A Collage of Impressions, curated by George Elliott Clarke Among Toronto’s cold, glistening skyscrapers, Corrado Paina (1954-2024) was a transplanted Vesuvius, fuming damning smoke and flame upon everyone content with the insipidly provincial in Canuck commerce and culture. He was arrestingly contradictory; a booster of trade between Canada and his native Italy, and yet also an urbane citizen favouring the…
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“Did you like Toronto when you first arrived here?” “Never,” she replies in her broken English, the r trilled. “I like nothing when I come here. The people, the food, the cold, the city…veramente niente.” Veramente niente. Truly nothing. “Nothing?” “Nothing,” she repeats quietly, looking away. Her face sags, wrinkles delicately folding into one another. The corners of her mouth…
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I have had an almost lifelong love affair with Toronto. I first fell in love with the city in the summer of 1963. I was eleven years old, and I had just moved here with my family from the place where I was born, a small rural town called Maierato in Calabria, southern Italy. This was my second trip to…
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Benvenuto a Roma! Welcome to Rome! If you want to enjoy your visit, shut your guidebook and listen to me, Rome’s most famous talking statue. I always tell the truth – with a dash of poetic license, of course –about this beautiful and sometimes brutal city. Cheeky poets and scurvy graffitists might impersonate me, but I am the one and…
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