num_pages: 280
description: A New York Times Best Wine Book of 2021A Washington Post Best Wine Book of 2021Named one of the Best Wine Books of 2021 by Henry Jeffreys timatkin.com South of Somewhere begins and ends in American writer Robert Camutos maternal ancestral town of Vico Equense Italya tiny paradise south of Naples on the Sorrento Peninsula. It was here in 1968 at ten years old that the author first tasted Italian life spending his own summer of love surrounded by relatives at the familys seaside pizzeria and restaurant. He fell in love with a way of living and with the rhythms flavors and aromas of the Southern Mediterranean.Fifty years later Camuto returns to Vico connecting with family members and a new generation. A lot has the old family restaurant has been razed and the seaside has been developed with hotels and restaurants including a famous two-Michelin-starred restaurant in a medieval tower now owned by a younger cousin. Though there are more foreign visitors the essentials of beauty food family bonds and simplicity have not changed. And here Camuto finds hope that this way of life can continue.Camutos fine-grained storytelling in this series of portraits takes us beyond the usual objective views of viniculture nto the elusive and magical world of Italian South-ness. While on one level able to create an instructive narrative about Southern Italys twenty-first-century wine and cultural renaissance Camutos unswerving eye juxtaposes the good and the badimmeasurable beauty and persistent blight anti-mafia forces and corruption hope for the future and fatalismin a land that remains an infinite source of fascination and sensory pleasure.
language: English
title: South of Somewhere: Wine, Food, and the Soul of Italy
publisher: University of Nebraska Press