Each Christmas season, Italian Americans in New York City assemble domestic Nativity crèches known as presepi. These Lilliputian landscapes are enlivened by narrative and performance in the service of Christian pedagogy, autobiography and family history. It is a site on which creators and their audiences impart their religiously-based and occasionally politically-informed utopian vision for their immediate lives. The presepio guides their interpretation of the past, their nostalgia, and their imagination of a hopeful future.