One of the many things I love about spending time in kitchens in Italy is that you always walk away with a lesson in immigration. This was the case at Il Giardino di Candida, a trattoria on Ventotene (Ponza’s neighbor, off the coast of Lazio) that bears the name of its late chef, Candida Sportiello (who shares her name with the island’s patron saint, Santa Candida). In 2019, during our last encounter, she told me of a community of 1,500 ventotenesi that immigrated to New York and still sends money back to the island’s main church. Ventotenesi, Candida told me as she stood at the stove, tending to her legendary pesce all’acqua pazza (whole fish simmered in a flavorful tomato broth), have always been immigrants. As she swirled the olive oil–enriched, garlic-infused broth in a large aluminum pan, she recounted how her home island was settled in the 1800s by twenty-eight families from Naples, whose descendents settled in New York in the 1910s. Given acqua pazza’s popularity in Italian restaurants up and down the East Coast of the US, perhaps we have the immigrants of Ventotene to thank for exporting it from their humble volcanic island.