ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

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Biography
The main result of his work as a historian is the book History of modern Greece (1453-1981) (Lecce, Capone, 1985), to date the only Greek story written by an Italian (it is filled with "a lacuna macroscopic in the Italian manuals", Giannachi 2016: 29), and is therefore cited in the reference bibliography of Richard Clogg (History of modern Greece since the fall of the Byzantine Empire to today, Milan, 1996). The history of modern Greece is followed by History of Cyprus (Lecce, Argo, 2007, ISBN 978-88-8234-043-8), .

As a neo-Hellenist of the Greek minority of Salento, he was the only one admitted during the twentieth century by the Parnassos Academy of Athens, where he was able to hold in 1994 a conference about a century away from that of the Hellenist and poet Vito Domenico Palumbo; his last conference took place at the invitation of the Italian Institute of Culture of Thessaloniki, just before blindness.

April wrote three novels. The first, Il sole e il sale, originally published by the Circolo Ghetonìa di Calimera in the 1980s (1987), was reprinted (Lecce, Icaro, 2006), ; he had a follow-up, The funeral and the field flowers (Lecce, Icaro, 2009). A third novel, Arsinòi, follows a story of Greek resistance to Nazi fascism.

He directed the Grecìa Salentina series: problems and documents for Capone publisher (the first issue, of 1980, contains among others a contribution of the great German dialectist Gerhard Rohlfs, supporter of the continuity of the Greek language from antiquity to today; to emphasize the fact that April is instead a supporter of the opposite idea, that of non continuity); .

Promoter of conferences and meetings for the study of the languages and cultures of the Italian alloglotte communities, involved other internationally renowned scholars including Pier Paolo Pasolini, collaboration however interrupted by the sudden disappearance of the latter.

Private life
Married with Tina, she had five children.

Notes

Bibliography