This paper wishes to explore how Caterina Edwards, an Italian Canadian writer, and Rita Ciresi, an Italian American writer, share a strong, although very different, personal and authorial relation to Italy and the Italian language. I shall be focusing on their similarities rather than differences: they are brought up in North America, their mother tongue is English, they (and their characters) travel from/to Sicily, Venice, Edmonton as well as New Haven, Venice and Rome in a complex chronotopic framework. Old and new myths, mystery and parody are intertwined in their innovative texts. These “new travelers” are part of a new cross-border literary community where Italy plays a significant role as much as their countries of origin, Canada and the US. Is Italy a place to visit, a crime scene, a mythical land, a country of passionate desire, or… just a dream?

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Cesari, M. G., (2025), "The Representation of Italy in Caterina Edwards’ The Sicilian Wife and Rita Ciresi’s Sometimes I Dream in Italian", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Italian Canadiana
2. Italian Canadian/American
3. journey
4. literature
5. Mafia
6. myth
7. new travelers

Original publication: Cesari, Maria Giuseppina. "The Representation of Italy in Caterina Edwards’ The Sicilian Wife and Rita Ciresi’s Sometimes I Dream in Italian." Italian Canadiana 34: 2021. 27-33. DOI: 10.33137/ic.v34i0.37446. 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/.