Rosanna Micelotta Battigelli’s new creative non-fiction collection is a love letter to her Italian roots. Product of Italy, Made in Canada: An Immigrant’s Love Letter to Food, Family, and Resilience (Latitude 46 Publishing) brings together stories written over a 23-year span about the author’s roles as daughter, sister, mother and teacher.
The themes in the book range from immigration, adolescence and fashion to teaching, love and grief. The stories can be considered a personal memoir as much as themes universal to all children of immigrants.
“My impulse was to write about events in my life, like my dad’s decline with Parkinson’s, as a way for me to process what was happening,” Battigelli explains.
“The situation of being a daughter having to feed her father as his condition worsened… I was feeding him at Sunday suppers, at the hospital, I was encouraging him to eat as I once did my children. Being a highly sensitive person, I was sad and full of grief inside, but I would never show my dad. I did not share that with a lot of people at the time. Instead, I dealt with those situations through writing,” she continues.
“People connect with stories that are written from the heart. In writing these stories, I know that some of them are sad, some are poignant, but I tried to balance them with some comic relief. Life isn’t all sad. It isn’t all happy. It is certainly full of challenges. Sharing how you process that and try to find some hope, I think that resonates with anyone and everyone.”
Throughout her 25-year career as a teacher, Battigelli was always writing.
“I was writing in my 20s, and then in my 30s, teaching during the day, writing at night. I was taking workshops, signing up for courses, reading books on the craft of writing, submitting my work for publication. I did whatever I could to become a real writer,” Battigelli explains.
Her perseverance paid off. Slowly but surely, Battigelli’s short stories began appearing in various publications and anthologies. Then finally, the book deals came in. In 2018 – three years after retiring from teaching – her novel La Brigantessa was published. That same year, two Harlequin Romances she penned were also published. Since then, Battigelli has published six Harlequin Romances, two children’s books, a fiction collection, and now her latest book, Product of Italy.
“I hesitate to call myself a prolific writer,” Battigelli muses.
“I think I’ve just been writing steadily to achieve my goals. I still have many children’s books to submit for consideration. There’s always something happening in the writing department,” she continues.
Product of Italy, Made in Canada was officially launched in October of 2025.
“The reaction has been super positive,” Battigelli comments.
“People are commenting how moved they are by the stories and how they can relate. How they couldn’t put the book down. And, sometimes they had to put the book down because something moved them and they needed time to process. Whether you make a reader laugh or you cause an emotion, you have moved them,” she adds.
At the official launch party for the book, Battigelli decided to bring a particular chapter to life. “You Are What You… Wear” recounts the many dresses that Battigelli’s mother has sewn for her throughout her lifetime… and the conversations and arguments integral to the process.
“I still have the dresses my mom made for me. I cannot part with them. And so I thought, I’m going to bring them to my launch,” Battigelli explains.
Battigelli asked friends to wear those very dresses at the launch, and at one point they paraded around the hall as one would a catwalk.
“This is the teacher in me. I always think about how I can introduce a lesson, in some way that is catchy and interesting to students. And that goes with audiences and readers too,” Battigelli muses.
“It was a visual feast; the dresses, the photos, archival documents, Italian pizza and dolci. At one point during the launch my eight-year-old granddaughter came up to me to tell me, ‘Good job, Nanna.’”
Earlier this year, Product of Italy, Made in Canada won in the Adult Non-Fiction category at the CANREADS Book Awards.
For updates on Rosanna Micelotta Battigelli’s ongoing book tour, please visit her Instagram page.
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