An Italian American Odyssey: Life line-filo della vita: Through Ellis Island and Beyond

A moving blend of words and images, this book tells the story of the journey to America across seven generations of one Italian-American family. Drawing on a remarkable collection of raw material – fragments of family letters, stories, diaries, and other writings, as well as photographs and collages – B. Amore fashions a completely new encounter with American history, as a story retold and reimagined. Woven throughout the fully bilingual text are numerous interviews and historic photographs from the Ellis Island archives. Also included are original essays by noted scholars, who take Amore’s art as a starting point for illuminating explorations of the immigrant experience, from the aesthetics of cultural memory and the persistence of ethnic identity, to issues of gender, race, and generational change in Italian-American history and life.