In July 2008 Niall Allsop and his wife Kay returned to the UK after their third holiday in Calabria near the small hill-top town of Santa Severina; the plan was to return the following summer. Ten weeks later, their left-hand drive Clio bursting at the seams, they left their home in south-west England and headed for the coast on the first leg of their journey back to Calabria to live.Scratching the toe of Italy continues the story from where Stumbling through Italy left off and explains how their move to Italy came about, the logistics of the move itself and what happened next.It is the story of two adventurous pensioners adapting to being the only English-speaking people in a small Calabrian town, of the new friends they made and the home they created there.Scratching the toe of Italy is a heart-warming chronicle of perseverance and optimism, of the struggle to come to grips with a new language and a new culture, of starting each day with the certain knowledge that it will not turn out as expected.

An effortlessly artful blend of travel book, memoir, and affectionate portrait of a people Calabria is the toe of the boot that is Italy—a rugged peninsula where grapevines and fig and olive trees cling to the mountainsides during the scorching summers while the sea crashes against the cliffs on both coasts. Calabria is also a seedbed of Italian American culture; in North America, more people of Italian heritage trace their roots to Calabria than to almost any other region in Italy. Mark Rotella's Stolen Figs is a marvelous evocation of Calabria and Calabrians, whose way of life is largely untouched by the commerce that has made Tuscany and Umbria into international tourist redoubts. A grandson of Calabrian immigrants, Rotella persuades his father to visit the region for the first time in thirty years; once there, he meets Giuseppe, a postcard photographer who becomes his guide to all things Calabrian. As they travel around the region, Giuseppe initiates Rotella—and the reader—into its secrets: how to make soppressata and 'nduja, where to find hidden chapels and grottoes, and, of course, how to steal a fig without actually committing a crime. Stolen Figs is a model travelogue—at once charming and wise, and full of the earthy and unpretentious sense of life that, now as ever, characterizes Calabria and its people.

Analyses questions of cultural violence