About Me
My name is Dejan. I’m from Serbia, when I was 13 years old, I fell in love with Napoli, a love that has only grown stronger since.
Football was one of the first things that pulled me in; there is something about the passion of this city, the way it lives and breathes through its team, that I had never seen anywhere else. That passion led me deeper, into the history, the music, the food, the chaos and the beauty of it all. Over the years, my girlfriend Anja, who is heavily involved in this story, and I have traveled to many corners of the South. Napoli means so much to me that I carry it on my skin: a tattoo of the city and Vesuvio, a permanent reminder of the place that changed how I see the world.
I am not Neapolitan. I am not even Italian. But somewhere along the way, this city stopped being a place I visit and became a place I belong to. Guagliò is what happens when that kind of love decides to do something with itself.
About Guagliò
Guagliò is a cultural magazine about Napoli and the Mezzogiorno, its history, its people, and the stories that never make it into the guidebooks.
This is not a travel site. We don’t tell you where to eat or which hotel to book. We exist for something else entirely: the history that shaped this city long before tourists arrived, the famous Neapolitans who carried this place into the world, and the ordinary people whose lives are quietly extraordinary. Kings and saints, fishermen and tenors, emigrants and the families that left it’s land.
We decided to tell stories. But we can’t do it alone, and we don’t want to.
This magazine is built to be a home for the voices of the South and the diaspora, not just a place where I write about Napoli, but a place where the people who actually live it get to tell their own stories. If you are from Napoli, from the Mezzogiorno, or from anywhere in the world where Southern Italian roots still run deep, I want to hear from you. Maybe you have a family story worth telling. Maybe you run a business that deserves to be seen. Maybe you simply have something interesting to say about where you come from. Whatever it is, this is a place where your voice can be heard, and I would be more than happy to meet you, talk with you, and find a way to collaborate – an interview, a guest piece, a feature, a mention, whatever fits best.
My hope is simple. I want Southern Italians and the diaspora to read this magazine and feel proud of where they come from. I want people with no connection to this part of Italy at all to read an article, learn something they didn’t expect, and come back the following week curious for more. And I want anyone who simply feels a pull toward this part of Italy, for reasons they can’t always explain, to find a place here that understands that feeling, because I understand it too.
This is the Mezzogiorno, finally told right, not as a postcard, but as a place with a past, a present, and people who deserve to have their stories told well, by the people who live them.
If that’s you, write to me. I’m listening.
Grazie per essere qui. Thank you for being here.
Dejan
