BEYOND THE COPPER HORIZON brings a timeless, yet unique Italian-American immigrant story vividly to life. Opening at the Battle of Novara in 1849, conscripted farmer Domenico Zanotto returns home to his alpine village of Cuceglio anticipating domestic peace in a burgeoning Italian nation. The war-scarred, cavalryman is instead devastated by lost love and violent nightmares. He questions God and labors in the vineyards in quiet despair until he finds unexpected love and hope in Catterina, a confident young woman twenty years his junior. Their family life is upended when disease, poverty, and death force them to join the earliest wave of Piemontese immigrants seeking wage paying jobs in the booming copper mines of Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula. In America, they face grueling working conditions, brutal winters, shattering loss, and the harsh prejudices of immigrant life. Only after achieving a measure of stability for his family, does Domenico realize what ultimately must be sacrificed in the pursuit of a better life for future generations.