My Italian Blog - Welcome to My Corner of Italy

Calabrian Eateries: La Festa di San Martino

SAINT MARTIN’S DAY

November 11^th is celebrated as Saint Martin’s Day in many European countries. Historically, the feasting marked the end of the agrarian season and initiated a period of fasting that eventually became Advent. Saint Martin or Martin of Tours lived in the 4^thcentury, started out as a Roman soldier, left the army to became a monk and ended up the bishop of Tours. Best known for sharing his military cloak with a beggar, who subsequently came to him as Jesus in a dream, St. Martin is the patron saint of beggars, tailors, children, soldiers, geese, innkeepers, vintners and France.
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Calabrian Eateries: Trattoria in Cosenza

GOOD FOOD FOR A GOOD PRICE

Every once and a while you happen upon a restaurant that you want to tell everyone you know about—friends of friends of friends, in modern parlance. But then you stop and say to yourself, Read More

Reggio Calabria’s Musical Instrument Museum

“There are things that don’t burn.”

One year ago today, Reggio Calabria’s Musical Instrument Museum was torched. Musical instruments and scores went up in flames. However, as was affirmed by a young boy on the evening of the solidarity march held shortly after the heinous event, “You can’t touch music, therefore, it wasn’t burned.” Read More

Calabres, Calabrese, Calabresi??

CALABRESE VS. CALABRIAN

When people ask me what my book’s about and I start talking about Calabria, the word calabrese often comes up. “So does it have something to do with calabres?” At first I was surprised that many people seemed to have more of a familiarity with an Italian form of a word than its English translation. I then came to realize that, whether heard spoken by a friend or co-worker or seen written on a restaurant menu, the original Italian term may actually be used more frequently than its English counterpart. Read More

Reflection: Lining up Today’s Pixels With the Columns of Ancient Greece

THE BOOK COVER

PUTTING TOGETHER A BOOK for publication takes a lot of thought and requires many decisions. For obvious reasons, much care is given to the cover, but the interior layout, choice of fonts and typesetting is equally important as that’s where the reader ultimately will spend most of his time. The book cover, however, gives the first impression, sets the tone.

I wanted to incorporate one of my photos. I had many to choose from—the mountains, the shore, the city, the countryside, the people, the food, the art… The difficulty would be selecting just one. Read More

Welcome to my Blog

BUON GIORNO!

This is my first blog post. As a matter of fact, it wasn’t until about a month ago upon reading a “how to” article that I learned where the word blogging came from—web logging glided to leave off the “we”, just in case you’re anything like me. Looking at it now, I suppose I should have figured it out years ago, but one day blogging was just there and it was assumed that anyone under the age of 70 should know what it was all about. Well, I’m now in the process of learning what it’s all about. Read More