ABSTRACT
on a summerday before the First World War a slim and Roman-nosed European gentleman walked down a New York street, idly looking at the shop windows. His name was the same as mine, Luigi Barzini. He was my father, perhaps Italy's best known journalist and writer of his day, sent by the Corriere della Sera to write colorful but definitive articles about the outlandish, peculiar, and inexplicable life in the United States. He was then in his early thirties and had been almost everywhere, in Europe, the Far East, Latin America, to cover some of the biggest stories of the time and describe people and countries in lucid prose.
