Italian Americana

Italian
Americana
Volume XXIX Number 1 Winter 2011
ITALIAN AMERICANA, a cultural and historical review devoted to the

Italian-American experience, is printed in cooperation with the University of
Rhode Island, Feinstein College of Continuing Education, and the American
Italian Historical Association.
EDITOR
Carol Bonomo Albright
The University of Rhode Island
Feinstein College of Continuing Education
Providence, Rhode Island
Editor and Review Editor Poetry Editor: Michael Palma

John Paul Russo Dana Gioia
University of Miami 1994-2003
Coral Gables, Florida
Associate Editor
Bruno A. Arcudi
State University College at Buffalo
Founded by Ernest S. Falbo and Richard Gambino
An international peer-review journal, ITALIAN AMERICANA is published semi-

annually at the University of Rhode Island, Feinstein College of Continuing
Education, 80 Washington Street, Providence, Rhode Island 02903-1803. Manuscripts
should be submitted in duplicate, conform to the revised edition of the MLA Style
Sheet and be accompanied by a self-addressed envelope with sufficient postage.
Poetry is not read during July, August, or September. Distributed in the United States
by B. DeBoer. ITALIAN AMERICANA is regularly included in Historical Abstracts;
Film Literature Index; America: History and Life; and Abstracts as well as in the
“Bibliography of Italian Studies in America” in Italica.
Subscription, rates: One year (two issues) individual, $20.00; two years, $35.00;
three years, $54.00; institution, $25.00; student, $15.00; foreign, $35.00. Checks
payable to Italian Americana. (Students must submit xeroxed ID for discount.)
2 Italian Americana
CONTENTS
4 Letter
4 Notes on Contributors
5 No License to Serve: Prohibition, Anarchists and the
Italian-American Widows of Barre, Vermont, 1900-1920 by
Robin Hazard Ray
23 Derived Aliens: Derivative Citizenship and Italian-
American Women during World War II by Lawrence DiStasi
34 Italian-American Urban Hyphens in Saturday Night Fever
by Margherita Heyer-Caput
POETRY
50 Featured Poet Robert Viscusi: Ellis Island as a Textual
Condition: Preface to Ellis Island 13.10, 14.2, 15.12
50 Three Poems from Ellis Island by Robert Viscusi
52 Witnessing’s End by Alessio Zanelli
52 Samuel Menashe Reads at the Harvard Club by Marc Alan
Di Martino
54 The Sugar Thief by Ned Balbo
55 Parkside by Stephen Campiglio
55 Where Have All the Epithalamiums Gone? by Joel Allegretti
56 Un Film di Federico Fellini, Musiche di Nino Rota by Joel
Allegretti
57 Found in Translation by Joey Nicoletti
58 Reverie #3 in Bourbon, Unfiltered Tobacco, and Rust by
Kenneth DiMaggio
59 Name Dropping by Barbara Hoffman
60 Cape May in January by Barbara Hoffman
60 Sad Laughter by Leonard J. Cirino
61 After Muso Soseki by Leonard J. Cirino
61 A Creation Poem by Wesli Court
63 Grandma’s House (story) by Mary Bucci Bush

81 Gifts of Grief (memoir) by Miriam Polli Katsikis
87 Any Place You Go in America (memoir) by Ernest E. Rossi
105 The Day Frank Sinatra Soothed Savage Beasts (memoir) by
Kenneth DiMaggio

REVIEWS
108 Sacco, Vanzetti, Parmenter, and Berardelli: 90 years of Confusion,

Clarity, and Innocent Victims. Review Essay
Exhibition: Sacco & Vanzetti: A Retrospective, In Remembrance of
Parmenter and Berardelli.
Review by Michael LaRosa
111 Point Omega by Don DeLillo
Review by Donatella Izzo
113 A History of the Italians in the State of Maine by Vincent A.
Lapomarda.
Review by John Paul Russo
114 The Imagined Immigrant: Images of Italian Emigration to the
United States between 1890 and 1924 by Ilaria Serra
Review by Fabio Benincasa
115 Old World Daughter, New World Mother. An Education in Love and
Freedom by Maria Laurino
Review by Caterina Sinibaldi
116 Peace Tower by F.G. Paci
Review by Paolo Simonetti
117 Welcome to Venice: Replicas, Imitations, and Dreams of an Italian
City edited by Guido Moltedo
Review by Alessandra Calanchi
119 Claiming Kin by Laura Marello
Review by Rita Ciresi
120 Bitter Spring by Stanislao Pugliese
Review by Guido Bonsaver
121 Sicilian Mimes: a Gallery of Sly and Rustic Tales by Francesco
Lanza, translated by Gaetano Cipolla
123 Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture
edited by Edvige Giunta and Kathleen Zamboni McCormick
Review by Michael LaRosa
124 The Abyss of Human Illusion by Gilbert Sorrentino
Review by Jonathan J. Cavellero
125 Scripting Identity. Writing Cultural Experience by Theresa Carilli
Review by Fulvio Orsitto
126 A New Language, a New World: Italian Immigrants in the United
States, 1890—1945 by Nancy C. Carnevale
Review by Iain Halliday
127 Briefly Noted: Sicily through Symbolism and Myth: Gates to Heaven
and the Underworld by Paolo Fiorentino
4 Italian Americana
Dear Reader,
We’re pleased to call your attention to two articles in particular in this issue.
They are both about Italian-American women and, though received too late to include in
American Woman, Italian Style: Italian Americana’s Best Writings on Women (Fordham
University Press, forthcoming), edited by Carol Bonomo Albright and Christine
Palamidessi Moore, we will eventually place both articles on the supplemental website,
www.italianamericana.com, along with other material not included in the book. We hope
you find these articles informative and that you enjoy all the contents in this issue.
Should you need to contact the journal editors, you may e-mail them at
it.americana@yahoo.com or at bonomoal@etal.uri.edu.
Sincerely,
Joseph DeAngelis
Former Rhode Island Speaker
of the House of Representatives
Notes on Contributors
Mary Bucci Bush’s book of short stories, A Place of Light (Morrow 1990), was repub-
lished by Guernica Editions in 2007. Her new novel, Sweet Hope, about Italians and
African Americans living and working together on a Mississippi Delta cotton plantation in
1903 has just been accepted for publication by Guernica Editions. Lawrence DiStasi is a
writer who lives in California. Margherita Heyer-Caput is Professor of Italian Studies at
the University of California, Davis. Her research and teaching areas cover the Italian lit-
erature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and Italian and Italian American cinema.
Her latest book, Grazia Deledda’s Dance of Modernity (2008), received the 2009 Ennio
Flaiano International Prize for Italian Studies. Miriam Polli Katsikis is a poet and short
story writer who received a fiction award from Pen Syndicated Fiction Project. A native
New Yorker, she now resides in Key West. Her novel Mothers like Gods was published in
2010. Robin Hazard Ray, an independent scholar, journalist, and editor, was graduated
from Brown University and studied European History at U.C. San Diego. She lives in
Somerville, MA. Ernest Rossi is retired from Western Michigan University, where he
was Chair of the Department of Political Science and Associate Dean of the College of
Arts and Sciences. He taught graduate courses in political science and undergraduate
courses in international relations and Latin American politics. He is coauthor of three
books in comparative politics and other articles in Italian American politics.
Our poetry contributors: Joel Allegretti’s third collection is Thrum (Poets Wear Prada,
2010). Ned Balbo won the 2010 Donald Justice Award for The Trials of Edgar Poe and
Other Poems (Story Line). Stephen Campiglio has a poem in Dennis Barone’s forthcom-
ing anthology New Hungers for Old:100 Years of Italian American Poetry (Star Cloud).
Leonard J. Cirino has published sixteen chapbooks and thirteen full-length poetry collec-
tions, including After Yang Chi & others (2009). Wesli Court’s new book is The Gathering
of the Elders (Star Cloud). Kenneth DiMaggio teaches Humanities and Film Studies at
Capital Community College in Hartford, Connecticut. Marc Alan Di Martino writes the
Man About Rome column for the online monthly The American in Italia. Barbara
Hoffman’s The Heat of Burnt Stubble was the first runner-up for the 2008 Bordighera
Prize. Joey Nicoletti is the author of Borrowed Dust (Finishing Line, 2010). Featured
Poet Robert Viscusi’s most recent book is a critical history entitled Buried Caesars, and
Other Secrets of Italian American Writing (SUNY, 2006). Alessio Zanelli’s most recent
collection is Straight Astray (Troubador, 2005).
No License to Serve: Prohibition, Anarchists, and the Italian-American Widows of Barre, Vermont, 1900-1920 5
No License to Serve: Prohibition,

