Among the exhibits were figures of men, women, and children clothed in the original costumes of their native land at the time of their arrival in America. A special exhibit called the “Anna Giordani Collection” was made up of clothes, trinkets, and other belongings of the immigrants that one Anna Giordani, the collector, had assembled over her years of working with the poor on the Lower East Side. Tina stood entranced at the spectacle of a magnificent bright-hued gloriously woven bedspread that bore the motifs of Calabrian design she had seen repeated in modern-day spreads during her trip through her ancestral region. In fact, as she neared the glass of the case and read the card, it said: “Origin: Calabria. Owner unknown. Acquired by Anna Giordani in 1886.” (407)

The silence that surrounds the “unknown” owner powerfully articulates the ways in which the history of the poor is written: the exhibit honors the name of the social worker, Anna Giordani, who never managed to “like” the immigrants, but “did her duty unflinchingly, as a kind of penance and discipline for her soul” (66)—and who clearly kept Umbertina’s exquisite coperta for herself. In what can be described as a blatant case of cultural robbery, the immigrants themselves are relegated to the silent condition of namelessness. Tina cannot possibly recognize the bedspread as her great-grandmother’s since the story has not been passed down to her. While she regrets that Umbertina did not bring a bedspread like the one displayed at the museum—“then it would have been passed down to me, maybe” (407)—an almost miraculous encounter with her dead ancestor occurs as the “woven designs of grapes and tendrils and fig leaves and flowers and spreading acanthus” speak to her “of Italy and the past and keeping it all together for the future” (408).

Tina’s quest for selfhood, a quest that is intertwined with the understanding of one’s cultural identity, remains, on the surface, only partially successful since she herself does not become a writer, a storyteller who can keep it “all together for the future.” Tina instead becomes a Dante scholar, thus connecting to an Italian tradition that is dramatically distant from the story of the bedspread. However, Tina’s journey traces the development of Italian American female identity. Tina, who at first rejects and is even ashamed of the appellation “Italian-American” (315), comes to embrace “Italian-American identity” (359) during her trip to Calabria. And while she feels that Umbertina has “eluded her” (393), once she is back in the United States the trip “flashes through her mind like glinting pieces of a mosaic that she tried to shape into a whole, a pattern of serious design” (392).