Italy is as close to me as appetite. Indeed, my first memory of the country is gastronomic. It's September 1948. I'm coming into Italy on a train from Cannes, and, at a station stop in Ventimiglia, on the Italian side of the frontier with France, I push down the window in my third-class coach. From among the crowds of milling people and porters on the platform, I unerringly single out the food vendor from whom, with gestures only, I buy my first Italian food, a panino— crusty bread around paper-thin slices of smooth white-flecked mortadella, a noble, venerable, and fragrant sausage of Bologna considerably debased in this country as baloney. The good air, the animation of the people, the fact of being in Italy, and the taste of that basic, fundamental food delivered me into the kind of transcendent exaltation I once experienced long before, as a child, at the solemn moment of First Communion.

Arrival in Italy was communion; it was the sense of Italy as the base of my identity and bloodline; the place where all my grandparents, and everyone before them, had been born. My desire for Italy had surfaced on its own thrust, breaking through layers of family repression where Italy and all things Italian were somehow put out of sight and mind, tinged as they were with indefinable feelings of shame and embarrassment. The family fervor was to be "American."