Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Reflections”
Christmas gets bigger every year, so much so that we can’t fit everything into just one month. Decorations come out earlier and earlier, and we’re hardly able to finish our Thanksgiving turkeys before those Christmas parties start rolling out. But amidst all the hype, there are also those moments, some may even be categorized as magical, that make the season …
“In Diretta” – LIVE! This past week I had my first occasion to speak on Italian radio. I converse in Italian all the time, but simultaneously staring down a microphone was a new experience for me. I was the invited guest of Tonino Massara, enthusiastic host of the program “Terzo Millennio” (Third Millennium) on Radio Antenna Febea in Reggio Calabria.
It seems as though I just finished celebrating 2 years of My Italian Blog and my third Blogiversary has already crept up on me. On this milestone (Trust me, the use of the word is not an exaggeration, and if you have a blog, you understand completely.), I would like to reflect on the things I have done over the …
Otherworldly screams? Laments from the afterlife? The bloody hand of the devil? The poor town of Pentedattilo on the edge of the Aspromonte Mountains in the southern tip of Calabria has seen it all. Earthquakes and precarious shifting of soil lent the final blow. But this cluster of edifices clinging to a strange rock formation, finally abandoned completely in the …
“We were told in no uncertain terms that we were the type of people who wore shoes…” Grazia Ietto Gillies reminisces of her early life in By the Olive Groves, A Calabrian Childhood, a memoir that focuses on her time growing up in Delianuova, a hill town of southern Calabria.
The list is out – early in January, the New York Times unveiled their “52 Places To Go in 2017” and Calabria made the cut! That’s right. The only place chosen in the entire length of the Italian boot wasn’t one of the usual favorites – not Rome, Florence, Venice, the Amalfi Coast or even the hill towns of Umbria. …
AN OLD CUSTOM It was a little later than I had wanted to arrive, but there were still a good ten minutes before the presentation was to begin. Rounding the hallway, I could see the aula magna or assembly hall, full of students, waiting rather patiently, I thought, for a school event. I entered through the doors in front with …
THE BEACH Amantea is blessed with an unusually mild climate, and that’s something Italians are really able to appreciate – good beach weather. In Amantea, summer can begin as early as April and last into November. Thus, the town’s long sandy beach is popular. In fact, Amantea boasts eight beautiful miles of shoreline along the Tyrrhenian Sea, a narrow coastal …
BLOG ANNIVERSARY This month marks my two-year anniversary of blogging about Italy, mostly Calabria, the region in the toe of the peninsula, and I would like to reflect a moment on what I feel makes something worth blogging or writing about. As with my book, I’ve put my all into my Italy blog and when people ask me, “When are …
Following one of my recent presentations about Calabria, an inquisitive audience member was inspired to look through his home library and revisit a book he had read almost twenty years earlier: The Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean by Paul Theroux. He remembered the author had mentioned Locri and told me about it a few days later.