Anarchists, and the Italian-American
Widows of Barre, Vermont, 1900–1920
ROBIN HAZARD RAY
On 27 February 1907, two of the 19th–20th century’s leading

anarchists—Luigi Galleani (1861–1931) and Emma Goldman (1869–
1940)—appeared together on the stage of the Opera House1 in Barre,
Vermont, a small city dedicated to the granite industry, to urge their
listeners to vote. Given that anarchists as a political species have long
disdained the vote, and that these two had no language in common
and disagreed on many philosophical points, this appearance demands
an explanation. One possible answer is to be found in the poverty and
misery of a disenfranchised group—Italian-American widows of
granite workers. It may be that the desperate circumstances of these
women forced Galleani and Goldman temporarily to suspend their
boycott of the vote in order to support a “no license” policy on liquor
sales and to become something they disdained: political leaders. An
exploration of the case reveals a great deal about the nature of immi-
grant politics in the context of local pressures, and about the struggle
for survival and for a voice in power politics on the part of women in
the nascent twentieth century.
Before delving into the particulars of the Vermont case, it is useful
to get a sense of who these two anarchists were and what they
believed.
Galleani the Intransigent

Luigi Galleani was an important figure in the Italian anarchist
movement within the United States from his arrival in 1901 until his
deportation in 1919. In those years, he edited the Paterson (NJ)
weekly Il Proletario; founded and edited the long-lived weekly
Cronaca Sovversiva (Barre, VT and Lynn, MA); and through his
speaking tours influenced countless members of the Italian working
class across the country. His most famous adherents are without doubt
Nicolò Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who were put to death in 1927
following a highly controversial trial.2
6 Italian Americana
Among his admirers and detractors alike, Galleani was regarded as

the epitome of ideological intransigence. His brand of anarchism
eschewed not only the state (whether monarchy or democracy), the
military, the judiciary, and capitalism, but any form of organization
whatsoever, including the labor union. “Anarchism rejects authority
in any form,” he wrote in 1924–25, “to the principle of representation,
it opposes the direct and independent action of individuals and mass-
es: to legalitarianism and parliamentarian action, it opposes rebellion,
insurrection, the general strike, the social revolution.”3 By corollary,
the vote was to be avoided, as it was seen as legitimizing the state and
its methods.4
In the stridency of his anti-organizationalism, he diverged from
anarcho-syndicalists like Rudolf Rocker (1873–1958), who saw the
general strike as a means of fortifying the power of the labor union
and therefore the workers, and hewed closer to anarcho-communists
like Errico Malatesta (1853–1932). To Galleani, the strike was not a
means to an end—such as better wages or safer working conditions—
but the end itself. He used his speeches and writings not to urge his
followers to achieve a set of goals, but rather, I would argue, to use
action or self-education to achieve a set of feelings: pride, defiance,
dignity, self-respect, selective solidarity. Galleani’s purist anarchism
was therefore more of a psychological or even a religious belief sys-
tem than a political one, since the achievement of political power was
not his aspiration. His language reflects this emotional, quasi-reli-
gious aim: those who died in the cause of anarchy were “martyrs,”
and even “sainted martyrs,” and the anarchist press published posters
depicting these martyrs, which “the faithful” or “coreligionists” (fedi
and coreligionisti), presumably hung in their homes in place of
Catholic religious prints.5
By contrast, Michael Bakunin (1814–1876) advocated “an organi-
zation formed by the people themselves, apart from all governments
and parliaments, a free union of associations of agricultural and fac-
tory workers, of communes, regions, and nations, and finally, in the
remote future, the universal human brotherhood, triumphing above
the ruins of all States.”6 In other words, he was anti-authoritarian and
“federalist,” but did not disdain organization per se, as did Galleani.
Galleani’s uncompromising strain of anarchism was of very long
standing, dating to the earliest years of his involvement with the
movement. As a youth, taking the stage at the Worker’s Congress in
Genoa in 1892, he helped to effect the rupture between the anarchist
wing and the socialist party proper, thereby sealing the doom of his
movement. His admiring biographer, Ugo Fedeli, frames this event as
a triumph of revolutionary principles over compromise. He writes:
At Genoa, it was undoubtedly Galleani who…was

most firmly and decisively hostile to the continuing
confusion and compromise [within the Worker’s
Party], which was immobilizing the competing forces
and rendering them useless. The Worker’s Party had
accumulated too many misunderstandings and other
baggage that were too weighty to carry forward into
the future; it was better that each side take its own
path and dedicate itself to a course of action that was
most appropriate to its own convictions.7
The socialist sector of the party, naturally, viewed the schism differ-
ently: Galleani, wrote the socialist Carlo Gabos in his pamphlet on the
Genoa meeting, was “the most violent obstructionist” in the gather-
ing, and much to blame for the weakening and defeat of the socialists
in later years.8
Galleani forged a reputation for himself as a man of pure princi-
ples, unwilling to be bribed by money or position, always more than
eager to speak truth to power and take the consequences. After the
failed anarchist rising of 1893–94 in Sicily and Tuscany, Galleani was
among the thousands of anarchists who were swept up for trial and
sentenced to prison or internal exile (domicilio coatto). The tribunal
that heard their cases in the anarchist stronghold of Carrara got a full
measure of Galleani’s hard-line oratory as he came to the bar in his
own defense. His aggressive confrontation of the witnesses and his
willingness to question the very legality of the proceedings proved his
eagerness to take on every adversary, regardless of the cost to him-
self.9
The tribunal sentenced him on 8 June 1894 to three years’ impris-
onment, followed by two years of “vigilanza speciale.”10 In the event,
Galleani spent two years in prison, and then in October of 1894 he
was shipped to the island of Pantelleria—an unproductive volcanic
island that, like Lampedusa, Ustica, Lipari, and Ponza, had been
deemed a good place to send troublemakers from Roman imperial
times up to the Fascist era. There he was to complete his sentence in
domicilio coatto.
8 Italian Americana
The use of domicilio coatto, along with that of “ammonizione”

