My cousin Marcella, three years my junior, wrote me to congratulate me for the PhD and to give me an update on her life. Marcella grew up in Southern Italy, in a region named Salento and a town named Lecce, where my father and her mother (my father's sister) are from, and where I spent most of my summers as a child and a teenager. We grew up playing, swimming in the Adriatic Sea and getting in trouble together during those summers. Because we have different accents, (mine is from Bologna, hers is from Lecce) from a very early age we started playing with our linguistic differences, and to this day we will speak and write to each other in Italian mixed with bits of our different dialects. That's what she did in her email to me this time, too. I love it.
Marcella is now a food scientist, and currently she works for an extra-virgin olive oil cooperative.
And she sent me this picture of her trekking across Salento:
I can recognize the quality of Salento's summer dusk light from Marcella's photo. I can't wait to go back. I still remember walking across fields with my cousin and my aunt, picking oregano that had already been dried up by the sun.
