Expat Life

A follow-up to the author’s Crossing the Cultural Divide: An Englishman in Italy, which recounted the adventures and misadventures of Hugh Stalwart over a time-span of more than 20 years among the Italians, this hilarious book presents us with a more mature, more reflective, though only slightly less accident-prone Stalwart, who on the occasion of his 50th birthday feels the need to weigh things up after all his time in Italy, to establish why he still resides there and why he left his native England in the first place. His reflections are hampered, however, by a hectic work schedule in Verona, Macerata and Rome, by wacky students, by his tendency to nod off, by his fixation with rugby, and by various human beings insensitively invading his personal space. A lively array of characters includes Ham, an outspoken, muscle-bound New Yorker, and Stalwart’s temperamental, unfathomable colleague Lucia, whose fascination with this Englishman appears to go well beyond mere cross-cultural issues…

Dominic Stewart has lived in Italy since 1987. He teaches English Language and Italian-English Translation at the University of Macerata, Italy.