(warning or admonishment), was sanctioned by public security mea-
sures voted by the rightist government of Italy in 1862, and it permit-
ted authorities to confine anyone from drifters to enemies of the state
for indefinite periods of time, with no right of appeal. In the 1870s, as
the economy of the newly united Italy staggered, social unrest mount-
ed, and radicalism grew among both urban and rural workers, domi-
cilio coatto was widely used to neutralize perceived insurgents,
socialist and anarchist alike.11 The desolate islands of the Mediterranean
became a stopping point in the careers of most of the famous Italian
radicals of this period, including Errico Malatesta (confined on Ustica
and Lampedusa); Galileo Palla (1865–1944; exiled to Pantelleria),
and Luigi Fabbri (1877–1935; sent to Ponza).12
Some of the islands afforded the detainees no more than a squalid
existence, with no means to earn a living and very little provided for
their subsistence.13 Galleani, however, managed to evade harsh com-
munal living conditions on Pantelleria and instead, according to
Fedeli, found himself a job tutoring local children. Apparently the
father of one of his pupils furnished him with a suite of rooms in the
neighborhood called Beccimulsa in the main town. It would seem
natural that other prisoners might resent the relative luxury of
Galleani’s accommodations, and indeed suspect him of either collabo-
ration or abandoning his fellow radicals, but if so one gets no hint of
it from Fedeli’s account.14
It was on Pantelleria that the incident of “I Morti” took place.
Fedeli writes: “In July 1897, some Roman anarchists—among them
Saverio Merlino, who had already begun leaning toward parliamen-
tarianism—thinking to be able to shorten [Galleani’s] sentence, had
proposed to make him a protest candidate in the election that was to
take place that year.”15 The idea, evidently, was to put up protest can-
didates in elections on the mainland, in order to expose the desperate
conditions on the islands of exile, to give a name to the nameless
prisoners. But Galleani refused outright. Any participation in elec-
tions, even as a protest candidate, served to validate the state and its
institutions, which he rejected root and branch. Instead,
The prisoners on Pantelleria proposed to the prison-

ers on all the other islands that they hold a public
protest and at the same time an anarchist affirmation,
against every authoritarian, legalistic, and parliamen-
tarian deviation, and against the illusion of protest

candidature. The proposal, suggested by Galleani and
sent from Pantelleria, was passed to many militants
on various other islands, and was accepted.16
The prisoners went on to publish the sole issue of a newspaper they

called I Morti (“The Dead”) on 2 November 1899; the whole front
page was taken up with an article by Galleani, which “truly set the
tone for the entire newspaper, because it was an affirmation of liber-
tarian, revolutionary, and anti-electoral intransigence.”17 Though
unsigned, the article is instantly recognizable as his work: it is florid
and oratorical, characterized by cascades of dependent clauses that
seem, in their fervor, to lose track of their substantives. It reads, in
part:
[B]eing forced to live, like many of us, for ten or

more years far from the world that fights and loves,
far from the lives that we adore and remember, from
the struggles that are our aspiration, our pride and our
life, far from every joy, from every intellectual plea-
sure, from all the intimate celebrations of the heart, to
know the aspiration to liberty that is so acute and
tormenting to our spirits, and at the same time need-
ing to arrange our environment to render it less cor-
rupt, our relations with others less wretched, our
battles more open and broad.
But I say to everyone, if in order to escape this
place we must bow before a banner that is not our
own, our liberation is paid for by barter, if we must
leave these barren rocks having lived even one day of
which we must be ashamed, if we must return dimin-
ished, stunted, altered, after having burned the incense
of lying adoration before the idols that we have repu-
diated…Better to remain here!18
In fact, Galleani himself was not made to choose between his lib-
erty and his principles. He struck up an affair with a married woman,
Maria Rallo, whom the FBI later characterized as “the wife of his
jailor,”19 and with her help and that of a pupil’s father, he bribed a ship
captain to take him, Maria, her son Salvatore Errera, and a daughter,
10 Italian Americana
Ilia, to Africa. Nevertheless, the period of confinement on Pantelleria

and his leadership role in the publication of I Morti did much to bol-
ster his reputation as an ideological intransigent, firmly set against
any cooperation with or participation in the political process.
I will not dwell here on Galleani’s arrival in the United States
(October 1901), on his assumption that same month of the editorship
of the anarchist weekly La Questione Sociale of Paterson, New
Jersey, nor on his leadership role in the violent strike by silkworkers
in that city in May and June of 1902. All of this is covered admirably
in Paul Avrich’s Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background.20 It
is sufficient here to affirm that Galleani’s intransigent stance did not
alter appreciably from the publication of I Morti to at least the time of
his trial—on charges relating to the Paterson riot—in 1907. In the
course of that trial, Galleani was called to the stand but refused to
swear on the Bible.21
In the interval between the Paterson riot and his trial, Galleani had
moved to Barre, Vermont, and there established his newspaper,
Cronaca Sovversiva, in 1903. In its pages he continued to rally “the
faithful” to what was in essence a secular religion, anarchy.
But it was also here that, just once in his entire career, he changed
his stance on the vote.
Emma Goldman, Tireless Agitator

Emma Goldman is much better known than Galleani in the
English-speaking world. This is in part because, though born in
Lithuania (then part of the Russian Empire), she emigrated early to
the United States, in 1885, mastered English (which Galleani never
did), and spent most of her adult life in America. She published copi-
ously during her lifetime and much has been written about her since,
interest in her life and career having been revived by the first wave of
feminist studies in the 1970s.22
Already in Russia, Goldman had been exposed to anarchist ideas,
which she was quick to embrace. Once in the United States, in her late
teens, she was further radicalized by the demeaning working condi-
tions she experienced in the New York needle-trade. She soon met
Alexander Berkman (1870–1936), who was to become her lover,
political partner, and lifelong friend. She also met the anarchist
Johann Most, editor of Die Freiheit newspaper, then engaged in a
defense of the Haymarket anarchists. Most helped Goldman launch
her speaking career, though they soon fell out over personal and doc-
trinal differences. By age twenty-five, Goldman was touring the coun-

try giving speeches on economic injustice and the crushing personal
cost of the capitalist labor and social system. She was jailed at various
times, most often for inciting to riot.23
Like Galleani, Goldman found the state to be everywhere and at
all times an instrument of oppression and psychological trauma. In her
essay “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For” (1910), she defines
anarchism as “The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty
unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of govern-
ment rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well
as unnecessary.”24 Anarchism, she argues, “is the only philosophy
which brings to man the consciousness of himself; which maintains
that God, the State, and society are non-existent, that their promises
are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through man’s sub-
ordination.”25
Goldman is now studied primarily for her advocacy on women’s
issues and sexual freedom, as well as for her personal and principled
rejection of marriage, which she deemed an unpaid form of prostitu-
tion. Her passionate grappling with the “Woman Question” is taken
for granted, in part because selective anthologizing of her works over
the years has winnowed out many other topics on which she spoke
and wrote, and has made it appear that women’s issues ranked higher
in her constellation of concerns than they in fact did.26 Careful reading
of her works shows that the social and economic degradation of
women was only one of the many issues she addressed. The wide-
ranging essay “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For,” for example,
in which she lays out her creed, makes no special mention of women
or women’s issues.
Among her widely reproduced writings on the “woman question”
is her essay “The Tragedy of Women’s Emancipation.” It casts the
push for equal rights as a doomed half-measure that leaves untouched
the shackles of capitalism and emotional oppression. In it, Goldman
asserts that until woman has learned to defy “internal tyrants,…to
listen to the voice of her nature, whether it call for life’s greatest trea-
sure, love for a man, or her most glorious privilege, the right to give
birth to a child, she cannot call herself emancipated.”27
Goldman confounded many would-be supporters of her day by
rejecting woman suffrage, calling it a modern “fetich” (i.e., fetish). In
an essay on the topic, she pours scorn on women in general and suf-
fragists in particular: “Woman, even more than man, is a fetich wor-
shipper, and though her idols may change, she is ever on her knees,
ever holding up her hands, ever blind to the fact that her god has feet
of clay,” the “idol” in this case being suffrage.28 Goldman sees wom-
en’s pursuit of the vote not as a bid for freedom and liberty:
On the contrary, [the suffragists] insist always that it

