An Immigrant's Love Letter to Food, Family, and Resilience
by
ROSANNA MICELOTTA BATTIGELLI was born in Calabria, Italy and immigrated to Canada with her family at three years of age. She is an alumna of the Humber School for Writers and her work has been published in over twenty anthologies and literary/academic journals. Rosanna has garnered awards for her historical novel La Brigantessa and her fiction collection Pigeon Soup & Other Stories. Rosanna also six romance novels published with Harlequin and two children’s books with Pajama Press. A proud Italian-Canadian, her latest release is Product of Italy, Made in Canada: An Immigrant’s Love Letter to Food, Family, and Resilience. (Latitude 46 Publishing, October 2025) She lives in Sudbury, Ontario.
PRODUCT OF ITALY, MADE IN CANADA
(with two POV narrators)
In April 1963, Canada was not our Canada. Canada was a place where our ship landed, unloaded the lot of us out at Pier 21, and rested its ample body on the cool blue sheets of the Atlantic before puffing its way back to Italy. The mighty Saturnia—how many immigrants traveled nestled within its ribcage during its lifetime? Felt its heart beating along with theirs, felt it heaving with every breath of the capricious wind.
We took the train from Halifax to Montreal. We were five: my mother, my father, older sister, younger brother, me. Then the journey west to Ontario, to the northern mining town of Sudbury, our final stop, where my mother’s brother had already settled and was working at the International Nickel Company—Inco—where my father would eventually find work, too.
The Canadian landscape in May did not please her mother, whose heartstrings were still attached to Italy.
They trailed her everywhere like a lost puppy, tangling her emotions like a fallen ball of yarn. It took her a long time to get used to Canada, to northern Ontario, with its short growing season and its seemingly endless winters of swirling blizzards, waist-high snowdrifts, and freezing rain. Her parents had risked everything and left their homeland to find work in the land of opportunity. The land that had attracted them, and thousands more, to the possibility of a better life. A land with different languages, different customs, different dreams.
COLLAPSEScott Overton on Indigo wrote:Read the full review at: https://www.thesudburystar.com/entertainment/new-book-captures-the-immigrant-experience-in-sudbury.
Read the full review at:
https://www.indigo.ca/en-ca/product-of-italy-made-in-canada-an-immigrants-love-letter-to-food-family-and-resilience/9781988989983.html
