Talking With Mark Rotella about 'Amore' and Italian song

In the delightful "Amore: The Story of Italian American Song" (Farrar Straus & Giroux, $26), Mark Rotella spotlights 40 popular hits, from Enrico Caruso's "O Sole Mio" to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons' "Walk Like a Man," to trace the assimilation of Italian immigrants and their music into mainstream American culture. It's the Publishers Weekly editor's second book exploring his ethnic heritage - "Stolen Figs" chronicled travels in his father's native Calabria - and both works grew from a personal crisis, as he explained to Newsday in a recent conversation.

You're writing about the music of your parents' and grandparents' generations. When did you to start listening to it?

In 1998, when my wife was 32, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She's fine now, but while she was going through treatment, we spent more time at home, and I was doing most of the cooking. I mostly cooked Italian food - that was what I was brought up with, what I knew - and I started listening to Italian music. It brought me back to a time, growing up in Florida, when we would go out to an Italian restaurant and it would be playing in the background, or sometimes at home my father would spontaneously start singing an Italian song. Looking back I see that I was creating a comforting little Italian household. After her treatment, we celebrated by going to Calabria with my parents, and that sparked "Stolen Figs."

"Amore" combines history, music and biography in an unusual way. How did you come up with the structure?

I found that I could tell the story of Italian immigration and assimilation through song. I learned with my first book that I tend to write in short chapters that each have a theme. What worked for me here was creating a songbook of not just my own favorites but big sellers, songs that really had an impact on America. Through each song, I tried to evoke the sound of the music, give a little background on the singer and also say what was happening with Italian Americans in general.

You interviewed many of these singers in person. Did you have a favorite moment?

There were many. I spent years trying to get Dion to talk with me, because Dion and the Belmonts were really big with my father and his brothers and sisters. He finally called and said, "You've got 10 minutes." We ended up talking for an hour and a half! That was a wonderful surprise.

The book ends with a moving description of Tony Bennett singing "Fly Me to the Moon" at Radio City Music Hall a few weeks after 9/11. What made you choose that for the finale?

I actually moved it from an earlier chapter. I liked the idea of a reprise, since I also wrote about Sinatra singing it; I like these two very different versions equally, for different emotions and under different circumstances. And I wanted to end on a note that reminds us these songs still resonate with us today.