Description:
The Italy of the John M. Glionna's ancestors cannot be found in the museums of Florence, among treasures shaped by the exquisite touch of da Vinci and Michelangelo, but a world away, on the peninsula's infamous boot. Their hands gnarled from planting pomodori, aglio and melanzana, his forefathers were peasant-farmers from the agrarian south - that other Italy - dirt-poor and uneducated, a land with a history of witch's spells and pagan gods. For them, working the earth wasn't art, it was a fundamental duty.
In 2023, Glionna experienced a cultural awakening: he travelled to his grandfather's home village to explore the landscape where his roots run centuries-deep. As he meets distant relatives, he asks questions echoed by all Americans exploring their ancestral homeland: "Who are these people?" "Who am I?" As a veteran Los Angeles Times journalist in search of his long-repressed Italianitá, he travels far off the tourist map, where he examines his grandfather's motives for emigrating. Beyond poverty and disease, he learns, southerners of his era faced a historic discrimination from their own countrymen that also drove them abroad. The book examines his father's upbringing as a child of immigrants and focuses on a realization that the author, like his father and grandfather, is proudly, deeply Italian, southern Italian.
Brief description: JOHN M. GLIONNA is a writer drawn to the edges of place and experience-where landscapes and lives grow raw, revealing their truest selves. A former Los Angeles Times correspondent who reported from Asia and the American West, he now writes literary nonfiction that illuminates the rugged, the overlooked, and the unexpected. johnglionna.com.He is the author of Outback Nevada: Real Stories from the Silver State (University of Nevada Press, 2022), No Friday Night Lights: Reservation Football on the Edge of America (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), and Rebels and Outliers: Real Stories from the American West (University of Nevada Press, 2025).His work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Outside, and The California Sunday Magazine, among many others, and has been included in The Best American Sports Writing. Several of his stories have been optioned for film.Born into a large Italian American family in suburban Syracuse, New York, he has spent years exploring his long-overlooked Italianità-a quest that, in 2024, took him to Rome as a fellow at the Italian Diaspora Studies Summer Seminar, sponsored by the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute. There, he deepened a personal project-a return to southern Italy to trace his family roots buried in the soil of memory and heritage.He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Lily, gathering the threads of ordinary and extraordinary lives alike-always in search of the next tale worth telling.
Review Quotes: "With profound sensitivity and a journalistic eye for detail, Glionna takes us on a journey from America to the forgotten landscapes of southern Italy."
Francesco Mancini, Mayor of Pomarico"Returning to his grandfather's village in Basilicata, Glionna gives us an evocative Italian American memoir tracing his journey from the New World to the Old Country. We feel an American heart learning the language of belonging, one sunrise at a time.Donna Chirico, Professor of Psychology, York College/CUNY "John M. Glionna's book reminds us that the places we come from never abandon us. "Francesco Glionna, architect, historian"This is a book that speaks to everyone, written with simplicity and warmth, capable of relating not only the portrait of a grandfather and his village, but also the universal sense of belonging and roots."Mario Bruno Liccese, photographer and correspondent"John M. Glionna's In the Land of the Midday Sun is the rare family memoir that finds the deeply-rooted truth of his heritage."Glenn Stout, Author of Young Woman and the Sea"In a small southern Italian village, John M. Glionna unearths a rich network of family connections, charming eccentrics and his own place in the life of a small village in southern Italy, a world seldom visited by tourists. It's a captivating account of self-discovery by a first-rate storyteller." E. Thomas McClanahan, author of Pranked