The bedspread symbolizes tradition, female work, Umbertina’s ambition, and the memory of her land sealed in the intricate design of leaves and flowers. The “traditional” design of the bedspread, with its “brightly colored yarn embroidered in bunches of grapes, fig leaves, twining ivy, flowers and the stylized hearts on the bright yellow-orange ground of thick homespun” (44), evokes the longed-for abundance and generosity of the homeland that Umbertina leaves with deliberation but cannot help missing and grieving over, despite her determination not to regret anything.22 Umbertina’s longing for the land she has left behind is not articulated through poetical reveries like, for example, Grandma Doria’s imaginative stories in Tina De Rosa’s Paper Fish.23 In that book, Italy lacks any kind of geographical reality: it is instead a mythological reminiscence that is contrasted to the grim physical environment of the Italian ghetto in Chicago.24 Wary of nostalgia and mythologizing, and paying scrupulous attention to the historical circumstances out of which the stories of her characters are born, Barolini never once loses sight of the social injustice that motivates her characters’ emigration25: for Barolini, there is nothing romantic about poverty. Yet Umbertina’s longing paradoxically resists the recognition that Italy has not been generous to her or the millions of its children forced to leave by devastating poverty, malnutrition, and disease.26

These hardships were the direct result of brutal exploitation by feudal landlords and the Italian government. In fact, Umbertina’s story of inherited poverty is the story of Calabrian peasants and shepherds abused by the absentee landlords of the Calabrian latifondi. In the nineteenth century, “partnerships” between landlords and peasants and shepherds, always mediated by fattori and caporali, were an integral part of the feudal economy of the Italian South. Such “partnerships”—in which the baron provided grazing land and flocks to shepherds (which both Umbertina and Serafino are), and the shepherds provided labor—proved “immensely profitable for the baron”: “the baron’s income was assured even in bad years when the ‘gain’ in ‘fruits of the flock’ was meager and corresponded to starvation wages for the shepherds” (Petrusewicz 118–19).

Of the baron’s existence, Umbertina was quite sure even though she had never seen him; she grazed the goats upon his hills and gathered wood and nuts from his forests; he existed every time his fattore came riding through the village to collect payments and levies. . . . She knew that he and his wife existed, for they had to be fed prodigious amounts of food and wine her father and the others worked out of the land and turned over to the fattore. (28–29)

Peasants such as Carlo Nenci, Umbertina’s father, were equally exploited by a baron who, “in return for doing nothing and knowing nothing, but for having the good fortune to be born who he was and thus owning all the land and trees and streams within sight . . . was given half of what was produced by Carlo Nenci and the other men of Castagna” (24).