About the Author
Author Biography
Joseph Sturiale is a retired banking professional living in Virginia. Born in Sicily, his family emigrated to the U.S. just prior to his second birthday. He grew up on Long Island, NY with his parents and a younger sister. After graduating from a local elite Catholic high school, he went on to receive an undergraduate degree in Economics from the University of Rochester and a graduate degree in Banking from Adelphi University. After four years of military service, he was honorably discharged from the United States Marine Corps in the late 1980s.
After marrying in the 1990s, he and his wife Jean moved to Northern Virginia, where they raised three daughters. The author enjoys spending much of his free time in his garage woodworking shop, where he has constructed a number of wooden boats and a yard full of patio furniture. He and his wife are also avid world travelers, who have trekked extensively through Europe, including frequent trips back to Sicily to visit family members and tour the island’s many cultural treasures.
Joseph has spent a lifetime studying history, particularly the stories of the great ancient empires of Western Civilization, of medieval Europe, and the history of the United States. In recent years he has devoted much of his leisure time to researching the genealogical history of his Sicilian ancestors. The Sicilian Odyssey book project initially started as a private essay on the history of the island, written exclusively for his family members, as part of his genealogical pursuits.
Over time, his modest sized essays expanded in scope into a comprehensive book project, largely motivated by the author’s desire to tell the true story of Sicily and its people to a much larger audience. The book also allows him to speak up in defense of his proud heritage and challenge centuries of misunderstandings, distortions, and slanderous lies, which continue to unjustly sully the good name and reputation of the Sicilian people.
Personal family photographs
Twenty-Five Years to Tell the Truth
The journey that became Sicilian Odyssey began, quietly, with a single book. Decades ago, Joseph read John Julius Norwich’s two-volume history The Normans in Sicily, and learned the story of the magnificent Norman Kingdom of Sicily — the richest, most culturally advanced, and most enlightened nation of medieval Europe.
That one book captured his imagination and began a decades long quest to consume every English-language book on Sicilian and Mediterranean history he could find, from ancient historians to modern historical authors. Most of the history books he read about Sicily focused almost exclusively on the actions of her dynastic conquerors, of kings, emperors, popes, the aristocracy and the Mafia. Either completely ignored or else barely mentioned in these historical English language works about Sicily are stories of the Sicilian people.
Sicilian Odyssey was written to write the Sicilian people back into the history of Sicily, telling the accurate story of their extraordinary suffering and exceptional resilience.
Sicilian Odyssey is the product of his lifelong exploration of his Sicilian heritage. It represents the book he wished were available in his youth, and the written legacy he has created to pass down to his daughters, their children, and to every Sicilian eager to learn the real story of their ancestors.
“In my entire extended family, both in Sicily and in the United States, there was not a single mafiosi.”
— Joseph Sturiale, from the Introduction to Sicilian Odyssey
Joseph is available for speaking engagements, book clubs, cultural organization events, Italian-American association meetings, and university lectures. He has developed several presentation topics drawn from the book.