Slovene language
He was born in Montecalvo Irpino, a small village in the Southern Italian region of Irpinia, where his family was sent to confination by the Italian Fascist regime. He spent his childhood in Trieste, where he attended Slovene language schools. After graduating in Slavic philology at the University of Ljubljana in 1969, in Slovenia (then part of Yugoslavia), he worked in several publishing houses in Trieste. He also worked as a Slovene language professor at the University of Trieste. Between 1996 and 2000, he served as president of the Slovenian section of the International P.E.N..