A hundred years on, the subject that draws the most interest from ethnic writers of all backgrounds is that of emigration/immigration. Our individual stories differ in the details, but any good story of immigration is a story for all Americans, since we're a country of immigrants. While Italian-Americans have been working out the best way to get their versions of this story down on paper, Melania Mazzucco, born in Rome in 1966, beat them to it.

Her "Vita" won the coveted Strega Prize in Italy upon publication in 2003 and it was published in hardcover in the U.S. last year. It just recently arrived in American bookshops in paperback and remains the only one of her works available here.

The book is based on the story of Mazzucco's own family, but she says, she never considered doing it as straight history.

"I never thought of writing the story of my family as non-fiction," she says via email from Rome, where she has just returned from a trip to Tonga. "The experience of Italian emigration in the world has, in the last 100 years, generated a large body of nonfiction: first-hand memoirs, documentaries, photographic exhibits, films. But, at least in Italian literature, there was a void. It's as if authors were unable to find the words to tell this epic story, which with the exception of the two world wars, is the most important collective experience of the Italian people."

Indeed, Mazzucco's mix of fact and fiction allows her to create a sweeping work from the shards of information she was able to reconstruct. And she manages to interpolate her own curiosity, her own thirst for information, into the story. That's something not easily accomplished in a novel.

"At the root of "Vita" are fragments of my grandfather's story," she recalls, "scenes, funny and tragic episodes, people, mysterious places like the New York of the Black Hand at the beginning of the 1900s and the forests of Ohio -- that my father told me when I was a little girl. At that time I wasn't thinking of writing it. They were stories from a long time ago, of mythical people that I didn't know -- my grandfather died 15 years before I was born -- but that seemed like people in a novel.

"I realized that it was essential to recover the memory of our emigrants' story, a wound that remains open in many families. In 1997 I began a long journey of research, of listening to 'witnesses,' of work in archives, etc., to recover the lost story of my family."

Mazzucco's tale, of course, offers an interesting perspective, especially to Italian-Americans who know our side of the story already. Many of us have lost touch with our Italian families and haven't heard about how emigration affected the mother country.

"When I wrote the novel, I couldn't imagine that it would be translated in America, even if I wanted it (to be)," Mazzucco says. "After the book came out, I was in New York and it was interesting to meet American readers whose families had stories similar and identical to mine and to compare our points of view on the American dream and on memory and our knowledge of the experiences lived by our ancestors."

The book also connected Mazzucco with many Americans who share her surname.

"Today there are more Mazzuccos in the United States and Toronto than in Tufo di Minturno (the town south of Rome from which the author's family hails). After the publication of the book in English, I received a lot of letters from Italian-Americans of the third, fourth and fifth generations. Some had lost the memory of their towns of original, while others still had close ties to Italy. The most extraordinary letter I received from the descendants of Diamante Mazzucco -- not my grandfather, but another boy from the same town with the same name and the same story. We corresponded, then we met in New York and became friends."

"Vita" is available in paperback from Picador USA.

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