Mother Tongue. An American Life in Italy

In the 1980s, the American writer Wallis Wilde-Menozzi moved with her Italian husband and her daughter to Parma, a small city in northern Italy that has existed since Roman times. Her search for a place for herself in a society that often seems closed to outsiders led Wilde-Menozzi to explore the pull between individualism and community, the role of women in both Parma's culture and her own Midwestern upbringing, and the powers and limits of language in the service of self knowledge, self expression, and artistic and political freedom. In doing so, she unearthed the extraordinary stories of remarkable Italians and remarkable women, including the Renaissance badessa Giovanna Piacenza, the fighting Donella Rossi Sanvitale, and her own indefatigable mother-in-law. No other book evokes so poignantly and profoundly the role of food, faith, and family attachment in Italian life and, by reflection, our own.