Vita

New York, 1903: in the city of great opportunities, where twelve thousand foreigners land every day, where Italians are seen as criminals and backward people, Diamante and Vita, two children aged twelve and nine, arrive from the village of Tufo in Minturno, a province of Caserta. He is silent, proud and brave. She is instinctive, jealous and able to move objects with just a glance. In a rundown boarding house on Prince Street, in the poor Italian neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, they are met by Angeloa, Vita's father, together with Lena, the woman he lives with, as well as Rocco, Geremia, Coca-Cola and, above all, America. Amid hunger, adventures, threats from the Black Hand and a violent father, the two children, bound tightly to each other by an early and premature passion, discover together death and the alphabet, thrills, sex, love, betrayal and loyalty.

For ten years, Diamante, always waiting for a better fate, will work as a newspaper seller, garbage collector, apprentice in a funeral agency, railway water works worker, tool carrier in a film company making cowboy movies; Vita will make artificial flowers, become a thief, street kid, cook, the lover of a bandit, seller of kisses, words and restless homes, both firmly convinced that they will find the happiness recognized by law as a right that belongs to them under the Constitution of the United States of America. But their fragile dreams are not necessarily destined to come true, at least not in New York and not for both of them together. Forty years later, in 1944, Vita's American son goes to Italy to fight on the Southern Front with the American Army, right near the Guariliano river in the village of Tufo, to look for the man who might have been his father. Adventurous and captivating like a novel, but "Vita" is not just a novel. The two children really existed, as did the boarding house and the characters of this gripping story. The writer, Melania G. Mazzucco, while writing it, searched for the roots of her family's history, relying on the accounts of her father and blind uncle; she found documents and data in the newspapers of the time, private correspondence, Brooklyn police archives, ship passenger lists and files of American railway companies. The novel "Vita" by Melania G. Mazzucco was translated by Mimoza Hysa and published by Albas.