Her father, Carlo Nenci, is a poor tenant farmer who toils for the Baron Mancuso di Valerba, an absentee landlord who takes half of everything produced by the villagers.
One day Giosuè, a charcoal maker from the next village, presents Umbertina with a heart-shaped holder for her knitting needles, which he made himself out of tin.
Umbertina likes Giosuè, who has beautiful dark hair and eyes, but her father instead promises her to Serafino Longobardi, an older man who had fought in the Campaign of 1860.
Well in advance of the wedding, Umbertina asks the local priest's housekeeper, Nelda, to weave her a matrimonial bedspread in the traditional Calabrian style.
Umbertina sells her bedspread to a social worker, and the family moves to Cato, New York, where some of their old friends from Castagna have settled.
While Serafino labors at the railroad yard, the enterprising Umbertina begins selling freshly made pizza and panini to his co-workers for lunch.
After college she travels to Italy, where she meets Alberto Morosini, a poet some twenty years her senior who comes from an old, established Venetian family.
While still grieving her mother, she learns she is pregnant by her feckless American boyfriend, and endures a painful, illegal abortion.
She begins spending time with Jason, a law student from an old, established New England family who is staying in Rome with his diplomat father.
Not realizing it once belonged to her great grandmother, Tina wishes Umbertina had brought something like that with her to America to pass down to her descendants.
On a visit to Jason's family home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts—not far from where an Italian bark, the Castagna, was shipwrecked in 1914—she plants rosemary.
A paperback edition published by Bantam in 1982 was packaged in the style of a romance novel; the cover featured "three women, hair streaming romantically."
"[2] It is also unusual in that it details the everyday struggles of working-class immigrants, which have traditionally been omitted from official historical narratives.