Close

The Calabrian city of Vibo Valentia has been named the first ever Italian Book Capital, for 2021, Culture Minister Dario Franceschini announced on Friday. Vibo beat Ariano Arpino, Caltanisetta, Campobasso, Cesena and Pontremoli. The Calabrian city won because "it has distinguished itself for the quality of the initiatives presented, set out clearly...

814

Congratulations to NIAF Member Gail Reitano on her new book Italian Love Cake. A journey of feminist and political awakening during 1930s America, the book follows Marie Genovese who mourns the recent loss of her mother and struggles to manage the family’s failing Five & Ten, as well as her brother flirting with Fascism. Isolated and uncertain, she...

432

Novelist John Domini hails from a famiglia of brave Neapolitans, men who defied Nazi occupiers and the Allied Command and the Camorra. It is a different species of courage, yet coraggio nonetheless, that Domini displays in tackling the genre of memoir in which a benighted adult son probes his father’s European haunts to mine buried war exploits. Th...

336

“America is technically home but my heart and soul is in Calabria,” says Rosetta Costantino, author of My Calabria, Southern Italian Desserts and culinary instructor of traditional southern Italian recipes and tour guide in Calabria, Sicily, and Puglia. Costantino was born and raised in Verbicaro, Calabria a small wine-producing hill town at the ti...

934

In spite of the intensive research undertaken by scholars, collectors and violin makers over the past 30 years, the history of Italian violin making is still far from fully documented. Owing to the huge diversity of historical, political and social situations in the highly fragmented Italian peninsula, there are still many important areas whose lut...

693

Prima dei 17 miliardi di dollari del Piano Marshall, nell’Europa devastata dalla guerra arrivarono le tavolette di cioccolato, le sigarette e le cigomme (i chewing gum), le calze di nylon e le sottane recuperate dai paracadute dei Liberators. Poi insieme ai dollari arrivarono il gel, il rock ‘n roll, i jeans e la guerra fredda. La storia dei rappor...

1586

There are said to be over 300 shapes of pasta, each of which has a history and a story to tell.  These shapes have evolved alongside the flavours of local ingredients, and the perfect combination can turn an ordinary dish into something sublime. The Geometry of Pasta pairs over 100 authentic recipes from critically acclaimed chef Jacob Kenedy – co-...

421

Vincent Graziano has done it again. Having published his first work of fiction, Die Laughing, in 2009, and more recently The Family Jewels in 2018, the stand up comedian turned funeral parlor owner again borrows from memories of his youth in Little Italy and imagined scenarios only a funeral director could devise. While Die Laughing and The Family...

580

Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet belongs to the literary canon of women’s literature, telling a bildungsroman of friendship and feminism. The four books are narrated by Elena (Lenù) Greco and follow her and her best friend Raffaella (Lila) Cerullo, beginning with their adolescence in Naples and following them through the divergent paths they tak...

842

When she was 14 years old, Gina Gingello wrote to the managing editor of the Democrat and Chronicle, answering the coverage that had painted her father solely as a mobster slain in a car bombing. Weeks after the April 1978 murder of Salvatore "Sammy G" Gingello, Gina wrote in the letter, "My Dad was a good loving father and a friend to me. We had t...

3481