Scratching the toe of Italy: Expecting the unexpected in Calabria
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 ‘90s 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 – the point at which 'Scratching the toe of Italy' begins – 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 'Stumbling through Italy: Tales of Tuscany, Sicily, Sardinia, Apulia, Calabria and places in-between' and 'Keeping up with the Lawrences: Sicily, Sea and Sardinia revisited'