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Book details

  • Genre:biography & autobiography
  • Sub-genre:Historical
  • Language:English
  • Series Title:The Story of Our Stories
  • Series Number:7
  • Pages:224
  • eBook ISBN:9781098302771
  • Paperback ISBN:9781098302764

Diary of Giovanni Vener

An Immigrant's Journey to the Heart of America

By Michael Pedretti

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Overview

“Michael Pedretti’s Diary of Giovanni Vener is beautifully written.” -- Karen Walpole

“A deep insight into the man's head and how he perceives the world. I definitely recommend it.” --Samantha Gregory

“Touched my heart with all its passion and tragic remembrances from the perspective of its lead character. The bond between Giovanni and his deceased wife Maddie remains strong, and the poignancy of their love and the effect her death has on the man speaks volumes through author Michael Pedretti’s talented weaving of words. The emotional sensibility of the story mixes with incredible true facts about the experience of life during such a fascinating time, making for a fully rounded historical novel that has everything a reader could want. Overall, Diary of Giovanni Vener is a highly recommended read. -- K. C. Finn

It's 1899. John Venner, born Giovanni Vener, has just been committed to the Vernon County Insane Asylum. When one of the nurses hands him a pen and a pad, his suppressed need to write surfaces and he scribbles about his experience the night before. By the third day he is making diary entries addressed to Maddie, the love of his life who had died just a few months earlier. John looks back at a life that was good to him, but one that never allowed him the leisure time to create, to fulfill his desire to put in writing his insights and thoughts. But now all responsibility had been taken away and he can reflect on his life - his life as a budding artist, immigrant, farmer, husband and father, and community leader. John tells us of his journey to America, his struggles to obtain and maintain his farms, re-experiencing his past, and talking sweet thoughts to Maddie, his wife. He tells Maddie (and us) why he emigrated from Campodolcino in northern Italy to Bad Ax, Wisconsin. He relives with her many moments from their life and their struggles to eke a living out of the bluffs and coulees in Genoa, a small Wisconsin town located on the banks of the Mississippi river. Many entries are bold and naked love songs to Maddie. He also tells her of his days struggling with reality since her death. Giovanni is left an original copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and develops a love hate relationship with Whitman and his poems. Homer appears in a dream and challenges him to write the great modern epic that will straighten out the errors that he, Virgil, Milton and Dante made. They celebrated war & quest, chauvinism, evil & despair, and fear. Homer challenges John to set it right –to tell the story of family, gentleness, creativity, charity, and peace. John believes he is too old for that, so he concentrates on making diary entries that depict his life with Maddie as fruitful immigrants each day making life a little better for themselves, their neighbors and the world.

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Description

It's 1899. John Venner, born Giovanni Vener, has just been committed to the Vernon County Insane Asylum. When one of the nurses hands him a pen and a pad, his suppressed need to write surfaces and he scribbles about his experience the night before. By the third day he is making diary entries addressed to Maddie, the love of his life who had died just a few months earlier. John looks back at a life that was good to him, but one that never allowed him the leisure time to create, to fulfill his desire to put in writing his insights and thoughts. But now all responsibility had been taken away and he can reflect on his life - his life as a budding artist, immigrant, farmer, husband and father, and community leader. John tells us of his journey to America, his struggles to obtain and maintain his farms, re-experiencing his past, and talking sweet thoughts to Maddie, his wife. He tells Maddie (and us) why he emigrated from Campodolcino in northern Italy to Bad Ax, Wisconsin. He relives with her many moments from their courtship and their struggles to eke a living out of the bluffs and coulees in Genoa, a small Wisconsin town located on the banks of the Mississippi river. Many entries are bold and naked love songs to Maddie. He also tells her of his days struggling with reality since her death. Giovanni is left an original copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and develops a love hate relationship with Whitman and his poems. Homer appears in a dream and challenges him to write the great modern epic that will straighten out the errors that he, Virgil, Milton and Dante made. They celebrated war & quest, chauvinism, evil & despair, and fear. Homer challenges John to set it right – to tell the story of family, gentleness, creativity, charity, and peace. John believes he is too old for that, so he concentrates on making diary entries that depict his life with Maddie as fruitful immigrants each day making life a little better for themselves, their neighbors and the world. By reading his diary entries, we find out how and why he emigrated from the area know as "fields of sweetness" in Valle Spluga to the rolling hills of western Wisconsin that proved a challenge every day to farm. The book includes a history of John's town, "Genoa, A Spray Drift of Empathy Part II" that tells the story of Genoa, Wisconsin, from the early part of the twentieth century until today. The story focuses mainly on the mid-twentieth century and expansively discusses what daily life was like for a resident in 1951. As seen through the eyes of a child, the life of a citizen of Genoa was filled with hard work, church, family, and close-knit community. [Genoa, Part I is in volume 1 of this series] Included is an essay, "Thwarting the Deadly Trinity – The Sword, the Famine, and the Pestilence," that investigates the possibility of ridding the world of war. The author defines the three main plagues upon the human race to be war, starvation, and pestilence. The author puts forth a theory of the basis for waging war, and then concludes with ideas of how the future of the world will benefit from the end of wars. The first part of the manuscript has personifications of death, starvation, war, and pestilence speaking to each other as they explain their continued existence. The manuscript then moves to feature individuals representing different ideas and viewpoints such as a historian, a politician, a farmer, etc. gathered around a table to discuss the existence and eradication of these plagues. The reader is invited to "listen in" to their discussion in 1870, and then that group joins current day counterparts to continue the discussion. The author also includes the genealogical story of John's Maddie, Mary Madeline Starlochi - tracing the actual ancestral history of our heroine back eleven generations to Guglielmo Chiaverini was born in 1566.
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About The Author

