The Heart (and The Tart) of The Heel, Part I: Evoking The Magic of Puglia

Evoking The Magic of Puglia

My sister Hilaree is “a California expat living in Puglia”, on the heel of Italy’s boot. In this post I intend to open a door onto her experience. The purpose is to invite the distant doings of her days into my workspace while I am missing her in California. But how can I possibly write a quick-framing sentence about her status quo, knowing her deeply, without taking this story where it truly needs to go? She is so much more to me, as she is to many others, than the chromatic expressions of her present production in the theater of Southern Italy.

Hilaree’s displacement to the Italian peninsula from former outposts, including but not limited to, our hometown of Redlands, California, is a source of enchantment to hundreds who follow the visual documentation of her life from afar. While probing the Pugliese playground with her two young, sunlit daughters in tow, Hilaree evokes the magic, the color, and very often, the humor of her adoptive habitat on the Italian Adriatic through her photography and storytelling, and through the turning of local fruits and fixings into art: @tartoftheheel.

Do you find it superfluous that I would recycle beauty that is already showcased so perfectly? I thought about the question myself and from it came another few questions: What could be more appropriate than to invite what is already beautiful into new spaces? Is that, in fact, what we do when we travel for pleasure? Is not exploration, of any kind, an invitation to the wonder of the world, to enter into our portfolio of experience, that we might host something new and enlightening? And how does that connection then transform our life space and perception? Which places and what engagements of the senses are you hoping to invite into the realm of your life?

Traveling Native invites The Magic of Puglia into the new spaces of curious travelers on our Tasting Puglia Tour.

This is the first showcase of Hilaree’s work here on the Traveling Native Blog. Stay tuned for coming exhibits where I’ll be collaging the ingredients of her experience into the story as I see it.