is woman suffrage which will make her a better
Christian and homekeeper, a staunch citizen of the
State. Thus suffrage is only a means of strengthening
the omnipotence of the very Gods that woman has
served from time immemorial.29
She goes on to cite countries and states where women have gotten the
vote and to ask rhetorically whether working conditions there are any
better or individuals any freer. She perceived, correctly, that much of
the push for woman suffrage came from women seeking more not less
interference in the social lives of others, especially their alcohol con-
sumption. The achievement of the vote for women in Colorado, she
opines, “instead of elevating woman, has made her a political spy, a
contemptible pry into the private affairs of people.”30 In addition, she
finds the suffragist movement “a parlor affair,” whose members
declined to canvas in poorer districts and clung to unequal modes of
behavior, so long as they were the beneficiaries: “Woman demands
the same rights as man, yet she is indignant that her presence does not
strike him dead: he smokes, keeps his hat on, and does not jump from
his seat like a flunkey.”31
This, then, does not seem like someone who would tread the boards
to get out the vote, any more than does Galleani. Let us now turn to
Barre, Vermont, and see what special conditions might have brought
these two figures to their surprising mission.
The Stonecarvers of Barre

It was not happenstance that Galleani chose Barre as his
home, nor that Emma Goldman should have visited this remote city
repeatedly over her American career. The granite quarries there
attracted waves of immigrant workers, starting with Aberdeen Scots
in the 1880s and ending with French-Canadians in the 1920s, with
Finns, Spanish, and others in between. But by far the bulk of the
immigrant labor was provided by Italians, in particular northern
Italians from the provinces of Lombardy, Piedmont, and Tuscany.

Many of the latter, particularly the skilled stonecarvers and stonecut-
ters from the marble industry of Carrara, in Tuscany, were dedicated
anarchists. We will remember that the Carrarese were among the
groups whose failed uprising led to the Tribunal and Galleani’s incar-
ceration on Pantelleria.
Historian Nunzio Pernicone writes:
[T]he anarchist movement had developed a unique

subculture in the province of Massa-Carrara, located
in the area known as the Lunigiana. The movement
here was unique from the standpoint of social class,
numerical strength, and revolutionary militancy.
Whereas anarchists elsewhere tended to be artisans
and workers of various types, as well as students and
autospostati [self-exiles] from the middle class, the
militants of Massa-Carrara were primarily workers in
the marble industry. The hard core of the Lunigiana
anarchists were the quarrymen (cavatori), who exca-
vated the precious Carrara marble found only in the
Apuane Alps. As a group, they constituted the most
politically advanced segment of the Lunigianian pro-
letariat and the aristocracy of the marble industry
workers....The difficult, dangerous, and isolated
nature of the work fostered a spirit of independence
and individualism, which, together with Massa-
Carrara’s historical tradition of perceiving state
authority as foreign and oppressive, made the quarry-
men natural candidates for anarchism.32
In Carrara, the anarchist Galileo Palla remarked, “even the stones are
anarchists.”33 And once recruited to the cause, the cavatori remained
loyal forever.
Quarrying and stonecarving in the Italian marble industry were
dangerous occupations, as they are everywhere, but with the move
from Italy and marble to Vermont and granite a new peril, silicosis,
soon presented itself among the immigrants. Marble dust, consisting
almost exclusively of calcium carbonate, is a substance that the
human body can absorb and metabolize fairly readily; furthermore the
carving workshops in coastal Italy could be opened for ventilation
most of the year. Consequently, men could work for decades cutting
and sanding marble with relatively little impact on their health. The
situation in Barre was quite different. The Barre Gray Granite, much
in demand for its fine-grained evenness and durability, is chemically
about sixty-nine percent silica (SiO2).34 Silica, unlike calcium carbon-
ate, cannot be absorbed by the body, and even relatively short periods
of exposure to high levels of silica dust will set off a pulmonary crisis.
The granite workers themselves became aware of the problem soon
after a technological advance—the pneumatic “hammer” patented in
1890—made granite carving swifter, more profitable, and far more
productive of dust. Already in 1903, The Granite Cutters’ Journal, a
union periodical, had made the connection between the skyrocketing
rates of tuberculosis among granite workers and their dusty working
conditions. Barre’s union scribe for the journal wrote with great bit-
terness in 1906, renewing his call for better ventilation in the granite
sheds: “[T]he winter will soon be upon us, and the dust boxes, called
sheds, closed up again for the season; each ready to produce its quota
of candidates for the premature inheritance of six feet of earth, a stu-
pid condolence resolution, and perchance a rock-faced marker!”35 Yet
it was not until the 1920s that the U.S. Health Department dispatched
Dr. A. E. Russell and his colleagues to study “The Health of Workers
in Dusty Trades,” including the granite industry.
The progress of silicosis was both predictable and inevitable.
Affected men first complained of shortness of breath “increasing in
severity with length of exposure.” Soon the panting and fatigue are
accompanied by pain in the chest, frequent colds, and finally an
“unproductive cough.”36 Invariably, the tuberculosis bacillus found its
way into the men’s weakened lungs. The granite sheds shut tight
against the Vermont winters, with many men working and coughing
in a confined space, assured the ready transmission of the bacillus. In
some cases, Russell theorized, the trauma of the silica dust may have
revived a dormant tuberculosis infection from childhood. In any case,
he searched with little success for granite workers who suffered from
silicosis only, without tuberculosis; he found only a very few, among
the youngest study subjects.
As the disease progressed, nodules in the lungs coalesced into a
rigid network and intertwined with the tubercular adhesions. The men
would usually continue working, but from the moment they devel-
oped the characteristic cough—grimly called the “stonecutter’s
chuckle”—they knew what to expect. Weight began to drop off,
reducing well-nourished, muscular men to bony shadows. Eventually

the patient could no longer get up and go to work. Russell found that,
on average, a man lived a little less than fifteen months after he
stopped working.37 The silica nodules, hardened by the waxy secre-
tions of the bacillus, ultimately broke through the tissues, filling the
lungs with blood. The men drowned, gasping for air. In autopsy, the
lungs of affected men could literally be stood up on the examining
table, rigid as a dried sponge.38
The most severely affected were also the most skilled, the men who
did the detailed lettering and carving on the granite pieces, with their
faces close to the spray from the pneumatic hammer. Their rate of
extinction was so extreme that it was literally off the charts: Russell
and his coauthors had to adjust the scale of the graph at Figure 23 of
their study so that the upward spike of the pneumatic-tool cutters’
mortality rate, plotted against age and compared with the nearly flat
mortality rate of rural Vermonters, could fit on the page.39 The carvers’
annual mortality rates were over sixty per thousand by age fifty-five.
That means that six percent of them were dying every year in that age
bracket alone.
By chance, it was also to most skilled who were the most likely to
be anarchists. The Barre Italians were quite divided in their political
loyalties, but it seems clear that the higher up in the industry hierarchy
a man worked, the more likely he was to be anarchist rather than
socialist. It is hard to know whether this was the result of thoughtful
political conviction—the skilled man, on careful consideration,
choosing the anarchist creed—or whether there were social factors at
work: it may be that anarchism became a kind of social club to which
one aspired, like Freemasonry. In any case, it is clear that Galleani had
come to Barre to be among his brother anarchists, but was soon sur-
rounded instead by their widows.40
Prohibition and the Widows’ Dilemma

