Customer Reviews

Stolen Figs: and Other Adventures in Calabria

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

In a perfect union of writer and subject, Publisher's Weekly editor, Mark Rotella, returns to his grandparents' homeland of Calabria. "Spurred" by Gay Talese's book, "Unto the Sons", to explore his southern Italian heritage, the author, an unabashedly, and self-admitted "romantic", provides an excellent introduction to this often overlooked region, conveying his own passion for familiarizing himself with it in the process. Largely untouched by tourism, and writers, for that matter, Calabria is both financially depressed and culturally rich, with large emigrant populations in Niagara Falls, New York, Toronto, Canada, and Danbury, Connecticut (though Rotella grew up primarily in Saint Petersburg, Florida). Whether traveling solo, with his father, wife, or postcard salesman, Guiseppe, Rotella captures the unique personality of each village he visits, with a superb eye for atmosphere, setting, and aesthetically outstanding visuals. Political and historical background, including foreign influences on the region, and effects of the Mafia, provide a framework and understanding to current situations. Rotella intersperses snippets of other writers' experiences, local legends, folktales, proverbs, customs, and traditions, lending an uncommonly expansive insight to Calabria. Combining past and present also lends a certain fascination for the reader, and includes the author's reunions with relatives, relationships formed over his several trips there, his dad's poignant remininsces, a visit to the church his grandparents were married in, and the elaborate Easter celebrations he attended. Though not without a sense of humor, Rotella's writing is most impressive for its unaffected style. Descriptions of the rugged, yet beautiful landscape, and harsh geography have a cinematic quality, and his writing becomes completely poetic over the mouthwatering cuisine he abundantly partakes of. In the end, and seeming to mirror the author himself, what emerges is an enticing picture of a gracious, highly social, and charmingly "masculine" society. Woman reader from New York

Hear the sounds, taste the food, kiss the relatives, explore the terrain, climb the mountains, visit the castles, learn the history (Greeks, Bruttians, Romans, Visigoth conquests) ... experience the adventure of exploring one's family roots in a small village in southern Italy. The village, Gimigilano, is located in Calabria, the region that looks like the foot on a map of Italy, which everyone knows resembles a boot. The author, Mark Rotella, describes his *very* first visit to this village with his father and later subsequent visits either alone or with his wife, who is of English and Dutch heritage. He captivates the reader with descriptions of nostalgia and heart-felt longing when he emotionally connects to the traditions, customs and life of the village. He is befriended by Giuseppe, a photographer, who produces postcards that he sells to regional shops and businesses. Giuseppe becomes his personal driver and tour guide to Calabria ...

The author intersperses memories of growing up, recalling how his grandfather made wine in New Jersey, which he traded with a Portuguese farmer, who raised pigs ... his grandfather slaughtered the pig in the old-fashion way and provided the family with the same cuts of meat that the author saw on his visit to the village. The author includes memories and discussions with his father. One of which is the family story when his grandfather returned to the village to find himself a suitable wife. He married her in the village and took his bride to live in America. Since his grandmother and grandfather practiced old world ways, the author was able to trace many of the family traditons back to the village and culture of the region. Favorite dishes, foods, spices and their preparation, Italian hospitality, the importance of family and the sense of belonging, are all aspects of the Italian culture of which the author is proud.

The continuation of customs and traditions in Calabria persist ... kneading and baking bread in communal fashion, making wine, eating rabbit stew, tending an olive grove, stealing figs from a neighbor's tree. The author wished to be viewed and accepted as the "returning son of the village" ... even sought Italian citizenship. He was disappointed to discover he was seen as "the American visitor". He found out ...one had to be *born* in Calabria, to be viewed as Calabrese. While Calabria has a depressed economy compared to Rome, Venice and Naples, all northern cities ... it has a proud and resilient people who continue to live in the region helping the area to develop. This author recreates the feelings and lifestyle of the village and surrounding towns and cities so well that the reader wants to experience it first hand. The imagination of the reader is captured by the sights, sounds, tastes and smells of Calabria ... one feels and senses this part of Italy is unspoiled in its splendor and beauty. You want to go there before the modern world intrudes and destroys it. Erika Borsos (erikab93)

