Italian American country. Finding Italy in small-town America

A trip to America's heartland in search of the descendants of the miners, farmers and fishermen who immigrated more than a century ago to establish Italian communities in every corner of the huge land that opened up before their eyes after the landing at Ellis Island. The book combines historical photographs with the images and voices of those who live today in places like Barre, Vermont, Valdese, North Carolina, Tontitown, Arkansas and Pittsburg, California. Towns whose immigrants were anarchist stonemasons from Tuscany, Waldensians from the alpine valleys of Piedmont, Venetian peasants escaped from cotton plantations of the Mississippi Delta and fishermen from Sicily. The reader will discover Italian communities in cities like Denver and New Orleans, in small towns on the edge of nowhere like Paradise Valley, Nevada and ghost towns like Dawson, New Mexico. The book is accompanied by a documentary with the interviews of more than a hundred descendants of Italian immigrants met while traveling across the United States. Theirs is a lively and moving testimony of what it meant and what it means being Italian in America today.