Since the 1880s, the Foti women of southern Italy have cultivated an unusual fruit: the bergamot lemon, a fruit that cannot be eaten. The Light Is Breaking follows the history of one of Calabria’s great citrus estates. It is a multi-generational story of love and death, folktale and dream, and the invisible presence of the Mafia. It is a novel of peasant farmers, of monks and nuns and fishermen and doctors and political idealists: the story of a farm that has passed down from one daughter to another for 150 years, as told by the last living daughter, Serafina Foti. As the land slips through many fingers, through time and heartbreak, eventually the bergamot trees are lost to the Foti family.

The Light Is Breaking is reminiscent of Tea Obreht’s incorporation of traditional folklore in a modern story in The Tiger’s Wife; of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magic realist family sagas, and of Louis de Bernière’s animation of history through comedy and tragedy in Captain Corelli's Mandolin.

Peter Oliva’s Connection to Italy:

My great-grandfather came from Pellaro, near Reggio di Calabria. He was a poor laborer who sailed away in the late 1890s to become a coal miner in Canada.  Eventually, he made enough money to return with his family and buy a small house in Pellaro, next to the sea.  The house was destroyed almost immediately in the earthquake of 1908, so he returned to Canada with his family and started all over again.  Both his house and the land were lost.  He never returned to Italy, nor did my grandfather.

In 1973 when I was eight my family returned to Italy, just as my novel describes. I attended Italian Elementary school in Reggio for one year. There I met the Foti family, one of the Great Estate families of Calabria, and stayed in touch with them for the next 50 years until today.

After high school, I travelled alone to Italy. I spent many summers there, beginning in 1982, staying for two or three months at a time. I stayed in Reggio di Calabria, and later in Messina, and in Rome. Eventually, I followed the Foti family to Ascoli Piceno. I have been there so many times over the years that the family has expected me to come each year, with my notepad and my gypsy backpack. I’ve attended their weddings, births and funerals. I was Best Man at one wedding. I was a family “confessor" to many members of the family. I was a patient to several fledgling doctors in the family. In fact, I was once diagnosed (by ultrasound) and given the surprising news that I was pregnant with a stone “baby” in my kidneys.  I was told that this diagnosis was “nothing to worry about” and I was actually relieved, which might illustrate my complete trust in them.  It is safe to say that I know this family better than my own.

I have travelled throughout the country by train, car, bicycle, foot, and once by hitching a ride on a scuba boat through the Aeolian Islands. I’ve participated in a number of conferences in Siena, in Venice (2005), in Puglia (2006), in Abruzzo (2010), but most of my time has been in Calabria, in Sicily, and in Ascoli Piceno, where I listened to Serafina Foti tell the story of her family that inspired THE LIGHT IS BREAKING.  

An editor named Francesco Loriggio included three chapters from the current manuscript (along with excerpts from my first two novels) in his anthology of Calabrese-Canadian writers called A Filo Doppio, un’ anthologia di scrittura calabro-canadesi (Donzelli Editore, Roma, 2017), pp. 221-242.

Giuseppe Gagliardi (the director who made Tatanka, and La Vera Leggenda di Tony Vilar) made a short film from a story in my novel Drowning in Darkness. It was shot near Bologna and premiered there, at the Bologna International Festival of Film and Food in May 2008.