This is a book about a small Southern Italian village and its offshoots in Toronto. It's about bread and figs and food in general, about Carnival and pilgrimages to religious sanctuaries, about fathers, mothers and children, about migrating and about remaining, about yearning to leave if you've stayed and yearning to make the trek back if you've gone, about how both those who travel and those who never stray from home change. But it's also about what it may mean to write an ethnography of the place you've chosen to continue to inhabit and about how an array of houses in one of the most forlorn backwaters of Europe can actually be in the thick of current history. Mixing fiction and non-fiction, autobiography, portraits of friends and co-villagers, anecdotes, short tales and the reflections of the specialist, it's also about how anthropology can be literature and literature anthropology. In short, it's a book sure to become a classic.

Translated by: Francesco Loriggio, Damiano Pietropaolo