As coffee-table books go, this one has some substantive scholarly value. It is quite common that historians of Italian migrations to the Americas will bemoan—even as they write about Argentina, Brazil, and the United States—the lack of research on Italian communities in the Caribbean, Central America, and the Andes. Moreover, not enough work has been done on the through lines that connect the preunification participation in Atlantic systems of peoples from the Italian peninsula and nearby islands (Neapolitans, Venetians, and others) with Italian mass migration after the Risorgimento of the 1860s. The Italian Legacy in the Dominican Republic helps expose these gaps, although it does not precisely fill them.
Many of the book's 47 chapters—arranged in sections on history, architecture, literature and the arts, economics and science, and journalism, law, and society—contain profiles of Italian prominenti who have had impacts on the Dominican Republic in the past and near present....
