It all started with the arrival of a business card in the letterbox. I had visited Italy many times and had always been keen to learn ‘la bella lingua’. And here in the letterbox was a card from one Beniamino Petrosino advertising his services as an Italian language teacher. I started lessons with some trepidation but all went well. I was aware from Beniamino’s overly wordy business card that he had written a book in English – “The Passage of the Frog and the Wild Strawberri

Visitors to the tiny hilltop village of Aliano in Southern Italy are very unlikely to forget it. The surrounding countryside is as desolate as a lunar landscape and the village is perched precariously on top of CALANCHI which are deforested, sandy soiled rocky hills. In 1980, a major earthquake shook the region of Basilicata and rendered many of Aliano’s clay buildings uninhabitable. Young people have moved away to find their fortune and the population now numbers less than 1