An American woman connects with her Southern Italian heritage in this sequel memoir.

In this follow-up to The Ghosts of Italy (2016), Paolantonio tells of how, in 2008, she was ready to make the switch from Mulholland Drive, which started right outside her Los Angeles home and ran along the mountains, to Via Fontana, a road in Calitri, Italy, that runs along the lands of her ancestors: “How do I feel when I have to leave the place that is now running in my veins?” she reflects on the Italian village. “I am lost.” The book is as much a history of women in Italy as it is a memoir, and Paolantonio masterfully weaves the two threads together throughout. In one instance, she highlights cultural differences in a recounting of an airport pickup in Rome. After mixing up one of her flights, she details how Giuseppe, an Italian man with whom she had a long-distance relationship, drove three hours to pick her up—an uncommon thing to do in Southern Italian culture. Because she wasn’t at that airport, Giuseppe went all that way for no reason, and would likely lose his job for doing so, as taking a day off was “not easy or even condoned in Southern Italy.” The author explores other cultural details throughout the book, such as how all the women in the village produced their own food, and the unspoken hierarchy of how to clean an Italian kitchen after a midday meal. There’s a strong emphasis on folklore and concepts of magic, with Paolantonio looking into her possible connection to spirits and even providing detailed instructions for a fewelixirs, said to be magical. The story travels beautifully through LA, New York City, and Italy as the narrative goes on, although it bounces somewhat randomly through time, which can occasionally be confusing. Still, Paolantonio offers a revealing look at how she learned how to belong in her ancestral home.

An often engaging personal and cultural journey.

Paolantonio recounts her trips to Italy in search of her ancestry and a new life.

Born in 1959, the author, the daughter of two first-generation Americans of Italian descent, grew up mostly in Long Island, New York. Her paternal grandfather Nicola first traveled to the United States in 1907 to join his three older brothers there and fell in love with the country so deeply that he enthusiastically pushed his children and grandchildren to thoroughly assimilate; as a result, Paolantonio was raised somewhat disconnected from her Italian heritage. This was a void she looked to fill when she first traveled to his native town of Calitri, an “ancient hilltown” in eastern Campania. She would travel back many times thereafter; delightfully haunted by the “ghostly world of [her] ancestors,” she established relationships with both the paternal and maternal sides of the family. In this sweetly tender remembrance, the author, affectionately nicknamed L’Americana by her family, fell deeply in love with Calitri…and then with Giuseppe Zarrilli, “The Handsome Man from Macchiursi.” She also learned about the secretive life of Angela Maria, her mysterious grandmother, and even bought the home that was once hers in the village, making it and Calitri her own. (“I always felt deep down that someday I would find the spirit of my grandmother. Between my first journey and today there have been several years of discovery in this small mountain village that I now call home. After buying her house on via Fontana, I had finally found her.”) The author’s rediscovery of her lineage, and the dramatic way in which she embraced it, is related with humor and warmth in endearingly informal, even intimately confessional, prose. The memoir’s tone can veer into the earnestly sentimental (bordering on saccharine), but, in the main, this is an affecting recollection, conveyed with candor and poignancy.

A touching memoir that should resonate deeply with anyone yearning to connect with familial roots.