The predicament of an immigrant woman whose husband
died was nothing short of dire. There was at that time, of course, no
Social Security to support her and her children. A collection might be
taken up to help with the burial costs and, in Barre, friends often vol-
unteered to make a man’s gravestone free of charge. Many socialist
Italians participated in mutual-aid societies (società di mutuo soc-
corso), and similar associations were set up by other ethnic groups.41
But the anarchists by and large disdained any kind of organization,
and thus did not participate; their widows were on their own.
Jobs for women were hard to come by in Vermont at that time,
especially if one did not speak English. In other Vermont towns,
women were employed in wool manufacturing, but there was little of
this in Barre. If the widow was fortunate enough to own her house,
she could take in boarders, and many did so.42 Other widows reemi-
grated to Italy, where their families could help support the children.43
If neither of these avenues was open to her, a widow had chiefly two
options: prostitution or selling liquor.
Some women must indeed have resorted to prostitution, though
what little evidence I can find indicates that the Italian women in
Barre were not inclined toward this source of income.44 For the rest,
liquor offered a means by which almost anyone could earn a living.
One tends to think of prohibition as something that began with the
Eighteenth Amendment—proposed in December 1917 and ratified by
two-thirds of the states in January 1919—and ended with its repeal in
December 1933.45 In fact, the sale of liquor had been regulated piece-
meal—town by town, state by state—across the United States since
the temperance movement had begun to accelerate in the 1830s.
Vermont was one of the first states in the nation to ban the sale and
consumption of alcohol (excepting only communion wine and hard
cider), in the “Temperance Law” of 1853.46 Nevertheless, as the early
chroniclers of prohibition Joseph Rowntree and Arthur Sherwell
noted in 1901, “in [Vermont’s] so-called ’cities,’…all of which are
small (the largest having a population of about 18,000 in 1899), the
law has for years been systematically violated.”47
Emma Goldman herself took notice of the pervasive violation of
prohibition in Barre and its deleterious effects on householders. On a
visit that in her memoir Living My Life she dates to 1899, Goldman
observed,
Vermont was under the blessings of Prohibition….In

company with my host [Salvatore Palavicini] I made
the rounds of some private homes. To my astonish-
ment I found that almost all of them had been turned
into saloons. In one such place I found almost a
dozen men visibly under the influence of liquor….
The stuffy kitchen, with the children of the family
inhaling the foul air of whisky and tobacco, consti-
tuted a drinking-den. Many such places were thriving
under the protection of the police, to whom part of

the income was regularly paid….Another result of
Prohibition was the increase of prostitution. We vis-
ited several houses on the outskirts of town, all doing
a flourishing business….By the closing of the saloons
the brothel became the only place where the men
coming into town could find some distraction. 48
She claimed to have seen Barre’s mayor and chief of police thor-
oughly drunk in one Italian family kitchen.
Though Goldman blamed prohibition for this sad state of affairs,
in fact the state’s repeal of prohibition did not cause these evils to go
away. In 1902, after half a century of ill-enforced and ineffective pro-
hibition, Vermont went to “local option,” which left it up to each town
or city to decide whether to be wet or dry.49 Finally in 1904, prohibi-
tion was repealed across the whole state, and “wet” prevailed until
national prohibition went into effect under the Volstead Act of 1920.
Despite local option and then legalization in Vermont, the prolifera-
tion of private speak-easies continued unabated. This is because only
licensed taverns were permitted to sell liquor, and the cost of a license
was unaffordable for the poor, including Barre’s widows. Edwin
Granai, who has thoroughly researched the legal history of prohibi-
tion in Vermont, writes that “a license required a $3000 bond and a
$1000 annual fee,” not to mention start-up costs.50
Payoffs to the police were sometimes not enough to avoid legal
consequences for the individuals running unlicensed speak-easies.
For reasons unknown—possibly political pressure, inadequacy of
bribes, orders to eliminate the competition, or personal retribution—
the police would periodically raid homes and arrest those found to be
“furnishing.” In Barre, it is likely that ethnic tensions among the
mostly Scotch-Irish police force, the Anglo-Saxon professional and
political caste, and the large working-class Italian population contrib-
uted to the more zealous persecution of the latter.
Many of these prosecutions were joltingly cruel. Granai discov-
ered that his own grandmother had been one of the many Italian wid-
ows arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned for liquor offenses. Elvira
Granai was, at the time of her arrest in 1917, a stonecutter’s widow
with eleven children, seven of them minors still living at home. The
youngest was two years old. These circumstances did not deter Judge
H. William Scott from finding her guilty on the very day of her arrest
and sentencing her to five months in the Vermont House of

Corrections. As Granai notes, she spoke no English, had no legal rep-
resentation, and was not afforded a jury of her peers.51 Nor was his
grandmother in any way unusual: “The city court dockets covering
the early years of the century show that about once a week an Italian
widow would be arrested, tried, and fined or imprisoned for selling
alcohol without a license. If they could pay the $500 fine, a year’s
wages in the stoneshed, they could avoid going to jail. Almost none,
of course, had the $500.”52 The number of Italian widows imprisoned
in this period therefore must be counted in the hundreds.
Elvira Granai’s arrest occurred in 1917. In 1907 the Barre voters
had had a choice. It was put to the vote whether to keep the system as
it was—“license only” liquor sales, which benefited those who
already owned taverns or had the means with which to buy them—or
go to “no license,” under which poor widows would have been free to
sell liquor in their homes, without having to produce the unheard-of
sum of $3,000. This, then, was the ballot question that brought Emma
Goldman and Luigi Galleani to the stage of the Barre Opera House.
Democracy Thrust upon Them

