Blending excerpts from audiovisual archival material, literary sources, and original video-interviews with direct witnesses of the 1943 Allied Landing in Sicily, the presentation read a largely forgotten pivotal historical event of WWII through the lens of foodways. In Fiore’s approach, as a memory and narrative device, food allows for an alternate history of the liberation campaign through complicating both the myth of the Land of Abundance incarnated by the U.S. military forces and the image of a destitute Sicily that the Americans embraced.

Included in the Jerre Mangione Lecture Series and sponsored by the Center for Italian Studies, the lecture fostered a lively debate among graduate students and faculty alike with a mix of touching family recollections, intellectual curiosity towards the subject, and careful inquiry about the research methodology.

March 10, 2026 marked the launch of , a book co-translated from Italian by Dr. Teresa Fiore (Inserra Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies, WLC Department). Written by Nikolai Prestia in Italian, this autofiction work was published by Rutgers University Press in the OVOI series (Other Voices in Italian). Enriched by a preface by Loredana Polezzi, a translator’s note by Teresa Fiore, and the cover photo by Lilia Pino Blouin created specifically for the book, the publication is part of a collaboration between the author and a mother-daughter translator duo, Teresa Fiore and Daniela Chaudhary Fiore.

Largely based on Prestia’s early life, the novel portrays the experience of the protagonist Kola growing up in 1990s Russia in a family marked by poverty, substance abuse, and neglect, which is the reason why Kola and his sister are eventually admitted into the orphanage system. Here, Kola comes face to face with a different but equally daunting challenge: navigating an unfamiliar and sometimes hostile world haunted by the absence of his mother. The ensuing journey, which eventually culminates in the adoption by an Italian family, alternates moments of both trauma and deliverance, while asking fundamental questions about our ability to reconcile ourselves with unfathomable loss.

Harrowing yet lyrical, Nikolai Prestia’s prize-winning 2021 novel is a testament to the duality of memory in its ability to both hurt and heal, and to the transformative power of those figures, adults and peers alike, who contribute to a child’s development. A rarity even in the realm of books on adoption, the novel serves up a wrenching glimpse into the back stories that often precede the adoption of an older child.

In Italy, the book was the winner of the Massarosa Literary Prize for Debut Novel, was long listed for the Comisso Prize, and short listed for the Premio Zocca Giovani. Originally published in 2022 by Marislio, it was reprinted in the prestigious Economica Feltrinelli series after several reprints. See some early .

Special thanks to Alessandro Vettori for embracing the proposal in 2022, Sandra Waters and Eilis Kierans for their wordsmithing as editors, Carah Nasseem, and the whole team at Rutgers University Press, for bringing the project into harbor. This project was also made possible through the support of presentations, workshops, and services by the Inserra Chair at ����vlog over the years.

Presentations of the book in Italian:
1. Online conversation with Nikolai Prestia at ����vlog (2022)
2. In-person presentation in Sicily (2024)

Part of the broader project launched by Dr. Fiore, titled Adoption Studies.

This ever-expanding site available in both and , and configured in mobile-friendly mode accessible via cell phone, is an aggregator of pre-existing forms of knowledge as well as new textual, video, and audio material, gathered in collaboration with professors of the University of Palermo (including the Agrigento branch, Polo Territoriale), environmentalist guides, chefs, photographers, architects, local residents, etc., and co-implemented with Ph.D. students Giacomo Frazzetta and Doğa Tekin. The project was co-sponsored by the Agrigento 2025 Foundation, the Italian Ministry of Culture, the Region of Sicily, the Municipality of Agrigento, the Inserra Chair (����vlog), and UCLA, with the logistical support of the Municipality of Realmonte.

The project has already been covered in other media: , , and .

