"My ancestral Italian village in America was in Waterbury Connecticut." In this sentence, Joanna Clapps Herman raises the central question of this book: To what extent can a person born outside of Italy be considered Italian? The granddaughter of Italian immigrants who arrived in the United States in the early 1900s, Herman takes a complicated and nuanced look at the question of to whom and to which culture she ultimately belongs. Sometimes the Italian part of her identity-her Italianità-feels so aboriginal as to be inchoate, inexpressible. Sometimes it finds its expression in the rhythms of daily life. Sometimes it is embraced and enhanced; at others, it feels attenuated. "If, like me," Herman writes, "you are from one of Italy's overseas colonies, at least some of this Italianità will be in your skin, bones, and heart: other pieces have to be understood, considered, called to ourselves through study, travel, reading. Some of it is just longing. How do we know which pieces are which?"

Joanna Clapps Herman is the author of The Anarchist Bastard: Growing Up Italian in America and No Longer and Not Yet: Stories, both published by SUNY Press. She is also the coeditor (with Carol Bonomo Albright) of Wild Dreams: The Best of Italian Americana and (with Lee Gutkind) Our Roots Are Deep with Passion: Creative Nonfiction Collects New Essays by Italian-American Writers. She lives in New York City.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Many Missing Stones

What Does It Mean to Be Italian?

Quando sono italiana: When I Am Italian

Waterbury, Connecticut, My Ancestral Village

Up the Farm
What Crawls around Inside Us
Housing Memory
Blue
What We Remember
Go Fish

Food, Food, Food, and Hard Work

Creature Life
My Mother's Letter to Her Sister
Hard Work and Good Food
Sunday on the Farm
My Only Irish Aunt
Minestra Means Soup

Move to America

Chiesta ca, or This One Here
After Eden
My First New York Story, 1965
200 Square Feet in the Village, or My Soluble Fortunes
My Friend Elizabeth
On Not Writing My Thesis

Italia, sempre italia

Part I. Southern Italy
The Stones of Dialect
Siamo arrivati
"That Winter Evening"
My Neapolitan Wedding

Part II. The Opposite of Southern Italy
After the Manner of Women

The Grief Estate

Visiting Our Dead
My Father's Bones
Voglio bene
Somewhere My Bill

Notes