Having grown up in that area (a few miles as the crow flies), I'm familiar with most of the locales and customs the author describes. I was excited to finally buy this book (it was on my Wish List for a very long time). I admit, I stayed up late to read it! in retrospect, I realize that I was hooked because I wish to relive some of the good times I enjoyed in Calabria ('60s and '70s), but the author did a rather poor and disappointing job.
The narration is repetitive and tedious with far too many typos in the text. Aside from factual errors regarding historical events (mentioned in other comments), the author mispelled several of the local dialect expressions which pepper the text. If you're going to use local idiom, please have enough respect to spell it correctly! For example, it's "culu" not "cullu" (trans: ass). And there are many more ... as in "Giallorosso" instead of "Giallorossa" (wtf!). And, if the author returned in July with family, how could he have witnessed a procession of screaming soccer fans following a tie match of the Catanzaro team? There is no Serie (A, B, C) soccer in July!!!!!! I guess it must have been a [pathetic] artistic license. Was this meant to be a novel or a documentary? It succeeded as neither.
When writing about Capo Colonna, he focused on the lone standing greek column (which is impressive enough); but how could he not highlight the fact that just a few feet away there are ruins of a roman villa and a byzantine church!? Within the space of an acre you can 'witness' layers of culture and history spanning 2500+ years!! Talk about an opportunity to illustrate the concept of a land at the center of [ancient and medieval] universal greed and aggression!
I am disappointed. It's like eating a cannolo made without sugar!

I found Rotella's account of his travels through Calabria to be evocative and very moving. For those seeking a travelogue - look elsewhere. This is one person's journey to discover his roots and family, and along the way discovering a beautiful unspoiled part of Italy, far from the tourists in the North. The descriptions of his relatives, the countryside, and the food made me truly envious. This is a lovely book.

When you look, you can find priceless information in any travel book and "Stolen Figs" is no exception.  It was nice to finally find out the origin of the word Calabria: From the Greek "kalos-bruo." Mark went into great detail about the various tribes that conquered Calabria throughout the ages and he detailed how the Spanish Bourbons were the ones who stunted Calabria's growth.

Truth be told, this was not the best piece of travel writing I have ever read but Mark did a great job in laying out present day Calabria and the way its people operate.

I felt fear when Giuseppe and Mark were driving to Roccaforte del Greco, Reggio di Calabria and encountered a man with a gun who told Giuseppe to pull over, cut the engine, and wait until someone came along to give further instructions.  Only three hours later did they realize that they had probably came upon a robbery (or other crime) and the guy just didn't want them to see what was going on. Same thing goes for when they encountered the blank stares of the natives.

The book paid for itself on page 132 when Giuseppe and Mark were in the Arberesh village of Spezzano Albanese and heard some guys in the store speaking in dialect.  When Mark asked them if they were speaking Albanian, one of the guys said, "If you want to hear real old-style Albanian, you have to go to Lungro."  One line of my family is from Lungro and, upon reading that, I was so happy.

That's the best part about this book: How Mark went into detail about the rich cultural history of the Calabrese, a cultural history that is celebrated and revisited even when the young move to the north for work.

I share Mark's cultural dilemna in that I am also a "half breed": An Italian father and a non-Italian mother (though mine's isn't French Canadian). I, like him identify with the Italian side more than the "other" side.

Some people may not like this book (especially those who claim to be "award winning writers" yet have no books to their credit), but if they can do a better job, let's see it.

American Immigrant Sagas are of two kinds. One is the "only in America" story. As a tale of great risk, many struggles and final triumph, it often succeeds. Far riskier is this, the dread second type: immigrant's child visits Old Country, returns gushing over colorful relatives, quaint folkways, impenetrable dialects, bewitching cuisine. This absolutely requires vigorous writing, narrative skill, insight and a venturesome spirit.

Pity Mark Rotella has none to offer. The month-long visit that makes up much of this book is spent mostly not with kin but with Giuseppe, a local entrepreneur. Giuseppe has a car, you see--but tRotella's free transportation comes in the form of Giuseppe's business trip. Thus Rotella explores Calabria, his ancestral region, with a postcard-salesman dunning deadbeat clients. Spontaneity dies here, and much of the month seems to pass in real time. On the rare occasions that Rotella is about to develop a chance meeting into something more, Giuseppe says "Sorry--gotta go!"

