Drawing out her mother's childhood memories of life in southern Italy at the dawn of the twentieth century, Mary Melfi takes an unconventional approach to autobiographical writing. Italy Revisited serves as a double memoir, told in dialogue between a mother and a daughter. The conversation takes the reader to a medieval town high up in the mountains where time is told by the shadow the sun casts, where wheat and olive oil are the currency of choice (barter is in use), and where marriage is as much about property as it is about love. As they re-create that vanished world, the pair finds greater understanding of the tumultuous relationships that sometimes exist between immigrant mothers and their children.

A significant part of Troy's history, and that of its neighborhood, is the immigration of diverse ethnic groups. By 1900, the US Census reported 465 Italian-born residents in Troy, and in 1930, there were 2,000 Italian immigrants. From 1900 to the 1950s, Little Italy, bordering the central business district from Ferry Street to the Poestenkill and from Fourth Street to Prospect Park, was predominately an Italian or Italian American neighborhood. Among the close-knit families of Troy's Little Italy were import stores, 60 mom-and-pop shops, churches, schools, a community center, and a veterans' post, all of which were found within a 20-block radius. America's Little Italy neighborhoods became centers of ethnic culture and heritage. In the 1960s, urban renewal challenged Troy and other cities with mixed results. Today, there is resurgence in Troy, with plans to expand the city's central historic district to include most of Little Italy. In the meantime, empty nesters, artists, and young professionals are moving into the neighborhood as valuable community partners continue to support the efforts of the neighborhood group Troy Little Italy.

Bringing together the work of a ground-breaking group of scholars working on the Italian Risorgimento to consider how modern Italian national identity was first conceived and constructed politically, the book makes a timely contribution to current discussions about the role of patriotism and the nature of nationalism in present-day Italy.

This book examines the concept of translation as a return to origins and as restitution of lost narratives, and is based on the idea of diaspora as a term that depicts the longing to return home and the imaginary reconstructions and reconstitutions of home by migrants and translators. The author analyses a corpus made up of novels and a memoir by Italian-Canadian writers Mary Melfi, Nino Ricci and Frank Paci, examining the theme of return both within the writing itself and also in the discourse surrounding the translations of these works into Italian. These ‘reconstructions’ are analysed through the lens of translation, and more specifically through the notion of written code-switching, understood here as a fictional tool which symbolizes the translational movements between different points of view. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of translation and interpreting, migration studies, and Italian and diasporic writing.

It is widely accepted that English Renaissance drama owes its extraordinary richness and variety to the blending of elements originating from the medieval heritage and classical and Italian dramatic traditions. This grafting of the "Italian world" onto the English Renaissance goes far beyond the conventional research of the literary sources. The articles in this collection explore English Renaissance drama through new and challenging aspects of influence and through investigations into classical and Italian theater. The volume moves from early Elizabethan to late Jacobean drama. The area of research ranges from New Classical Comedy to commedia erudita, from the Renaissance theory of tragedy and tragicomedy to the birth of pastoral drama and beyond.