📘 THIS tale is a love story, a Valentine, to the Puglia region of Italy. Suffused with Mediterranean warmth and geniality, it follows the adventures of Samy Ben Meddah, of North African origin, as he meets Italian counterparts from the north shore of the Mediterranean. Behind the southern warmth of Puglia there lurks a serious subject, the problematic of immigration and culture shocks in a transcultural world. The author presents a wide spectrum of immigrations: geographical, temporal, and artistic. But the whole is leavened by wit and the Southern joie de vivre.