This is a story of a young bride, typical of many Italian women of her generation, who struggled with the proposition of having to leave all she knew and loved behind to join her husband and a new life in ‘America’. Threading this common story of emigration, journeying, and settling, however, are the memories of a devoted grandson who, charmed by grandma’s fascinating narratives of “home”, embarks in his adult life on his own journey, back to the fount of his origins. Nonna Artemisia had left Italy on the promise to her father that she would endeavour to return someday to be with him again. The author, captivated by his grandmother’s lifelong feeling of separation, symbolically returns her spirit to its original familial home.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Culos, R., (2025), "Nonna's Spiritual Journey Back Home", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

  Copy Citation | Export metadata as... | JSON | CSV | RO-Crate | BibTex | EndNote

1. anima
2. emigration
3. Italian Canadiana
4. journey
5. new beginning
6. nonna
7. nostos
8. settling
9. Vancouver

Original publication: Culos, Raymond. "Nonna's Spiritual Journey Back Home." Italian Canadiana 35: 2021. 95-107. DOI: 10.33137/ic.v35i0.37220. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Italian Canadiana. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Italian Canadiana under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.