A charming, informative personal history that blends the anecdotal, historical, and downright unusual The child of Italian immigrants and an award-winning scholar of Italian literature, Joseph Luzzi straddles these two perspectives in My Two Italies 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 Italies"―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.” ― Craig Seligman, The New York Times Book Review “Written as part memoir, part disquisition on Italy, its dialect and grammar, its food and idiosyncracies, its celebrated writers and painters, its Mafia and founding myths, My Two Italies is also a thoughtful book about exile, the sense of displacement and confusion that those driven from their roots carry with them forever. Even if, as in Luzzi's own case, it is exile from a world that he himself never actually knew. Some things, he notes, are indeed translated into the idiom of a new life; others, ‘felt in the blood,' endure unchanged.” ― Caroline Moorehead, The Times Literary Supplement “Joseph Luzzi['s] . . . charming new book, My Two Italies . . . succeed[s] in capturing the spirit of a certain form of biculturalism and the ambivalence and conflict it causes . . . Luzzi is particularly good when he shares personal experiences and conveys observations and ideas about identity. His anecdotes about family will strike a chord with any reader familiar, even vaguely, with the immigrant experience.” ― Adam Parker, The Post and Courier “ My Two Italies deals with the enduring disconnect between the ideal Italy that is admired as a center of civilization, and the hardship and hardness of the emigrant experience. Both come vividly alive in Luzzi's heartfelt and illuminating book.” ― Gay Talese, author of Unto the Sons “Joseph Luzzi has written a funny and often moving family history that opens onto wider vistas that he knows and loves equally well--the Italian cultural and political landscape from Dante to Silvio Berlusconi. Full of charm and insight, but admirably frank and unsentimental, My Two Italies should be required reading on all flights to Italy.” ― Ross King, author of Leonardo and the Last Supper “This is a delightful, poignant, moving, entertaining but above all illuminating book, which like the best art has many layers--of the Italian-American experience, of Italy's north-south divide, of Italy's strange but fascinating modern history and of the personal journey of its author. I commend it warmly.” ― Bill Emmott, author of Good Italy, Bad Italy and former editor of The Economist “Joseph Luzzi has skillfully woven together a powerful and moving memoir of his Calabre