by Niall Allsop (Author)
In September 1999 Niall Allsop and his wife Kay flew to Pisa and stepped onto Italian soil for the first time. Within six months they returned and therafter they visited Italy at least twice a year, usually to the most southerly provinces of Apulia and Calabria and the islands of Sicily and Sardinia.They knew they holidayed differently to other people and in Italy, despite the lack of language, they found themselves somehow drawn into people's lives and homes; they had experiences and encounters that seemed to pass others by.'Stumbling through Italy' is the irreverent chronicle of their Italian travels and the people they met there up to the summer of 2008 ... when, finally reconciled to the inevitable, they returned to Italy one last time. Which, as they say, is another story.Also included are chapters on the idiosyncrasies of the Italian language and the Italian driving experience.The sequel to 'Stumbling through Italy', 'Scratching the toe of Italy', is also available.
Author Biography
Niall Allsop was born and educated in Belfast, Northern Ireland, but began his working life as a primary school teacher in London and in 1971 took up his first headship. He left teaching in 1981 to pursue a career as a freelance photo-journalist specialising in the UK's inland waterways and wrote extensively in this field both as a contributor to several national magazines and later as author of a number of related titles, one of which, in a fourth edition, remains in print. By the early 1990s he was a graphic designer and the in-house designer for a photographic publishing house in Manchester before becoming a freelance graphic designer based in the south-west of England. In September 2008 he and his wife, Kay, moved to Calabria, the toe of Italy, where they enjoy a sort of retirement and where they continue to struggle daily with the language in a small hilltop town where they are the only English-speaking people. Niall Allsop is also the author of several other titles with Italian themes.