The best books on why your family left Southern Italy a century ago

Why am I passionate about this?

I spent a decade researching my own dramatic family story in Southern Italy – a story of murder and passion – so I took a deep dive to learn about a hidden culture my relatives left behind when they came here to America in steerage. As a fellow at the New York Public Library, I literally read hundreds of books, articles, and papers over those ten years to try and educate myself about the world I was entering for my own search. These are the books that touched me the most deeply – and continue to – not just with their own intense research but with their emotion and gorgeous prose.


I wrote...

Murder In Matera: A True Story of Passion, Family, and Forgiveness in Southern Italy

By Helene Stapinski,

Book cover of Murder In Matera: A True Story of Passion, Family, and Forgiveness in Southern Italy

What is my book about?

Growing up in New Jersey, I heard lurid tales of my great-great-grandmother Vita, who fled to America back in 1892 with her three children after being involved in a murder. Gripped by the family legend, I embarked on a decade-long fact-finding mission to Basilicata – the instep of Italy’s boot – to uncover Vita’s story.

In a stunning turn of events, I not only learned the truth about Vita but also about the sad history of this beautiful, undiscovered land. Deeply researched and reported, Murder in Matera is a powerful story of immigration and motherhood, a profound testimony to how far one woman would go to find the truth and protect her family.

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of a Year

Helene Stapinski Why did I love this book?

This was the first book I read about Basilicata, and it is essential for anyone interested in Southern Italian roots. Written in staggeringly poetic language, it offers a sad but beautiful introduction to the culture and history of the region, which is hardly ever written about and barely even visited, even by Italians.

During WWII, Levi was sent as a prisoner to Basilicata as punishment, to work as a doctor among the peasants there. The book taught me about the feudal farm system still in place there well into the 20th century, about its inhospitable landscape, and its isolated, poverty-stricken population – my ancestors.

It set the bar high for me to write my own memoir and continues to inspire me. The title refers to the fact that the train line only went as far as Eboli – that Christianity and civilization stopped short of Basilicata.

By Carlo Levi, Frances Frenaye (translator),

Why should I read it?

5 authors picked Christ Stopped at Eboli as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'There should be a history of this Italy, a history outside the framework of time, confining itself to that which is changeless and eternal, in other words, a mythology. This Italy has gone its way in darkness and silence, like the earth, in a sequence of recurrent seasons and recurrent misadventures. Every outside influence has broken over it like a wave, without leaving a trace.'

So wrote Carlo Levi - doctor, painter, philosopher, and man of conscience - in describing the land and the people of Lucania, where he was banished in 1935, at the start of the Ethiopian war,…


Book cover of Women of the Shadows: Wives and Mothers of Southern Italy

Helene Stapinski Why did I love this book?

This incredible book gave names and faces to the women of Southern Italy, who, until recently, were mostly ignored by writers—and, by extension, readers. It taught me about the intensely difficult life my own female ancestors endured and stories that did not travel with them to the United States for those who immigrated—stories that were left behind, and for good reason.

The book was written in the 1970s after Cornelisen worked in the South, helping to establish nursery schools there. But the story is not her own. The stories belong to the strong, overworked, oppressed, inspiring women of Basilicata.

By Ann Cornelisen,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Women of the Shadows as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Conversations with and observations of peasant women of southern Italy reveal the hardships, sorrows, strengths, and perseverance of wives and mothers who are burdened with unremitting poverty and frustration


Book cover of The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

Helene Stapinski Why did I love this book?

I loved the generational sweep of this novel, its gorgeously written history of Calabria, and its character and relationship studies. Though it is fiction and borders on magical realism, Grames spent time in her ancestral village to give the setting and background a wonderful sense of authenticity.

I loved Stella, who overcame bad luck over the decades, and her intense relationship with her sister, Tina. As a woman who wondered about the back story of her own Italian grandmother and old aunts, I was captivated by the descriptions, the attention to language and detail, and this heartbreaking tale of crushing patriarchy.

By Juliet Grames,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'You don't read this book, you live it' Erin Kelly

'Holds the reader under a spell from start to finish' O, the Oprah Magazine

'If you're going through Elena Ferrante withdrawals, this is the book for you' Harper's Bazaar

If Stella Fortuna means 'lucky star,' then life must have a funny sense of humour.

Everybody in the Fortuna family knows the story of how the beautiful, fiercely independent Stella, who refused to learn to cook and who swore she would never marry, has escaped death time and time again.

From her childhood in Italy, to her adulthood in America, death…


Book cover of Stolen Figs: And Other Adventures in Calabria

Helene Stapinski Why did I love this book?

When I first read Mark’s book, I was jealous of the access he had to his own Southern Italian family. Over the decades, his father had kept strong bonds with the relatives back in Calabria, and so Mark goes with him on a journey that uncovers family secrets and the history of the region.

His beautifully wrought prose brings the landscape, the food, and its people to vivid life. Though it’s labeled a travelogue, it’s much more: a deeply felt story of family and what binds us together.

By Mark Rotella,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Stolen Figs as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

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;…


Book cover of Magic: A Theory from the South

Helene Stapinski Why did I love this book?

This anthropological study of Basilicata explained the superstitions that my family carried over with them to New Jersey at the turn of the century. It helped me understand where many of their “backward” ideas came from.

Delving into the folklore, home cures, witchcraft, and rituals of the South, De Martino respects the culture and places it in the context of the harsh, feudal society many of our ancestors escaped. It’s been an academic classic in Italy since the 1950s but was only translated into English for the first time in 2015 by American anthropologist Dorothy Zinn.

By Ernesto De Martino, Dorothy Louise Zinn (translator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Magic as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Though his work was little known outside Italian intellectual circles for most of the twentieth century, anthropologist and historian of religions Ernesto de Martino is now recognized as one of the most original thinkers in the field. This book is a testament to de Martino's innovation and engagement with Hegelian historicism and phenomenology - a work of ethnographic theory way ahead of its time. This new translation of his 1959 study of ceremonial magic and witchcraft in southern Italy shows how de Martino is not interested in the question of whether magic is rational or irrational but rather in why…


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By Victoria Golden, William Walters,

Book cover of A Last Survivor of the Orphan Trains: A Memoir

Victoria Golden Author Of A Last Survivor of the Orphan Trains: A Memoir

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Why am I passionate about this?

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What is my book about?

Four years old and homeless, William Walters boarded one of the last American Orphan Trains in 1930 and embarked on an astonishing quest through nine decades of U.S. and world history.

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Whether escaping his abusers, jumping freights as a preteen during the Great Depression, or infiltrating Japanese-held islands as a teenage Marine during WWII, William’s unique path paralleled the tumult of the twentieth century—and personified the American dream.

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What is this book about?

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From 1854 to the early 1930s, the American Orphan Trains transported 250,000 children from the streets and orphanages of the East Coast into homes in the emerging West. Unfortunately, families waiting for the trains weren’t always dreams come true—many times they were nightmares.

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