Breath of the Onion: Italian-American Anecdotes is a collection of prose pieces and a few old, family recipes. Beginning in a twelfth-century Tuscan mountain village in the 1940s, Pagnucci
celebrates a handful of Italian characters, some of whom immigrate to Illinois. Then he moves on to a short visit to Italy after forty years, and deals with life in the suburbs west of Chicago
with the pressures the New World imposes on an ethnic culture. Language, customs, and values are affected and modified, often with humor and a new understanding.