Michael Pedretti traveled to Italy several times to encounter the small valley in Northern Italy that his ancestors called home for a thousand years before immigrating to a small Midwestern town in the mid-nineteenth century. There he discovered his ancestors were a kind, creative and empathetic people. As he learned more about them he became inspired to write a twelve book American epic titled The Story of Our Stories covering many generations in a family saga that highlights their contributions to and perspectives on life. While there he researched the genealogical roots of the families of his stories. More importantly he experienced the places and met the people who still live in the communities he has written about. He is currently over halfway through writing a twelve volume epic called The Story of Our Stories which tells the journey of an archetypical American family starting from the earliest human mother right through the next generation with a focus on the last families to live in Europe and the first families to settle in small town America in the second half of the nineteenth century. The author was born and raised on a farm just outside Genoa, Wisconsin, the locale for many of his stories and where his family farmed for over one hundred years. He spent many hours as a child hanging out with and listening to the tales of his grandfather who was the first in his family to be born in America – born before Lincoln became President. As a child he did many of the activates such as helping to make bresaola, milking cows by hand and chopping wood with a blunt ax that the people he writes about had been doing for a thousand years – giving him an inimitable viewpoint as he brings the characters alive in his stories. In addition to writing historical fiction, biographical stories and pure fiction, he enjoys writing poetry. Having traveled to well over thirty countries and visited nearly every state, the author has a world view on life. He enjoys meeting people from other cultures and dining at out of the way restaurants serving authentic native food. He has been selected to be in International Directory of Distinguished Leadership, Who's Who in the World, The Contemporary Who's Who of Professionals, International Who's Who of Intellectuals, Who's Who in World Education, Who's Who in Entertainment, Who's Who Registry of Business Leaders, Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the South, Men of Achievement and Outstanding Young Men of America. He has served on peer panels for the NEA, the NJ Arts Council, and the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation. He has received several awards for his work in the mime and clown field. Michael Pedretti spent the first part of his professional career as a college professor of theater directing over 100 theater productions. Later, he produced international theater festivals presenting over 170 movement theater shows from 30 countries. The festivals were covered in hundreds of newspapers and magazines, was featured many times on the Terry Gross show and on Fox News, The Today Show and CBS Nightwatch. He recently completed a two-volume book covering the work of the originating performance artists whose work was presented at the international theater festivals he produced and who challenged the theater world in the later part of the twentieth century.
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Book Reviews

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Leo
The Promise of the American Dream There are many reasons that I think the Diary of Giovanni Vener has improved my life, and some of them will be included in this review. Perhaps more relevant is why I think this book could enhance other readers’ lives. This is the 3rd book now available and that I have read in the author’s planned 12-volume series, which, as he says, can be read in any order. The diary presented here is that as written by a 71-year-old immigrant/widower who spent his last months in late 1899 and early 1900 in a county asylum. Through this diary, readers can visualize another America- one they may very well be familiar with, but is often overlooked. This is the great epic of America, the dream that came about after the Enlightenment, but has often gone astray with leaders who would not follow through with their vision, were incompetent, or plainly under the influence of money and has too often led to a place where money buys pardon for the injustices committed by or on behalf of the wealthy and where money too often buys votes and/or voter suppression. There is another America found here- one we find in our families, in the kindness between neighbors, in the sacrifices of parents, and in the ingenuity of our citizens. This is not the America the greed-heads and the oligarchs would have us hear about everyday- and perhaps not so entertaining- but what gives our families the goodness that makes up the essence of America, what unites us and puts us on common ground. There is hope in this other promise of America. But where we have been falling short, how can we do better? This is where other parts of this volume (and other volumes) come into play. Included in this volume is the second part of the story of Genoa, Wisconsin (“a spray drift of empathy”) and an essay on “the deadly trinity.” These describe a path to a better America, the one originally envisioned by those believers in the Enlightenment who didn’t always know how or were incapable of following through with their vision of a place where “all men [mankind] are created equal” and a place where “the people …establish justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty…” Read more