Thank You for the Shoes

While this story focuses on the life of one man, Michelangelo Rizzo, it is an everyman story of immigrants who came to America. It reads like a novel. Spanning eighty years, two continents, and several U.S. states, this saga opens in 1909 as a thirteen-year-old fatherless boy leaves his hometown of Platania in the mountains of southern Italy on a solo journey to find the grave of the man whose blood runs in his veins, a man he cannot possibly remember. Through flashbacks, we come to understand the history, circumstances, and challenges faced by the boy's father and millions of others who were part of a thirty-year Italian migration to the Americas in the late 1880s and early part of the Twentieth Century.

From the port of New York, to the steel mills and coal mines of Pennsylvania; then on to building the Shore Road along Lake Erie in Cleveland, Ohio, and finally arriving in the state where he hopes to find his father's grave and where he settles, Connecticut, This young man's journey is fraught with detours, challenges, loss and tragedy, and enriched with love, joy and a triumph of spirit.

Readers will come to love this imperfect, ordinary man, with an extraordinary helping of faith, hope, commitment, and zest for living, merged with a button-busting love for his adopted country.

RAFFAELA MARIE RIZZO is an award-winning author who was born in Southern Italy and raised in Connecticut. She learned English at school. She turns her passion for people, history, family stories, genealogy, and travel into compelling stories based on real people, facts, and locales, brought to life through her imagination and creativity. A former senior executive, she earned numerous awards in business and marketing communications. She earned an MBA from Jacksonville University and a BA in media studies from Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, CT. She has been a lifelong volunteer, helping those in need. She recently published THANK YOU FOR THE SHOES, Anniversary Edition, which won a Gold Medal Florida Authors & Publishers (FAPA) 2026 President's Book Awards and the book was chosen as a winner in the 2026 International Firebird Book Awards.