Stolen Figs & Other Adventures in Calabria
by Mark Rotella

Calabria is the toe of the boot that is Italy -- a rugged peninsula where grapevines and fig and olive trees cling to the mountainsides during scorching summers. Calabria is also a seedbed of Italian-American culture; in North America, more people of Italian heritage trace their roots to Calabria than to almost any other region in Italy.

Mark Rotella's Stolen Figs -- named a Best Travel Book of 2003 by Condé Nast Traveler -- is a marvelous evocation of Calabria. A grandson of Calabrese immigrants, Rotella persuades his father to visit the region for the first time in thirty years; once there, he meets Giuseppe, a postcard photographer who becomes his guide. As they travel around the region, Giuseppe initiates Rotella -- and the reader -- into its secrets: how to make a soppressata and 'nduja, and, of course, how to steal a fig without committing a crime. Stolen Figs is a model travelogue -- at once charming and wise, and full of an earthy and unpretentious sense of life that now, as ever, characterizes Calabria and its people.

"Calabria, the southern foot-shaped part of Italy and the birthplace of Rotella's forebears, first captivated the author when he visited the region with his father in the early 1990s. This candid travel memoir is a synthesis of his successive return journeys of exploration and kinship alliance. Enlisting a knowledgeable and affable local photographer as a guide/companion, Rotella tours Calabria's larger centers (Catanzaro, Cosenza, Reggio di Calabria), coastal towns (Crotone, Ciro, Sibari, Locri), and remote villages of the Aspromonte region (where Mafia kidnappers have long sequestered their victims for ransom). His genuine curiosity, genial informality, and Calabrese origins facilitate encounters with custodians of museums and churches as well as craftspeople (weavers, coppersmiths, potters, artists) who would otherwise be more suspicious, reticent, and aloof. Rotella delights in and evokes the simple pleasures of breaking bread or sipping a caff with relatives and strangers, of tucking into pure and unembellished Calabrese food or gorging on plump, luxuriant figs. His narrative, at times a bit leisurely, lures the reader into this passionate affirmation of blood and belonging."
--Library Journal

ZB6276    Stolen Figs & Other Adventures in Calabria            $14.00

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