Rotella does no better on his own. He makes much of visiting Roccaforte, pretending it's important to hear its residents speak Greek. But he botches it, arriving at siesta time. The village is asleep, so he immediately leaves, mission unaccomplished. Likewise Santo Stefano, birthplace of a legendary regional Robin Hood whose name "every Calabrian mentions with pride." In the town, the bandit's name draws a blank.

Rotella learns nothing and from such visits because his idea of research is proceed from ignorance and then ask random people random questions (e.g., What's with the mafia around here? or How come Calabria's still so poor and backward?). He never follows up, thus turning issues into small talk. Occasionally he tries to pump up some melodrama with auguries or omens or hints of "something" mysterious or threatening about to happen (at one point he fears kidnapping), but nothing ever does.

These incidents are tame and lame, and so is the writing: flat, plodding, repetitive. He visits a pottery and finds it full of pottery; meets a potter and learns the pottery has "machines that had to be pedaled with the feet" (oh--you mean potter's wheels?). The potters, he says, have formed a pottery guild and paint their pottery in a style paralleling the pottery of Deruta, a town famous for pottery.

Elsewhere, old men stroll on their morning stroll, and his spicy sausage tastes spicy ("spicy" is about the limit of Rotella's culinary lexicon). There's a dental quality to such prose--it's numbing--but his forays into imaginative writing are worse: the brief historical sketch embodying Calabria as a woman is uncompromisingly vulgar. Other references to sex are equally crude.

His reporting is shaky. A relative is Masimo in one sentence and Masino in another; a restaurant unaccountably changes names; Alaric is both Goth and Visigoth. Such gaffes are often eliminated if writers self-edit, which prompts this question: If Rotella couldn't be bothered to read his own book (and his editor, if any, likewise), why should you?

Of course, Publishers' Weekly praised this book extravagantly and fulsomely. Possibly because Rotella works for Publishers' Weekly?
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Bill Marsano is an award-winning writer on travel and wines and spirits,

With such a catchy title and the neglected subject of Calabria, I wanted so much to like this book that I read it twice...the second time was worse than the first. The author, who seems intent on the "yellow journalism" style of sensational writing, defers to the typical stereotypes that are placed on Calabria and Calabrese throughout this book.
A jab here, an insult there, after a while, even those with thick skin will find this book annoying. Somehow the author wants to convey that it is OK to deprecate and stereotype the Calabrese, Italian men, people from Reggio, Italians in general and so on.
What was particularly absurd was the assertion that anyone South of his little town was more prone to be a dangerous criminal and spoke a dialect that, "sounds like Arabic." No doubt, an erroneous idea cultivated by his Italian relatives or even perhaps his father.
What you are left with after you sweep aside all this nonsense, is a not particularly interesting story about someone's vacation where he meets Italian relatives, gets driven around (with a lot of paranoia I might add) and attends a town festival. But I guess one way to make a boring story more interesting would be to cause some waves by being "politically incorrect" as is the rage these days.
If you would like to read an honest and accurate historical account of this region and an interesting story as well, try "Calabrian Tales."

I really enjoyed this book. It is a lovely, lyrical ode to a region that is unknown and unvisited by most Americans, but that certainly seems worthy of discovery. The author evokes so perfectly the feel of the place---the rugged landscape, the pace of life, the warmth of the Calabrese people, and of course, the incredible food---that I felt like I was a part of his journey. Very heartfelt and highly recommended!!!

Those who descend from this "Glorious Land" will disagree with anyone who found this book trying to decide to be a personal journey or a travel log.

The land and personal journey are intimately tied to each other. Mark Rotella helps me see again the land of my family which I have visited four times and continue to visit.

Go to Calabria and then read this book.

This book makes me wish I were Italian. Mark Rotella has successfully immersed a WASP into his beautifully written yet honest account of a people who have (refreshingly) not yet caught up with the rest of the too fast, too conflicted world. His observations make it effortless to join him on his journey, and I was pleasantly surprised at how easily I could identify with the people in a place of which I knew so little. This book is a gift to Italians and non-Italians alike.