BOOK + DOCUMENTARY
Author: Paolo Battaglia
Dimensions: 21×30, over 200 color illustrations
Pages: 200
Year:2019
Language: English
An illustrated book and a 3-episode documentary to discover the history of the small Italian American communities in the Heartland of the United States.
Italian American Country is a multimedia project with an illustrated book and a documentary which to be released in September 2019. Both products will be available both in Italian and in English. The book will follow the journey from New York to California. Each chapter is dedicated to one of the communities with historical photographs combined to photographs of the communities today. The chapters dedicated to the towns intertwine with themes that crossed the paths of most Italians in America. As an example, the chapter on the Macaroni Railroad highlights the close relationship between the diffusion of railways and the distribution of Italians in America; its starting point is the construction of a small railway in the south of Texas promoted by an entrepreneur from Foggia. It came to be known as Macaroni Railroad because most of the workers who built it came from Italy.
