Stefano falls madly in love with Milena, leaves the seminary and his religious vocation, mesmerized by the beauty and the charm of the girl. But, as often happens in life, reality does not follow the schemes designed by humans: fate, perfidy and destiny, hinder the path established by the two lovers. The people of the town, who had seen the vocation of the young man as a collective good, receive the news of Stefano abandoning the seminary with disappointment and dismay. To escape the hostility, Stefano leaves for America with a promise to come back in a year, when he and Milena would get married and then both would go back to America together. However, once in New York Stefano faces loneliness, hard work, and the criminal underworld.

Toronto’s Damiano Pietropaolo is an award winning writer/broadcaster, director, translator, and educator. Translations include: selections from Italian Renaissance drama and dramatic theory (Sources of Dramatic Theory, Volume 1, Cambridge University Press, 1991); Ugo Betti’s The Queen and the Rebels (Pro Arte Productions, Toronto, 1997); The Fellini Radio Plays, translated and adapted for the stage from radio plays by Federico Fellini (Stratford Festival 2002); a play Love Letters from the Empty Bed, adapted from Ovid’s Heroides, (staged at the Glenn Morris Studio Theatre and the Canadian Opera Company’s Bradshaw Amphitheatre, 2012); and the novel Between Rothko and Three Windows: Murder at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Quattro books, 2016). Essays, reviews and creative non-fiction have appeared in Saturday Night Magazine, The Globe and Mail, Grail Magazine, CBC Radio, and Il Quotidiano della Calabria. As editor, director and producer Damiano explored the theme of exile and return and the emergence of a post-national drama in such series as Where is Here? The Drama of Immigration (Scirocco Books, 2005), Little Italies (2006, CBC Audio Books, 2007). Essays, poetry and short fiction have been translated into Italian and published in A Filo Doppio, Ed. By Francesco Loriggio and Vito Teti, Donzelli, Rome 2017.

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Nino Famà was born in Barcellona P.G. (ME). At the age of 18 he emigrated to Canada, where he has lived ever since. In spite of the years gone by, he has maintained his close ties with Italy by returning annually for visits of variable lengths. In Canada Nino Famà pursued his university studies, obtaining a BA from Brock University, an MA from the University of Western Ontario and a PhD from the State University of New York at Buffalo, USA. He taught Latin American literature at the University of Victoria, British Columbia (1976-1984) and then at the University of Waterloo in Ontario (1984-2008). During his university career, Nino Famà published two books of literary criticism: Realismo mágico en la narrativa de Demetrio Aguilera Malta (Madrid, 1976) and Las últmas obras de Alejo Carpentier (Caracas, 1995). He is also the author of numerous scholarly articles, which have been published in professional journals in Canada, Europe, USA and Latin America. More recently, he has dedicated himself to writing works of fiction in Italian. His latest novel, Il sogno di Toloma (2017), a reworked, amplified and totally restructured version of La stanza segreta, and L’oceano nel pozzo (2014), were published by Pellegrini Editore. The novel, La stanza segreta (2004), was published by Sciascia Editore and was later translated in English by Douglas Campell and Leonard Sbrocchi and published by LEGAS Publising in 2008 with the title The secret room. A collection of short stories, Don Gaudenzio e altre storie, was published by Bastogi Editrice Italiana in 1996.

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