John Keahey has spent more than thirty years as a newspaper/wire service reporter and editor who has turned his love for Italy into a career of writing and speaking on the subject.  His third book--Seeking Sicily: A Cultural Journey through Myth and Reality-- takes a unique approach beyond the typical travel narrative. It explores Sicilian culture through a variety of elements: its cuisine, which draws from the influences from the various nations that once controlled the island; its authors who, like their fellow islanders, consider themselves Sicilian rather than Italian; and through their deeply ingrained isolationist attitudes of Sicily’s three thousand-year history of being ruled by one invader after another (northern Italians being that latest conqueror during Italian Unification in 1861). Keahey also examines the influence of the Mafia and the impact of Sicilian-Greek myths that still permeate the Mediterranean's largest, most mysterious, and most historically significant island.

His first book is a travel narrative of little known – at least to U.S. travelers – Southern Italy: A Sweet and Glorious Land – Revisiting the Ionian Sea. This book follows the journey, one hundred years earlier, of Victorian novelist George Gissing through the wild and untamed reaches of the Italian peninsula’s bottom third. Gissing and Keahey explored the remains of the ancient Greek cities that once flourished in what is today Italy’s far south – it once was called Magna Graecia, or Greater Greece – and marveled at a land that stoically weathered invader after invader. The Greeks, here centuries before the Romans crawled out of their wooden-and-mud huts and marched down the slopes of the Palatine Hill to found a great western empire, created a civilization that still can be found in Southern Italian traditions, dialects, and DNA.

 

Keahey’s second book details the decades-long struggle to find a way to protect Venice from an unstoppable sea-level rise that threatens the very fabric of the city: Venice Against the Sea – A City Besieged. The book, as the end of the twenty-first century’s first decade approaches and the relentless effects of global warming threatens coastal cities worldwide, remains the definitive study of Venice’s watery struggle through history. It describes how, and why, the city was built in the midst of an Adriatic lagoon, how Venetians for centuries stayed above the sea’s twice-daily high tides, and it dissects the controversial and mightily opposed construction of the multibillion-dollar mobile gates at the Venetian Lagoon’s entrances.

 

He speaks at colleges, community events, and a host of other organizations about his work.