Stolen Figs: And Other Adventures in Calabria
by By Rotella, Mark
Category: Travel , Europe , Italy

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 Rotella's 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.