Writes Sandra Mortola Gilbert, author of The Culinary Imagination: "... Personal Effects is both a brilliant tribute to a powerful scholar-memoirist and a significant contribution to Italian-American studies and cultural studies more generally. It is a collection to savor!"

Of Journey to the Heart Waters, Pasquale Verdicchio writes: "Out of such recounting emerges a figure that has gained great currency and importance for a re-reading of the Italian South and its relationship to other Mediterranean realities, the Black Madonna ..."