The Road to San Donato: Fathers, Sons, and Cycling across Italy
About this audiobook
The Road to San Donato is an adventurous and nostalgic bicycling memoir of an American father and son tracing their Italian heritage. Riding rental bikes and carrying a bare minimum of supplies, Rob Cocuzzo and his sixty-four-year-old father, Stephen, embark on a 425-mile ride from Florence to San Donato Val di Comino, an ancient village in the mountains outside of Rome from which the Cocuzzo family emigrated a hundred years earlier.
Prompted by Rob’s ailing grandfather, who regrets having never visited his home village, the two cyclists pledge to make the trip in the old man’s honor. Despite an expired passport, getting lost, some near misses, and other misadventures, the father and son finally reach the quirky village of San Donato. For Italian Jews in the 1940s, the road to San Donato was one of exile, and many of the people in the village banded together to protect nearly a hundred Jews. While meeting his many new “cousins,” Rob attempts to unlock this history and glean what role his family played at the time—resistors or collaborators? The Road to San Donato is a generational story that many Americans share and a travel adventure not to be missed.
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About the author
Robert Cocuzzo is an editor, journalist, and author of the critically acclaimed Tracking the Wild Coomba: The Life of Legendary Skier Doug Coombs. He is also the editor of Nantucket Magazine and has written for Outside, Town & Country, Departures, Luxury, and Boston Common. Rob and his wife, Jenny, live with their daughter in Arlington, Massachusetts. Visit him online at RobertCocuzzo.com.
James Patrick Cronin began his audiobook career at twelve years of age opposite Christopher Lloyd in The Pagemaster. An Earphones Award–winning narrator, he has recorded over one hundred audiobooks across an extensive range of genres. A classically trained stage actor with an MFA from the University of Louisville and a degree in philosophy, he has spent his years since college performing as an actor and a comedian on stages all over the world. He has performed everything from the classics to original material in Ireland, Scotland, Serbia, and Israel, as well as all across the United States.
