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THIS COLLECTION of
stunning photographs and inspired commentary
documents the lives of Italian immigrants to
Toronto. Award-winning photographer and cultural
historian Vincenzo Pietropaolo has spent much of
his life taking pictures inside the tightly knit
Italian-Canadian community. While the images in
this book are part of the fabric of life in
Toronto, they transcend the specificity of place to
evoke the lives of immigrants in cities around the
world. With a foreword by novelist Nino Ricci,
essay by Giuliana Colallilo, author interview by
photographer Denyse Gérin-Lajoie, and
context provided by Pietropaolo, Not Paved with
Gold pays tribute to the broad spectrum of the
immigrant experience.
"As a writer I know I
have the leisure to revisit a passage, a sentence,
a single word, a dozen times if I need to get it
right, but a photographer has no such luxury. It
seems a little miracle that photographers ever get
it right, that out of the usual chaos of things
they can pick out the moment when a thing is truly
revealed. This is a book full of such little
miracles, one that repays the eye with new
perspective and depth with each
viewing."
Nino Ricci,
from the Foreword
Vincenzo
Pietropaolo is an award-winning photographer
whose work has been widely published in Canada and
abroad. An Italian-Canadian, he and his family
immigrated to Canada in 1959. He is the author of
Celebration of Resistance: Ontario’s Days
of Action (BTL, 1999).
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