This collection of stunning photographs and inspired commentary documents the lives of Italian immigrants to Toronto. Award-winning photographer and cultural historian Vincenzo Pietropaolo has spent much of his life taking pictures inside the tightly knit Italian-Canadian community. While the images in this book are part of the fabric of life in Toronto, they transcend the specificity of place to evoke the lives of immigrants in cities around the world.

With a foreword by novelist Nino Ricci, and context provided by the photographer, Not Paved with Gold pays tribute to the broad spectrum of the immigrant experience.

Vincenzo Pietropaolo is an award-winning photographer whose work has been widely published in Canada and abroad. An Italian-Canadian, he and his family immigrated to Canada in 1959. He is the author of Celebration of Resistance: Ontario's Days of Action (1999), Not Paved With Gold: Italian-Canadian Immigrants in the 1970s (2006), and Harvest Pilgrims: (2010), as well as many other books. In 2010 he was awarded the Cesar E. Chavez Black Eagle Award (Cultural) by the UFCW for his work photographing migrant workers and recording their stories. This work is the basis of Harvest Pilgrims.

Vincenzo Pietropaolo's profile page

NINO RICCI's best-selling Lives of the Saints (published in the United States as The Book of Saints) won the Governor General's Award for fiction, the SmithBooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the F. G. Bressani Prize. The New York Times Book Review hailed it as “an extraordinary story — brooding and ironic, suffused with yearning, tender and lucid and gritty . . . [The author has] perfect pitch and brilliant descriptive powers.” This was the first book in a trilogy and was followed by In a Glass House — “beautifuly written and tireless in its pursuit of emotional truth” (Times Literary Supplement) — and Where She Has Gone, which was a finalist for the Giller Prize.

Nino Ricci's profile page