I can make some more progress.

Over the years, I also made contact with some of TAM’s other writers, with some unexpected and fortunate revelations. One day I read a review of Susan Levenstein’s Dottoressa: an American Doctor in Rome and decided to buy it. I was intrigued by the story and the writer’s determination in navigating the tangle of brilliance and ineptitude, tolerance and sexism, chaos and rigidity in Italy, her adopted homeland. Dr. Levenstein had come to Italy with her Italian husband (they had married in New York) with the idea of living and working for one year in Rome, a decision that changed the course of her life forever. She went through the ordeal of Italian bureaucracy to have her medical license recognized in Italy and “in only two years” she won her battle, thanks to her stubbornness and an accelerated course in an ancestral Italian virtue: la pazienza. After more than forty-five years, Dr. Levenstein still works and lives in Rome. Even after her marriage to her Italian husband came to an end, Dr. Levenstein stayed in Italy, never once tempted to go back to America.

I wrote to Dr. Levenstein, suggesting that it might be nice to have an Italian edition of her book. As a literary translator, I would have been more than happy to translate it. Then, one evening, talking on the phone, Dr. Levenstein said, “Well, yes, even my husband, Alvin Curran, says that it would be nice to have the book published in Italy.” For a moment I was speechless. I had not yet fully read the book, had just rapidly scanned it, busy as I was at the time, and many details of her Italian adventure had escaped my notice.

So when I finished writing a piece, I took up the habit of reading it, trying to put myself in the shoes of an American reader. I still have a lot to learn, but perusing the articles of my informed native colleagues, I trust I can make some more progress.

“Are you Alvin Curran’s wife?” I timidly asked.

“Well, yes. Why?”

“Because, in this case, we have met. Long ago. Here, in my native Salento.”

In 2000, it was late February or early March, Dr. Levenstein, whom I now, with her permission, call Susan, and Alvin Curran, the eminent American experimental composer she would soon marry in Rome, had come to the southernmost tip of Apulia, to visit a long-time friend of theirs, who by curious chance was also a dear friend of mine, the British food writer Patience Gray. I just happened, that evening, to be visiting Patience myself. Patience was in mourning for the death of her husband, the Flemish-born sculptor Norman Mommens. Many years earlier, on one of his first visits to Spigolizzi, Alvin Curran had composed “Under the Fig Tree.” It was written of course under the giant fig tree in the garden.

Susan did not remember meeting me, but Alvin did. And I remembered Alvin Curran from that evening at Spigolizzi. Later, I had listened to his music on the Internet, but Susan I could not recall meeting. My poor memory for names and faces is nearly legendary.

It took some time to lure an Italian publisher into agreeing to publish a translation of Dottoressa, and during this time Susan and I kept in touch via email and telephone. We haven’t met again since 2000, but does friendship need meeting in person to flourish?

Dottoressa is now fully translated and in the final phase of editing, and both the author and the publisher, the Salento-based Besa Muci Editore, are looking forward to receiving the final draft (the Italian version should be released late in 2025). And I can’t wait to meet Susan and Alvin in person at the book launch somewhere in the Eternal City.

About the 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.