Stolen Figs: And Other Adventures in Calabria

Calabria is the toe of the boot that is Italy -- a rugged peninsula where grapevines and fig and olive trees cling to the mountainsides during scorching summers. Calabria is also a seedbed of Italian-American culture; in North America more people of Italian heritage trace their roots to Calabria than to almost any other region in Italy.. Mark Rotellas Stolen Figs -- named a Best Travel Book of 2003 by Condé Nast Traveler -- is a marvelous evocation of Calabria. A grandson of Calabrese immigrants Rotella persuades his father to visit the region for the first time in thirty years; once there he meets Giuseppe a postcard photographer who becomes his guide. As they travel around the region Giuseppe initiates Rotella -- and the reader -- into its secrets: how to make a soppressata and nduja and of course how to steal a fig without committing a crime. Stolen Figs is a model travelogue -- at once charming and wise and full of an earthy and unpretentious sense of life that now as ever characterizes Calabria and its people.