Short link:

Through an experimental narrative, the film tells the journey to the United States of the protagonist, a Sicilian woman forced to emigrate to the USA with an imposed arranged marriage, leaving behind a partner and her children. As such, the woman becomes “other” both with respect to the world she comes from and that of Lawrence, Massachusetts, in which she finds herself living after crossing the ocean. The theme of the video is highly relevant to the Agrigento 2025 dossier, entitled “The Self, the Other and Nature: Cultural Relations and Transformations” and places emphasis on the gender issue, in a province characterized by strong emigration, including female emigration, both in the past and today.

Maria Rapicavoli’s video work is an adaptation of the real story of a relative of hers, whose micro-history as “other” is intertwined with the US macro-history at the time of the Spanish flu epidemic and the great strikes that redefined the concept of work in the 20th century. From a philosophical point of view, Rapicavoli’s work is inspired by the words of Simone de Beauvoir in the essay “Woman as Other” which serves as the introduction to The Second Sex, a revolutionary book published in 1949: “It is not the Other who, by defining itself as Other, defines the One; the Other is posited as Other by the One positing itself as One. But in order for the Other not to turn into the One, the Other has to submit to this foreign point of view.”

Created in 2020, the two-channel version of the video had an extremely limited audience due to the impact of COVID on the art world, although it was screened in prestigious spaces. This installation in Agrigento therefore has a key role in making the video in the original version accessible to a wide and varied audience, for the first time in Italy and in particular in Sicily, which is one of the two locations of the story.

The opening of the installation takes place only a week after the in November 2025, a day at the General Assembly at the United Nations in 1999.

THE OTHER: A FAMILIAR STORY is a video installation included in the project called , as part of , with the support of the Italian Ministry of Culture, the Fondazione Agrigento Capitale, the Sicilian Region, the Municipality of Agrigento, and the Inserra Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies at ����vlog.

�� ��

The work was initially commissioned by The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, exhibited in collaboration with Westfälischer Kunstverein, and supported by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism (now MIC) within the Italian Council Program.

Resources
Further information on this
Maria Rapicavoli’s
Maria Rapicavoli’s
project

Maria D. Rapicavoli was born in Catania and lives and works in New York. She obtained a Master’s degree in Art from Goldsmiths University in London (2005) and a degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania (2001). She participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2012. In 2024 she was an Artist Fellow at the Swiss Institute of Rome. In 2023/24 she taught as an artist at the Children’s Museum of the Arts in New York.

She has exhibited in several group exhibitions (The High Line, New York; ICAMilano; Socrates Sculpture Park, New York; Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster; Magazzino Arte Italiana, Cold Spring, NY; Whitechapel Gallery, London; The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, New York; Villa Croce Museum, Genoa; Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, Turin; Villa Croce Museum, Genoa; Palazzo Reale, Milan; Riso, Museum of Contemporary Art, Palermo; Palazzo Strozzi Foundation, Florence; Italian Cultural Institute in London and New York). She has received numerous awards and scholarships, including the Italian Council Award VI edition (2019); New York Award – The Italian Institute and the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies, New York (2021). For years she has been an associate artist at the prestigious Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York. For more information, see

Teresa Fiore holds the Inserra Chair of Italian Studies and Italo-American Studies at ����vlog (New Jersey, USA). She has also taught at Harvard, Yale and NYU. She is the author of the book Pre-occupied Spaces: A remapping of transnational migrations and Italian colonial legacies (Mondadori/Le Monnier 2021), which also addresses the topics of the Italian diaspora and gender, and of numerous articles on migration to and from Italy. In 2019 she was awarded the title of Knight of the Order of the Star of Italy for her work in cultural diplomacy between Italy and the USA through a regular calendar of events(). She is currently working on a project on food practices during the Allied landing in Sicily in 1943 (Food, Hunger and Migration) and a project on the cultural representation of adoption (Adoption Studies Project). For Agrigento Capital of Culture 2025, she coordinated four programs within the project (a program on the SBARCO/Landing of the Allies in Sicily in 1943, a project of digital research on the Scala dei Turchi, an exhibit about the Italian citizenship law e videoinstallation about emigration and gender)

Dr. Fiore, a former Fulbright scholar, illustrated the work done at ����vlog in the field of internationalization of the education experience: from the focus on Made in Italy in the Tri-State Area with the BA in Language, Business, and Culture to the Translation Project which created unique internships in Italy for students specializing in subtitling and surtitling for the Performing Arts.

