{ "item_title" : "The Pizzaman Talks", "item_author" : [" Mario Felidi "], "item_description" : "The Pizzaman Talks: They Said Men Like Me Made PizzaThey said men like him were only good for making pizza. They were wrong.Told in the warm, wry, unmistakably opinionated voice of Nestor - Marcello Sancrocco's closest friend for more than fifty years - this is the sweeping story of one man's life, from a small mountain village in Italy's Liri Valley to the streets of the Bronx, and every hard-won inch of ground in between. It opens at a family gathering decades in the future, with Nestor raising a glass and deciding, finally, to tell the room who his best friend really is - and how he got there.Marcellino grows up in Esperia, a village where time moves by the rhythm of wheat fields and church feast days, and where his father, Giovanni, teaches him more through silence and example than through words - how to read land, how to read people, how to know what matters and let the rest go. A widow at the village fountain, a grandfather's buried wartime secret, a Baron who values a good man's judgment over his own money - these are the lessons that shape Marcellino before he ever leaves Italian soil. It's a childhood built on scarcity and dignity in equal measure, where a single fig, a hidden grenade, or a fountain conversation can carry the weight of an entire philosophy of life.Then the family emigrates, and everything he thought he understood about how the world works gets tested. In America, the patience and quiet confidence that made sense in Esperia don't automatically translate - not on a crowded ship, not in a cramped Bronx apartment, not in a schoolyard that draws its lines along streets instead of village borders. Marcellino has to build a new way of understanding a new world, without ever quite letting go of the old one. His mother carries a grief she can never fully name; his father carries silence forged in wartime; and Marcellino carries all of it forward, whether he means to or not.On Morris Avenue, he comes of age behind the counter of a neighborhood butcher shop, learns the unofficial rules of the block the hard way, and - much to everyone's confusion - falls in love with books. He's the kind of young man nobody quite knows what to do with: too disciplined to dismiss, too curious to pin down, too stubborn to be told who he's supposed to become. Around him, the neighborhood itself is a character - church feasts, turf boundaries between blocks, a butcher shop that functions as much as a courtroom and confessional as a business.He falls for Veronica, and their courtship - complicated by family expectations, old-world obligations, and the ordinary friction of two strong-willed people - becomes the emotional spine of the second half of the book. Marriage brings its own reckonings: a difficult pregnancy, a career reinvention that pulls him away from the trade he grew up in and into a very different kind of working life, the quiet negotiations of a decades-long partnership, and the slow accumulation of an entire life - children, grandchildren, and the kind of hard-earned peace that only comes from actually living long enough to look back on it and understand what it cost.Spanning a village fountain in Esperia to a wedding anniversary celebration fifty years later, The Pizzaman Talks is a multigenerational immigrant story about identity, ambition, and the people who quietly hold each other together across decades and across oceans. It's narrated by the one man who watched all of it happen up close - Marcello's best friend, who spent fifty years being equal parts astonished, exasperated, and unwaveringly loyal, and who finally has the floor to say so.For readers who love immigrant family sagas, and narrators with the kind of dry, affectionate voice that only comes from truly knowing someone for a lifetime - The Pizzaman Talks is a tribute to a man nobody expected much from, and everybody, in the end, underestimated.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers1.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/818/668/9798186683124_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "18.98", "online_price" : "18.98", "our_price" : "18.98", "club_price" : "18.98", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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