Reporters from both of Barre’s daily newspapers went to the
speeches on 27 February; one estimated the crowd at 500, the other at
900. Goldman spoke first, addressing the gathering in English,
according to the Barre Argus report of the next day subtitled “Famous
Anarchist Hammers Everybody and Wants No License.” Though she
lambasted the ballot box as “not clean and…only used to throw sand
in the eyes of the working men,” she nevertheless urged the assem-
bled to “do everything in their power to defeat the license law.” The
class inequity of liquor laws were alluded to: “She said it is necessary
for the working man to have his liquor, but the wealthy man has the
best of it. He gets drunk, is carried home in his cab, while the poor
man has to be made a public show of. This she laid at the feet of the
wealthy politician whom she claimed got his money by stealing it
from the poor.”53
The Barre Times reported that she inveighed against those who
managed to corner the liquor licenses while getting others arrested for
selling: “She declared that voting would not do any good, but if men
were going to vote, she told them to vote against granting licenses to
a few ’spies,’ and to give the right of selling liquor to everybody. She
repeatedly advised the voters to consider what they were voting for.”54
When Galleani took the stage, many people walked out and the
reporting became much less detailed, presumably because his deliv-
ery was in Italian. He had recently returned to Barre after having been
arrested in January 1907, on charges relating to the Paterson riots.55
The Times reporter wrote, “Galleani spoke in a satirical vein and sev-
eral times was interrupted by applause, while Goldman had an unin-
terrupted discourse to the end.” The Argus reported:
In his discourse he set forth that they wanted to upset

their whole power against the license question at the
polls next Tuesday....Miss Goldman denied the report
that she was hired to come to Barre by the Anti Saloon
league. All Galleani’s friends in Barre will vote no
license, because they are sore over his arrest and will
take this way of getting back at men they think were
responsible for his incarceration. The Italians were
advised a year ago by Galleani to vote no license and
resolutions were adopted. The city went no license by
12 votes last year. This meeting threatens to injure the
no license cause in Barre rather than help it.
Cronaca Sovversiva also covered the dual address at the Opera

House. It quoted Goldman as emphasizing the need to work for “eco-
nomic liberation”: “Splendid and convincing was her criticism of the
situation created by the equivocal dilemma: whether to support privi-
leged license or the hypocritical Temperance, showing how it can
only lay bare the betrayal, the lies, the corruption.”56 The paper
inveighed against the “pirates,” “spies,” and indeed the socialists,
who allegedly defended the monopoly of the entrenched powers.
Defeat
In this interesting case, Goldman and Galleani were essen-
tially encouraging their followers to vote within the State against the
extension of State power. As the Argus reporter noted, the vote in the
previous year had carried for “no license” by a mere twelve votes. He
was also, perhaps, not wrong in predicting that the vocal support of
two foreign-born anarchist leaders would harm rather than advance
the cause so crucial to the Italian widows. On 5 March 1907, the city
of Barre voted by a margin of 152 votes to go “license only.”
According to the Daily Times, “The no-license men were counting on
getting better support in the fifth ward through disgruntled voters, but
it failed to materialize.”57 The “license” supporters, by contrast, had
mobilized a well-organized and well-financed voter drive, with “a
score of double teams and barges impressed into the service” of get-
ting their voters to the polls.
“It is the sad, worn-out truth,” the Cronaca Sovversiva gloomily
observed the following week, “that with ’license’ nothing triumphs
but hypocrisy and corruption. Under the pretense of liberty, the fer-
mented beverage trade is in fact reduced to a monopoly of three or
four crooks who can sell whatever crap [porcherie] they want, at
whatever price they want: hence hypocrisy.”58
The widows of Barre would have to wait for Repeal, in 1933, by
which time it was far too late to do them any good. Meanwhile, police
raids on Italian households started promptly: on 25 March 1907, the
home of one G. Guidelli was raided for “furnishing,” with Mrs.
Guidelli brought up on charges and fined $500.
As for Galleani, he would remain in Barre for a few more years
before moving his family and newspaper to Massachusetts in 1912. It
is unclear what further efforts, if any, he made on behalf of his “con-
stituency,” the granite widows. His first appeal to the vote was also,
to my knowledge, his last. Both Galleani and Goldman were deported
from the United States under the Alien and Sedition Act in 1919,
never to return.
ENDNOTES
1. The Opera House (1899), attached to the City Hall in Barre, hosted local entertainments as
well as touring shows in a politically neutral venue. It still stands today.
2. Galleani appears as a benign, fatherly character in Upton Sinclair’s novelized version of the
Sacco-Vanzetti case, Boston: A Documentary Novel (1928).
3. Luigi Galleani, The End of Anarchism?, trans. Max Sartin and Robert D’Attilio (Orkney:
Cienfuegos Press, 1982), p. 14.
4. The boycotting of elections is standard practice among anarchists in Italy. There, at election
time, it is common to see the anarchist symbol—the letter “A” inscribed in a circle—and
the admonition “Non Voto.”
5. In January 1905, fire officials turned up numerous photographs of “martyrs” such as Leon
Czolgosz, the deranged man who assassinated President McKinley, after a conflagration at
the Cronaca Sovversiva office in Barre, VT (Montpelier Evening Argus, 27 January 1905).
The Boston Sunday Herald got hold of one of these posters, depicting the Haymarket anar-
chists, and reprinted it in its sensational, but not far from true, story “The Anarchists of
Barre, Vermont,” 12 March 1905.
6. Michael Bakunin, “Stateless Socialism: Anarchism,” http://theanarchistlibrary.org/state-
less-socialism-anarchism, accessed 13 January 2010. See also his “Revolutionary
Catechism” (1866).
7. Ugo Fedeli, Luigi Galleani. Quarant’anni di lotte rivoluzionarie, 1891–1931 (Cesena:

Antistati, 1956), p. 55. “Fedeli” (“faithful”) is the pseudonym of Ugo Treni (d. 1964).
8. Carlo Gabos, “Caccia alle deleghe,” in Genova 1892. Nascita della partita socialista ital-
iano (Milan: Avanti!, 1952), pp. 30–31.
9. For the trial, see Fedeli, Galleani, pp. 56ff.
10. Galleani’s CPC (police) record, p. 11a, entries for “Genova 8-10-96” and following. A copy
of this record is on file in the Barre (Vermont) Archives and the Archivio Famiglia Berneri,
Reggio Emilia, Italy.
11. Spencer di Scala, Italy: From Revolution to Republic: 1700 to the Present (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1995), p. 134; Nunzio Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, 1864–1892
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 130–32.
12. Piero Brunella, “Malatesta non parlava mai da sè,” Arivista Anarchica, anno 33, no. 295
(Dec. 2003–Jan. 2004), n. 20; accessed via http://www.anarca-bolo.ch/a-rivista/295/56.htm,
12 May 2010, 9:00 a.m.
13. Galleani’s biographer Fedeli reproduces a 1898 report by a Milanese named Luigi Vittorio
Bertarelli on the appalling condition endured by the exiles on Lipari, from Vittorio
Pasquale, Scritti sulla questione sociale in Italia (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1902), pp.
182–83. See also L. De Fazio, I coati politici in Italia (Rome: 1895), p. 45; transcribed in
Fedeli, Galleani, p. 66.
14. Fedeli, Galleani, p. 67.
15. Ibid., p. 68.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., p. 69.
18. I Morti: Gli anarchici del 1899 (Pistoia: Edizioni RL, 1974), pp. 8–9.
19. National Archives, College Park, MD, Department of Justice, Records of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, 61-1372-4, dated 20 April 1922.
20. Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1991), esp. Ch. 4.
21. Antonio Cavallazzi, “Resoconto del Processo,” Cronaca Sovversiva (Barre, Vt.), 18 May
1907.
22. See, for example, Red Emma Speaks: Selected Writings and Speeches by Emma Goldman,
ed. Alix Kates Shulman (New York: Vintage, 1972); the republication of Goldman’s mem-
oir Living My Life (1934; New York: Dover, 1970); the play Red Emma: Queen of the
Anarchists by Carol Bolt (1974); and numerous biographies that appeared in the 1970s.
23. Goldman’s itineraries are catalogued, though not without erroneous reliance on Goldman’s
occasionally inaccurate memoir Living My Life, in Emma Goldman: A Documentary
History of the American Years, ed. Candace Falk, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2003).
24. Widely reprinted and revised, an early version of this essay appears in Emma Goldman,
Anarchism and Other Essays (1910; repr. ed. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1969),
pp. 53–73; quote from p. 56.
25. Ibid., p. 58.
26. See, for example, Alix Kates Shulman: “The Woman Question was one to which Goldman
was most sensitive and responsive,” Preface to Part Two, Red Emma Speaks, p. 104.
27. “The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation,” Red Emma Speaks., pp. 227–28.
28. “Woman Suffrage,” in Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays, p. 201.
29. Ibid., p. 203.
30. Ibid., p. 210.
31. Ibid., pp. 211–13.
32. Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, p. 227.
33. Quoted in Ugo Fedeli, Anarchismo a Carrara e nei paesi del marmo: Dall’Internazionale
ai moti del ’94 (Pisa: Biblioteca Franco Serantini, 1994), p. 85.

