Umbertina

Umbertina is a 1979 novel by American author Helen Barolini. Spanning almost a century from 1860, the novel follows four generations of an Italian-American family, focusing on the experiences of women. Umbertina is loosely based on the author’s own family history, emerging from Barolini’s attempts to write about her grandmother. Largely ignored upon publication, the novel has since come to be recognized as a major contribution to American literature: the first novel to consider the intersection of women’s lives, the immigrant experience, and Italian-American ethnicity. Barolini received the 1984 Americans of Italian Heritage Award for her contribution to Italian-American literature.

The novel begins with a prologue, set in the 1970s. An American woman named Marguerite is living in Rome. She is in therapy, and during a session with her psychiatrist, Marguerite explains that she feels lost and directionless in her comfortable, upper-middle-class life. She reveals that she envies the “primitive strength” of her Italian maternal grandmother, Umbertina.

Part 1 (“Umbertina, 1860-1940”) introduces us to Marguerite’s grandmother Umbertina Nenci as a sixteen-year-old. She works as a goatherd in a poor, rural area of Calabria called Castagna. Her parents and her many siblings share a one-room stone cottage. Her father, Carlo, is a farmer, but he rents his land from the local aristocrat, Baron Mancuso di Valerba, who claims half of his tenants’ output and rarely visits Castagna.



Umbertina flirts with Giosuè, an apprentice charcoal-burner from a nearby village. One day he presents her with a present he has made: a tin box in the shape of a heart, in which Umbertina can store her knitting needles. Giosuè is a beautiful young man with dark hair and eyes, but Umbertina cannot marry him. Her father has promised her to an old soldier, Serafino Longobardi, who will be able to keep Umbertina in a more comfortable lifestyle.

Umbertina goes to Nelda, the priest’s housekeeper, and asks Nelda to weave a matrimonial bedspread for her wedding to Serafino. This traditional item is the one valuable personal possession that Umbertina will take to her new home. She also asks Nelda for a cutting of rosemary: she hopes that after her wedding to Serafino, she will be able to afford chicken to cook with the rosemary. Nelda reminds her of an old proverb: where rosemary grows “the women of that house are its strength.”

After the marriage, Serafino buys a small farm. Umbertina bears three children. However, taxes and interest rates rise, and the soil of their farm gives out. The family begins to run out of money. Umbertina is determined to emigrate to America, and she persuades Serafino to carry out this plan. The family loads its possessions onto a donkey and sets out for Naples with a caravan of other emigrants.



In Naples, the family boards a ship to New York. There they live in slum conditions in the city’s Italian ghetto. Umbertina works as a laundress while Serafino does manual labor. The couple saves with an immigrant bank and loses everything. Umbertina sells her bedspread to a social worker, and with the money, the family leaves for Cato, New York, following some old friends from Castagna.

Serafino gets another manual job at the rail yard. Umbertina spots a business opportunity, and begins selling her pizza and panini to the rail yard workers at lunchtime. Her business thrives, and she is able to lease a plot of land. She begins growing fresh vegetables and opens a grocery store. All the while, she continues to bear children, five more, including Marguerite’s mother Carla.

As Umbertina’s business continues to thrive, the family becomes well to do and increasingly Americanized. Finally, Umbertina becomes ill. In her final hours, she has a detailed vision of the bedspread she sold. As she dies, she asks her son to bring her a cup of water from a fresh spring in Castagna.



In Part 2, the narrative returns to Marguerite. She has just graduated from college and is searching for a meaningful life. Traveling in Italy, she meets a poet named Alberto Morosini. He is two decades older than her and from a wealthy old Venetian family. Sharing a vision of the artistic life, they marry. With their two daughters, they live between the United States and Italy. However, while Alberto’s writing career thrives, Marguerite’s does not. She bears much of the responsibility for raising the children and managing the family’s home life and her artistic ambition is a casualty.

When Marguerite is forty-two, she embarks on an affair with another writer—closer to her own age—and uses her connections in the literary world to further his career.

Part 3 follows Marguerite’s daughter Tina as she learns that her mother has died in a car accident. She flies from her New York home to Rome to attend the funeral, bringing with her the tin heart she carries everywhere (the gift made for Umbertina by Giosuè). Like her mother before her, Tina is a student struggling to find a vocation.



While she is in Rome, Tina learns that she is pregnant by her American boyfriend—a layabout with whom she sees no future—and she is forced to undergo an illegal abortion.

Later, Tina meets Jason, an American law student. At first, she mistakes him for Italian, due to his dark good looks, but in fact, he is from an old-m,y New England “WASP” family.

She and Jason visit southern Italy, and during the trip, she abandons Jason for another man. She visits Castagna, and without knowing it, she meets one of Giosuè’s descendants.



Tina returns to the U.S. One day, she visits the Museum of Immigration on Ellis Island. There she sees an intricately-designed Calabrian bedspread. Tina wishes that Umbertina had brought such an heirloom to America—not knowing that it is, in fact, the very bedspread Umbertina was forced to sell when she arrived in New York.

Tina decides to reconcile with Jason and he proposes to her. From her solo journeys, Tina has learned the independence to insist on her own career. When the young couple visits Jason’s grand family home, Tina plants rosemary in the garden.