Literary Nonfiction. Italian & Italian American Studies. Translated by Fabio Girelli Carasi. I have often been asked by Italians: 'Who are these Italian Americans? Why don't they speak Italian like us? Why don't they read the same books we read? Why don't they behave like us? Why do they serve a lunch of spaghetti with meat balls as if it were an Italian dish instead of the sorry marriage of a Swedish recipe with an Italian one?' As I said earlier, Italian Americans bear the wrong name. They are not a mixture of Italy and America: they are Italians lost in America. --from the foreword