34. Dorothy Richter, “Barre Granite Quarries, Barre, Vermont,” Geological Society of America
Centennial Field Guide – Northeastern Section (1987), p. 240; T. Nelson Dale, “The
Commercial Granites of New England,” USGS Bulletin 738 (Washington, D.C.: USGPO,
1923), pp. 125, 139; and A. E. Russell, R. H. Britten, L. R. Thompson, and J. J. Bloomfield,
The Health of Workers in Dusty Trades: II. Exposure to Siliceous Dust (Granite Industry),
Public Health Bulletin 187 (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, July 1929), p. 18.
35. James McAdam, “Fighting Tuberculosis, As a Direct Result of the Dust Nuisance in Granite
Cutting Sheds,” The Granite Cutters’ Journal (Quincy, MA), September 1906, p. 1.
36. Russell et al., The Health of Workers in Dusty Trades, p. 9.
37. Ibid., p. 111.
38. See Section 10, “A Pathological Study of Eight Lungs from Employees in the Granite
Industry,” ibid., pp. 138–70.
39. Ibid., p. 117: “It has been necessary to employ a much condensed scale in order to bring the
curve for cutters within the limits of a graph, and for this reason the curve for rural Vermont
must necessarily strike one as being very flat. It is a limitation of arithmetic scaled paper.”
40. In 1912, Galleani moved Cronaca Sovversiva to Lynn, MA.
41. Susan Richards notes the importance of the Clan Gordon Order of Scottish Clans in sup-
porting the Scottish-American widows in Barre, in “Making Home Pay: Italian and Scottish
Boardinghouse Keepers in Barre, 1880–1918,” Vermont History 74 (Winter/Spring 2006),
p. 59.
42. Richards calculates that “from 1880 to 1990 between 45 and 50 percent of Barre’s working
earned income from taking in boarders”; “Making Home Pay,” p. 48.
43. This solution was taken by Maria Corti, whose husband Elia was killed in a violent scuffle
between anarchists and socialists on 3 October 1903. For this incident, see Karen Lane,
“Old Labor Hall, Barre, Vermont,” Labor’s Heritage 10, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 1999), pp.
52–53.
44. There clearly was prostitution going on in Barre. See Patricia W. Belding, One Less
Woman: A Vermont Murder: 1919 (Barre, VT: Potash Brook Publishing, 2006), who writes
of a young married woman who sold sexual favors in Barre.
45. For dates of ratification, see http://www.usconstitution.net/constamrat.html#Am18,
accessed 11 August 2010.
46. The text of the Vermont law is given at http://www.assumption.edu/whw/old/NarrativeGuide.
html, accessed 11 August 2010.
47. Joseph Rowntree and Arthur Sherwell, The Temperance Problem and Social Reform
(London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1901), p. 226.
48. Emma Goldman, Living My Life, vol. 1 (1931; New York: Dover, 1970), pp. 238–39. There
is reason to doubt her dating of events. She recalls (p. 238) meeting Luigi Galleani in Barre
in 1898, at a time when he was still detained on Pantelleria.
49. Rowntree and Sherwell, The Temperance Problem, p. 121.
50. Edwin Granai, citing The General Laws of Vermont, 1917, loc. cit., Sect. 6468; 115 (bond),
sect. 6480; 1117 (license); in “The Rewards and Risks of Family Research,” Voices of
Italian Americana 11, no. 2 (2000).
51. Vermont women only gained the right to sit on juries in 1943; Belding, One Less Woman,
p. 37.
52. Granai, “Rewards.”
53. Barre Argus, 28 February 1907.
54. Ibid.
55. Galleani’s trial in Paterson, in April 1907, would result in a hung jury and dismissal of the
case. The proceedings were admirably documented in the Paterson (NJ)
Derived Aliens: Derivative Citizenship and Italian American-Women during World War II 23
Derived Aliens: Derivative

Citizenship and Italian American-Women
during World War II
LAWRENCE DiSTASI

Not long ago I received an e-mail concerning an Italian
American woman’s loss of citizenship. It read as follows:
I wonder if you’d know what was behind what hap-

pened to my aunt, now deceased, when she was living
in our hometown between Syracuse & Utica, NY. She
was born in this country, as were all her siblings, of
Italian-born parents who became U.S. citizens when
she was a child. My Aunt Laura was a U.S. citizen.
In 1921, in our hometown, she married a non-citi-
zen. He had application papers in for becoming a
citizen, but he died in 1922 before they could be pro-
cessed.
In 1933 she re-married to a U.S. citizen (Italian
American, like her).
In 1954, I believe, while applying for a county job,
she was informed that her citizenship had been
revoked. She was no longer a U.S. citizen because she
had married the non-citizen in 1921. Aunt Laura
never lived anywhere but the U.S. She married the
non-citizen in the U.S. when she herself was a U.S.
citizen.
She had to reapply to become a U.S. citizen in 1954,
take some tests and an oath of allegiance to the U.S.
(which she did). She once again became a U.S. citi-
zen.
Do you know what this was all about? How was it
possible that a native-born U.S. citizen who never left
this country had her citizenship revoked (without her
knowledge, no less) because of whom she married in
this country?1
It turns out that this case, and the puzzlement over its cause, bore
striking resemblances to citizenship problems that affected many
Italian-American women during World War II.2 The problems
stemmed from what is called “derivative citizenship”—a category
that includes women and minor children, both of whom have tradi-
tionally been said to derive their citizenship status from others:
women, from their husbands; children, from their fathers. Few of
those affected during WWII, however, understood the legal techni-
calities behind this term. All anyone knew was that there were these
peculiar cases—of American-born women, presumably American
citizens, who were for some reason classified as “enemy aliens” dur-
ing the war. But how could this be? The fearsome term “enemy alien”
was normally applied only to immigrants born in enemy nations who
had not yet become American citizens. Nevertheless, in these cases
the term was extended to the American-born, had something to do
with marriage, and affected only women. Such women, like the Aunt
Laura referred to above, seemed to have lost their American citizen-
ship by marrying a foreigner, and done it at a time when doing so was
perceived as hostile or disloyal. One informant claimed that it had
something to do with the Cable Act (see below).
This lack of citizenship during the war was not an idle matter,
for it turned out that losing their citizenship made these American-
born women subject to all the restrictions imposed on Italian, German
and Japanese “enemy aliens” at the time: restrictions on travel, restric-
tions on the possession of so-called “contraband” including short-
wave radios, cameras, and the like, and, on the West Coast, their
forced relocation out of “prohibited zones” mainly near shorelines. As
one public example, consider this story that appeared in Stockton,
California’s newspaper, the Stockton Record, on February 9, 1942,
describing a woman born in California, and hence a U.S. citizen by
birth:
…in 1908 she married a man of Italian nativity. It was
in that period that a woman lost her citizenship if she
married a citizen of another country. Several years ago
her husband applied for his papers and later became a
citizen of the United States. Recently his wife learned
that although she lost her citizenship by marriage, she
did not regain it when her husband became natural-
ized….Consequently, her husband, born in Italy, is
now a full-fledged citizen of this country while she,
born in California, is an Italian subject, cannot vote

