AFTER ITALY

---

     To tell my family’s story, I could dig in anywhere—1915, 1950, 2024.  I could begin in Italy, Pittsburgh, New York, or Nebraska. Begin with my parents, my grandparents, or me, and from every point of entry, our story is the same: three generations unhappy in love.

     Let’s begin in autumn 1929, in Vazzano, our mountain village in Calabria...

This beautifully written story of three generations of marriage is a page-turner. Monardo's honest and reflective memoir reveals intergenerational patterns as intricate as Italian lace. This family story has something to teach us all. 

         —Mary Pipher,  A Life in Light and Reviving Ophelia 

Anna Monardo’s story is one of strength and vulnerability, the two chambers of the immigrant heart. 

            —Adriana Trigiani,  The Good Left Undone

 After Italy is a kind of translation, taking big questions involving society and self and relating them in the universal language of deeply explored personal experience 

           —Sue William Silverman, Acetylene Torch Songs  and How To Survive Death and Other Inconveniences

As an Italian American like Anna Monardo, I relished every detail of her family’s story... Monardo is a generous, wise guide  

           —Ann Hood, The Italian Wife and The Stolen Child

Weaving research with dream with fine embroidered language, Monardo confronts the damage of Old World “patriarchal imperatives” and the false narratives within the American Dream. 

       —Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, Finding Querencia: Essays from In Between

After Italy is  a profoundly personal story told with intimate precision and in exquisite emotional detail. How did Anna Monardo pull off this magical double feat? By understanding that it’s all one big love story. Even when love is absent or imperfect or too lightly or tightly held, it's always the main event. 

            — Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion