Stones into Bread

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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.

AUTHOR

Vito Teti

AUTHOR

Damiano Pietropaolo

Toronto’s Damiano Pietropaolo is an award-winning writer/broadcaster, director, translator, and educator. As editor, director and producer Damiano explored the theme of exile and return and the emergence of a post-national drama.

Reviews

Every book by Vito Teti is a blessing. His stories about the Italian South, about Southern Italian mobility, unfold as anthropological narratives: men who migrate hoping to make their luck in America, women who listen as in a dream … –Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah It’s quite rare to run across such a symbiosis of rigorous analysis and poetic sense of life, of life’s passing and its enduring, of its floundering and its re-emergence. Perhaps the great anthropologists are the real poets of modernity, founders, as much as discoverers, of buried cities and disappearing civilizations, but founders in so far as they are discoverers and discoverers in so far as they are the founders of perennial values that are refracted, changing but never disappearing, in the flux of time. –Claudio Magris, author of Blameless

It’s quite rare to run across such a symbiosis of rigorous analysis and poetic sense of life, of life’s passing and its enduring, of its floundering and its re-emergence. Perhaps the great anthropologists are the real poets of modernity, founders, as much as discoverers, of buried cities and disappearing civilizations, but founders in so far as they are discoverers and discoverers in so far as they are the founders of perennial values that are refracted, changing but never disappearing, in the flux of time.