A wonderful article from was written recently on My father came from Italy.

Maria Coletta McLean cultivates her father's legacy.

The Italian village of Supino has few laws. Many citizens have never even seen a parking ticket. The only police officer, Luigi, doubles as a waiter, and City Hall is closed more than open. Minor infractions? Disregarded. Laughed at, actually. History and tradition, however, are taken very, very seriously.

So Maria Coletta McLean learned when she bought a house, sight unseen, in the village where her father grew up. "There is a law in my father's village, Supino, which says you cannot tear down your ancestor's house; you
can only build onto it," explains Coletta McLean. "In this way, every new home in the village is technically an addition, and you can always find original walls of the original home in the new home."

Such is the foundation of Coletta McLean's first book, My Father Came from Italy (Raincoast Books). She envisioned taking her father home to his village 64 years after he immigrated to Canada. "We originally thought this would be a great gift we could give to my father," remembers the 1995 York University graduate. "It was he who gave us the gift."

The dean¹s list student and mother of six hadn't initially intended to write about her father/daughter journey retracing family history, but her life changed when her father died. "I was a mature student, carrying a full load,
and I just felt like I couldn't take all these courses and deal with my dad's death. Something [had] to go," recalls Coletta McLean. What went were a few classes, but the one she made up in the summer was a nonfiction writing course.

When she started writing her nonfiction story that summer for class, she naturally chose to write about her time in Italy. Coletta McLean realized then that her personal journey paralleled that of Italian architectural tradition. She grasped, through the writing process, that Supinese law metaphorically mimicked what she hoped to accomplish by taking her father back to Italy in the first place. Not only did she wish to take her father home before his death as a gift to him, but she also wanted a glimpse of his
past in order to build upon her family's historical foundation.

My Father Came from Italy chronicles Coletta McLean's journey from inception to completion, from seedling to harvest. A business trip she and her husband took to Italy served as the catalyst for what seemed a wild idea at first. It happens that their native Toronto was twinned with L'Aquila, a city in Italy near the village of Supino. In a whirlwind business trip, Coletta McLean and her husband, Bob, met with her Italian cousin, Guido, who took them to Supino. The seed was planted. That was November.

Not aware of it herself, Coletta McLean's idea germinated over the winter, poking its head out of the ground in February and into her mind just as the blue flowers in Italy were making themselves seen. In the Spring that came
early that year, she presented the idea to her husband that they buy her father's old home in the little village with no cinema, restaurant, or theater.

The house her father grew up in wasn't for sale, but Guido assured the McLeans that one close by was, so they bought it. The purchase required a second trip to Supino in May, where the McLeans hired village workers to get
the house in shape in time for her father's arrival. Little things, really. A new roof to keep the rain out, a toilet that wasn't cracked . . . how to get running water, well, they would worry about that later.

Explaining her story with simplicity, because that's what life is like there, Coletta McLean takes readers with her to every family meal, festival, and trip to the Kennedy bar, slowing to admire the geraniums in bloom and greet each person who passes on the narrow road. What seems like a summer of nostalgia is, in fact, in Supino-time only 10 days.

Vice president of the family's 50-year-old business, The Columbia Coffee Company, Coletta McLean is currently putting the finishing touches on a novel, The Woman Who Ran Away. "I love the title; I love the whole idea of
it. It's kind of intriguing to me," says the writer. The book is the story of a woman who, fed up with her humdrum life, escapes to Venice.

Still enchanted with her own life, Coletta McLean finds writing about extramarital affairs a stretch. And, after completing the first-person nonfictional memoir My Father Came from Italy, she says jumping to a third-person fictional narrative in the next book was tricky. The process of making up characters with their own feelings, and many feelings of guilt resulting from infidelity, has been challenging for this grandmother who never strayed from her own marriage vows.

Book three (with a working title of Book Three) is also underway in the form of a folder on her computer filled with stories and anecdotes from her childhood. "Part of the paranoia about being a writer is that every once in
a while I think ŒOh, no! I've written one book; I'll never be able to write again or ŒThey're going to find out that they put my book in the pile of rejects but instead it went into the accepted pile and they're too embarrassed to admit they made a mistake. So I always feel good when I have some reserve stories in the bank."

Alexis K. Pasqua is a writer in San Diego, California.