Fiore has highlighted two recent projects: her 2025-26 sabbatical project about the Allied Landing in Sicily, which has produced a , as well as the two-month internship in a Sicily-based musical for three Montclair State students of Voice, Musical Theater and Italian who have performed in Il risveglio degli dei in the Valley of the Temples of Agrigento for several magical dawns.

“Given the upcoming 250th Anniversary of the foundation of the U.S., there will be opportunities for collaborations to highlight the historical relationships between Sicily and the U.S. as well as relevant current projects,” Cook remarked.

When: Monday, September 22 at 6pm

How: Send an email to italy@liberationroute.com to get the Zoom link
The webinar will also be streamed through FB ()

Speakers:
Teresa Fiore (����vlog): “Telling the Story of the Landing through an Accessible Multi-media Approach”
Carmela Zangara (Associazione MEMENTO): “A Project to Recover and Enhance the Memory of WWII on the Central-southern Sicilian Coast”
Mirco Carrattieri (moderator)

Included in the broader initiatives of the 80th anniversary of the end of the war, the webinar aims to illustrating the various languages used to remember the landing in the past, as well as this year, in order to give proper visibility to an event such as the Sicily Landing that deserves to have a more central role in the official narrative of the war.

Based on the questions from the audience, the debate that will follow intends to collect suggestions for future editions of the anniversary and for the creation of sightseeing routes. Please participate actively to make this rediscovery of the past dynamic and shared as a public history project!

In collaboration with Inserra Chair at ����vlog, , Municipality of Licata, , and .

Other resources: Mirco Carrattieri on WWII and Public History at ����vlog

 

After auditions held in March, two students were granted a scholarship to fund a two-month stay in Agrigento, rehearsing and performing with the Savatteri Produzioni company: Mia Grizzuti is a major in Musical Theatre (CART) and Brianna Coppolino is a Master’s student in Voice, Cali School of Music — they are both taking classes in the Italian Program. In love with the idea of performing in the magical Valley of the Greek Temples (), Emma Mason decided to participate through direct funding from Savatteri Produzioni, after her graduation (BA in Voice, Cali School).

Read the full story and see photos from the production at Inserra.

(L to R) Mark Rotella, Teresa Fiore, Maria Laurino and Erica Moretti

Laurino’s (2024) is an investigative work into an adoption program run by the Vatican, which between 1950 and 1970, sent almost 4,000 Italian children to the U.S. These children were initially labeled as “war orphans” and then simply “orphans”, despite the fact that they were not orphans. Her work, based on archival research and interviews conducted in Italy and the U.S. with adoptees, adoptive families, birth mothers, priests, social workers, etc., shows that in reality these children were the offspring of unwed mothers. Often struggling economically, these women were deemed unfit to raise their children or lured into thinking that their children would be taken care of for a while and then returned. In the most chilling cases, they were told their children had died, when in reality they were taken to the U.S. to be raised by Italian American families who were unaware of the full story.

After an introduction about the genesis and development of this project, Maria Laurino was in conversation with Italian cultural historian Erica Moretti, who explored the deep extent to which the Italian American community was involved in assistance programs in support of Italy after WWII. Dr. Moretti highlighted the fact that the support program was international and covered several areas related to refugees, POW’s etc who were forced to relocate by the war. She also discussed how the adoption program involved entities and intermediaries other than the Catholic Church, thus demonstrating the complexity of this practice that was driven by good intentions but ultimately produced loss, grief, and identity disorientation, all of which surface in Maria Laurino’s research.

Maria Laurino and Professor Teresa Fiore (center) with students from the Honors Program class on adoption.

