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    He sits in a booth by the window, with a view of sunny Union Street and the Corriere della Sera before him on the table. He has a lunch meeting with his lawyer, DiSilvio, but DiSilvio is always late, so Antonio keeps reading. Th ere’s another story—a different one every week, it seems—about the drop in the Italian population, the growing fears that the country will have no one to carry on its traditions, now that Italian girls feel no shame living childless with their boyfriends, choosing careers in politics and banking and the law over motherhood. Th e article confirms for Antonio that he will die at the right time: before Italy loses its Italian altogether. He circles the headline— A RRIVEDERCI, ROMA —to show DiSilvio.
    Antonio’s first years as an immigrant in America, he lived alone and single and with his back turned to the Old Country. It had served its purpose by giving him life, but after that, he’d asked himself, what good did Italia do? Th e Grassos’ farm, stuck at the rocky bottom of the hill, struggled to produce enough to feed them, let alone trade. For every child born to Antonio’s mother and grandmother, another died before the age of five. Th e wars came through like tornadoes, spinning good people and bad people together up in the air and spitting them out in pieces. Th e few left on the ground stayed dumb and believed whatever they were told, afraid of tomorrow, afraid of today, happy only when they remembered yesterday and tried to repeat it, even if yesterday punched them in the gut.
    America, on the other hand, was never without a smile on its face and a big idea in its head. It did stupid things—the government was a bunch of crooks, of course, show him a government that wasn’t—but the stupid things it did still put the country a step ahead. It knocked people over on the way, and didn’t apologize, and kept that smile on its face the whole time, and that was how it earned respect. Th is is, at least, how his father explained America to Antonio in those first years he and Mario and their mother lived with him in the row house on Eighth Street. He convinced his sons that Italy was a dying world, that eventually everyone they’d known in the village would have to find their way across the Atlantic, and that they were lucky to have beaten them to it. Th eir mother was not convinced. Sunday afternoons at four, she would turn on Radio Italia, and the men would leave the room. Nostalgia was not allowed. Nostalgia was not honest, their father said; it got you drunk and tired worse than whiskey. It was better to pretend that Italy, and all their memories of it, had sunk into the sea.
    When Antonio named the Grasso restaurant after the Al Di Là Café in Santa Cecilia, he meant it as a tribute not to his country or his village but to Maddalena. He had brought her to the café late one Saturday night, soon after he and Mario had returned to Santa Cecilia to find wives. He was twenty-six then, Mario twenty-four. Th e Al Di Là Café was the only place to take a girl dancing. By day, customers ate their meals outside on the terrace, surrounded by a wrought iron fence, but a few times a month, a band showed up from another town, colored lights were strung across the walls, and the terrace became a nightclub. Th at night, with her chaperone father watching, Antonio and Maddalena slow-danced across the stone floor to the music of a young guitar player from Terni. Maddalena was nervous. Th e boy who loved her, Vito Leone, might be watching, too, she said, along with her father, so her body was stiff, and when the song ended she had tears in her eyes. She’d known Antonio less than a month at that point, but he’d made a good impression on her parents—the farm boy turned rich American businessman!—and they insisted she marry him, and then the boy who loved her married her sister Carolina, and in that village way, life started for them all. Th e only guilt he felt at the time was for