New York Times Best Wine Book of 2021. South of Somewhere begins and ends in Robert Camuto’s maternal ancestral town of Vico Equense, Italy—a tiny paradise south of Naples on the Sorrento Peninsula. It was here in 1968, at 10-years-old, that the author first tasted Italian life.

Fifty years later, Camuto returns to Vico, connecting with family members and a new generation. A lot has changed: The old family restaurant has been razed and the seaside has been developed with hotels and restaurants, including a famous two-Michelin-starred restaurant in a medieval tower now owned by a younger cousin. Though there are more foreign visitors, the essentials of beauty, food, family bonds, and simplicity have not changed.

Camuto’s fine-grained storytelling in this series of portraits takes us beyond the usual objective views of viniculture nto the elusive and magical world of Italian “South-ness.” While on one level able to create an instructive narrative about Southern Italy’s 21st-century wine and cultural renaissance, Camuto’s unswerving eye juxtaposes the good and the bad—immeasurable beauty and persistent blight, anti-mafia forces and corruption, hope for the future and fatalism—in a land that remains an infinite source of fascination and sensory pleasure.

The book is published by University of Nebraska Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.

"His best yet, a razor-sharp evocation of the people, places and points-of-view that captures both the fatalism so often encountered in southern Italy." (New York Times)

"A delicious pre-pandemic travelogue through southern Italy in South of Somewhere." (Washington Post)

"A delicious, thirst-inspiring romp full of remarkable personalities, their wine-soaked cellars, and one delectable meal after another. Camuto does it tastefully!” (Kermit Lynch, wineconoclast, author, and importer)