Students from the Italian American in Film class participated after watching a documentary that Maria Laurino mentions in her book: Pia’s story: My Brother, My Sister, Sold for a Fistful of Lire (1998) by Belgium-based Basile Sallustio, about an elderly Italian woman who searches for her siblings who were adopted in the U.S. with the support of the Catholic Church. A clip from the movie highlights the secrecy of the system that she has to challenge over and over again until she is able to meet her siblings. Students in the Honors program class titled “The Meanings of Adoption” read Laurino’s book in its entirety and were inspired to ask questions about the role of translation in the encounters with Italian birth families, the agency of women in economically depressed conditions, and the role of Catholic spiritual values in this story. One of the students, Nour Shalash, remarked: “It’s the first time that as students we get to hear in person the author of one of the books we are covering in class! Learning about the motivations behind the project and the long time devoted to its completion directly from Maria Laurino has added even more value to this fascinating book.” The broader audience contributed with questions about the complications entailed in the search for original identity documents, and they also shared first-hand recollections of the days in which similar practices of forced adoption took place in the U.S.

The event was co-organized and sponsored by the Inserra Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies and the Coccia Institute for the Italian Experience in America, in collaboration with the Italian Program in the World Languages and Cultures Department. “It’s been a pleasure to work with my colleague Mark Rotella at the Coccia Institute to bring an author whose interests continue to speak to both our missions on campus” Dr. Fiore remarked. “I am particularly appreciative of the time Maria Laurino spent with the students after the event, and of the possibilities that Dr. Moretti’s research opens to continue a conversation on important topics related to the US-Italy relationships after WWII.”

Students working in groups during the workshop session

The talk centered on the notion of translation at large as a philosophy and practice of moving from one dimension to another, whether it’s language, culture… or family as in the case of adoptees. Indeed, both the books Prof. Fiore addressed – Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal? (2011) and and Nikolai Prestia’s Dasvidania (2021) – are written by adoptees who resort to the genre of memoir to translate their experiences of loss and abandonment, as well as abuse and trauma, into stories, while translating themselves from the birth family to the adoptive one. Translators of lived experience, Winterson and Prestia, have also been published in translation. Students developed their translation of Winterson’s book and then compared them to the official publication in Italian. Prof. Fiore shared aspects of the translation of Dasvidania, which will come out in English in 2026 with Rutgers University Press in the OVOI series, as the result of a co-translation by Prof. Fiore and Daniela Chaudhary Fiore.

Students of the Translation graduate class and Professor Fiore

“I am very grateful to Prof. D’Amore for inviting me to talk about a topic that is at the center of my current research agenda (Adoption Studies Project). It was a pleasure to meet the students as part of a workshop in which they have shown refined translation skills and a well-honed awareness about the challenges of this practice. By mere coincidence, the talk was held in the same room where, in 2024, I first introduced the Dasvidania translation project in the course of the AATI (American Association of Italian Teachers) conference. This time, it was exciting to announce that the book is now in the final stages of copyediting!” – Fiore commented. And she added: “The talk was also an opportunity to appreciate once again the breathtaking site of the the University of Catania’s Department of Humanities, a World Heritage building. The is a fascinating complex functioning like a palimpsest of several historical periods, from the Roman era in the foundations to the present with contemporary additions designed to enhance the 16th century structure rebuilt after the 1693 earthquake. A veritable work of architectural translation!”

Maria Laurino was born and raised in northern New Jersey. She�� is the author of the national bestselling memoir Were You Always an Italian?, an exploration of how stereotypes and class prejudice influenced Italian-American identity; the memoir Old World Daughter, New World Mother, a meditation on contemporary feminism; and The Italian Americans: A History, the companion book to a national PBS documentary.

Tue. March 25, 2025 6pm�� – SBUS (School of Business) 140
For info and to reserve a seat, see webpage

Introduced by: Mark Rotella (Coccia Institute)
Moderated by: Teresa Fiore (Inserra Chair) and (FIT – Fashion Institute of Technology)

Jointly organized and sponsored by the Inserra Endowed Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies��and the Coccia Institute for the Italian Experience in America, in collaboration with the Italian Program (Department of World Languages and Cultures).