A poignant personal account from a child of Calabrian peasants whose lifelong study of Italy unveils the mysteries of this Bel Paese, "Beautiful Land," where artistic genius and political corruption have gone hand in hand from the time of Michelangelo to The Sopranos.
The child of Italian immigrants and an award-winning scholar of Italian literature, in My Two Italy’s Joseph Luzzi straddles these two perspectives to link his family's dramatic story to Italy's north-south divide, its quest for a unifying language, and its passion for art, food, and family.
From his Calabrian father's time as a military internee in Nazi Germany-where he had a love affair with a local Bavarian woman-to his adventures amid the Renaissance splendor of Florence, Luzzi creates a deeply personal portrait of Italy that leaps past facile clichés about Mafia madness and Tuscan sun therapy. He delves instead into why Italian Americans have such a complicated relationship with the "old country," and how Italy produces some of the world's most astonishing art while suffering from corruption, political fragmentation, and an enfeebled civil society.
With topics ranging from the pervasive force of Dante's poetry to the meteoric rise of Silvio Berlusconi, Luzzi presents the Italians in all their glory and squalor, relating the problems that plague Italy today to the country's ancient roots. He shares how his "two Italy’s" -the earthy southern Italian world of his immigrant childhood and the refined "northern" Italian realm of his professional life-join and clash in unexpected ways that continue to enchant the many millions who are either connected to Italy by ancestry or bound to it by love.
"My Two Italies [is] a brilliant tour de force that is part memoir, part cultural criticism and part paean to the magical city of Florence. A narrative at once elegant and elegiac, the book encapsulates the essence of contemporary Italy--sordid politics, organized crime, the bella figura--in a fast-paced prose that rushes by much too quickly."
Arlice Davenport, Wichita Eagle
"In his elegant, thoughtful new memoir, My Two Italies, [Joseph Luzzi] writes of watching his father and uncle carve up an entire goat, make wine, and hold a meeting of brothers to determine the fate of an uncle's unfaithful wife. And this was not 19th-century Calabria, but Rhode Island in the 1970s . . . In this relatively slim book, Luzzi effectively covers lots of ground on Italian identity as a whole: the concept of mammoni (40-year-old Italian men who live with their mothers), Italy's Slow Food movement, and a somewhat dutiful examination of the country's politics since World War II."
Mark Rotella, NPR
"My Two Italies touches, lightly and elegantly, on politics, history, geography, sociology, language, literature, film, food and family . . . [There are] deeply felt stretches of memoir."
