My story begins in Opi (see photo, left) in the heart of what is now the Parco Nazionale d’Abruzzo, Lazio e Molise (National Park of Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise). It is a lovely place of gentle wildness, not well enough…
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Being an immigrant in Naples
My historical novel of immigration, When We Were Strangers, is set in the 1880s, when Irma Vitale leaves her mountain village in Southern Italy and comes to America. My “research” began in November, 1990, when I left Northern California to…
Irma’s big city
My protagonist Irma speaks of Pescasseroli, the biggest city she knows, just visible from her own village. Her mother has never been to its far edge. Pescasseroli is bigger now than it was in the 1880s, still small, but you’ll…
Visiting Opi
Here is one of the finer streets of Opi in Abruzzo, where my protagonist Irma found safety and yet the ultimately strangling circumstances that forced her to leave seems to be named for a pagan goddess of abundance. There is…
Opi in the snow
With snow covering Europe and much of the Northeast this Christmas, I imagine Irma in her small stone house in the flickering light and the endless cold but still in this serene beauty.
Opi in the wintertime
Here is an image of Opi much as we saw it on our first visit for cross-country skiing. I’m not much of a skier, but walking in the late afternoon in those quiet streets that so quickly become mountain trails,…
Making limoncello
At the home of our friend Anamaria outside Naples, my husband Maurizio sharpens the knife to cut off the lemon peel of a mound of lemons for our 2010 batch of limoncello. We begin our batches each year when we…
Lentil soup recipe
Thick lentil soup (Minestra di lenticchie) Regional variations of this soup were common in the “cucina povera” or poor people’s cuisine of Abruzzo and it was probably a soup or potage of this sort that Carlo overturned during a fight…
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