Tempesta's stories explore complexities that are both profound and profoundly human, for example in cultural differences between life in the USA and in Italy. Most of his stories ask the reader to consider such questions as whether friendship possesses substance beyond illusion, and whether new life and new joy can emerge from surrender to aestheticized memories. Translating short stories is an arduous task but he succeeded in recreating in English, the emotional impact of his original stories in Italian. The importance of his writing lies in his capacity to generate dialogue. A reader must actively engage his texts, not to arbitrarily construct meaning, but to capture the abundance of subtlety and nuance that his work evokes. His prose (just like his poetry) does not ask to be received or decoded. Rather, it asks the reader to reflect on it and converse with it.