and must register as an enemy alien.3
Numerous other women in California and elsewhere appeared to

come under this vexing category. California-born Hope Cardinalli
was ordered to move from her home in the area of Monterey prohib-
ited to enemy aliens, until she hired a lawyer to contest her evacua-
tion. Postal worker Elaine Null of Pittsburg wondered why she had to
register her American-born mother as an enemy alien. It turned out to
be due to her marriage to an Italian. And the Tolan Committee
Hearings, held in San Francisco in February 1942, recorded several
testimonials about the same situation. In one, attorney Chauncey
Tramutolo testified about the case of Marguerite Valdez Vezzolo4,
who had been born in San Ardo, California in 1898 and who, then
living in Salinas, California with her eight children,
lost her citizenship by reason of the fact that she mar-

ried a noncitizen prior to 1922. As you are undoubt-
edly aware, anyone who married an alien prior to 1922
lost her citizenship even though born here. This
widow has never been out of the United States and her
only means of livelihood is the dairy farm of which
she owns a half interest and the other half is owned by
her brother-in-law, who must vacate because he is an
alien. I am sure you can readily appreciate that it
would be a tremendous hardship to ask this woman
and her children to remove from the dairy farm, which
is in a prohibited area.5
Though everyone who heard about this ‘guilt by marriage’ law found
it puzzling, if not infuriating, few of those affected by it possessed
either the sense of entitlement or the means to challenge its legality.
Even the attorney, Tramutolo, though keen to point out its cruelty and
unfairness in the cases he described, accepted the law without protest.
And shortly after beginning my research into the wartime story, I was
to learn that its effects reached into my own east coast family. A
cousin revealed that her Connecticut home had been searched for
contraband in 1942 because her immigrant father had been an enemy
alien during the war; and further, that her American-born mother, my
Aunt Ruth, had also been saddled with the “enemy alien” designation
because she had lost her citizenship by marrying my Italian-born
uncle. The irony was that this aunt, of Pennsylvania Dutch extraction,
came from a family that had settled in the United States before the
American Revolution, a war in which one of her forebears had served
with distinction. No matter. As a woman, her American birthright was
forfeited when she married: the law decreed that she derived her sta-
tus, with all its enemy alien penalties, from her immigrant husband.
One other related situation from WWII deserves mention.
Countless Italian-American women were classified as “enemy aliens,”
and thus forced to leave their homes in west coast prohibited zones
alone, or with their minor children, even as their immigrant husbands,
most of them naturalized citizens, were allowed to remain. Angelina
Bruno, forced to evacuate from the prohibited area of Pittsburg,
California, lamented this very fact:
What burned me up was this: I came here at age ten,

went to school here. I had three children, my husband
was an American citizen, and still I had to move out.
When I got married I thought I automatically became
a citizen. But when the war came, they said I wasn’t.6
Rose Scudero’s family fit in this same category: her father an

American citizen, her mother was an enemy alien who had to leave
Pittsburg, and was required to bring Rose, a minor, with her. And
Pearl Piziali’s mother, who had to move from her Richmond,
California home to Oakland with her minor children, left her citizen
husband remaining at work in Richmond so distraught that he consid-
ered quitting his job to move with them. Women, in fact, made up a
large percentage of the Italians branded as enemy aliens—in part
because many, living in communities where they could conduct their
business and social life in Italian, felt little need to learn the English
needed to pass the citizenship test. Besides, like Angelina Bruno, most
felt that with husbands naturalized—automatically giving them, they
were sure, derived citizenship—they were adequately protected.
With the war, all this changed. Suddenly unprotected, such
women were forced to abide by edicts restricting their movements and
possessions, and even where they could reside. This included the most
incomprehensible restriction of all—the one that said if you were an
American-born woman who had married an Italian prior to 1922, you
were not a citizen, not even if your husband had later become one, but
an enemy alien who could not be trusted. Like many of the problems
faced by immigrants in wartime, this was a law that appeared not only
absolute, but impenetrable. All anyone knew was that a woman mar-
ried to a foreigner took on his foreign citizenship, and, for some rea-
son, kept it even after he became an American citizen himself.
It was this kind of incomprehension and frustration that
finally led an Immigration and Naturalization (INS) official to give a
talk in Stockton, California, attempting to explain that the situation
was not really as dire as people were making out. The talk was report-
ed in the Stockton Record of February 18, 1942, “Some Alien
Problems Cleared by Lions Club Speaker Here.” Paul Armstrong,
assistant district director of the INS in San Francisco, was reported to
have testified that “much confusion” had existed, and that many
American-born women had been registered unnecessarily under the
blanket alien registration order of 1940 and the enemy alien registra-
tion of early February 1942:
He explained that women who have married aliens

and who have never left this country fall under neither
classification and are not affected by any alien restric-
tions. This includes the orders banning certain areas to
enemy aliens. Under the Repatriation Act of June 25,
1936, women who lost citizenship through marriage to
aliens are deemed generally as citizens, it was
explained. They cannot avail themselves of certain
rights, such as voting, until they follow either of two
courses. If they have left the United States, they must
follow regular repatriation procedure. If they have not
left the United States, they must simply take an oath of
allegiance. Therefore, the Immigration Department
has adopted the stand the latter group is not affected
by restrictions aimed at enemy aliens.7
Though it is not clear what rights someone “deemed generally as a

citizen” would retain (since the right to vote is the essential right of
citizenship), this information would have been very helpful to
“derived aliens”—and just in the nick of time, for the evacuation from
prohibited zones had a deadline of February 24—had it appeared in
all newspapers, including the ones in Italian. It did not. So, to begin
with, if a woman lived in Stockton and could read English, then she
could avoid an unnecessary move; but if she lived elsewhere, and did
not read the papers regularly, the article would have been of little help.
The second problem involves the somewhat subtler sin of omission.
That is, if not the reporter, then surely Mr. Armstrong might have
pointed out that derivative citizenship worked both ways. A woman
could lose her citizenship through marriage, but she could also gain
(or regain) it that way. That is, if an Italian immigrant became natural-
ized prior to 1922, his wife, even if she were one of those who had
lost her citizenship through marriage, would have regained it. This
proviso stemmed from the Immigration Law of 1855, whereby an
immigrant woman instantly became a U.S. citizen at the time her
husband was naturalized.8 But the other problem with this explana-
tion by a high INS official, is that the 1936 law repatriating those who
had lost their citizenship via marriage applied only to those no longer
married, i.e., widows or divorcees.9 This would have helped Marguerite
Vezzolo, the widow running a dairy in Salinas. But for women still
married to their foreign-born husbands, the wait would be extended
until 1940, when Congress finally allowed all women who had lost
their citizenship to regain it, to “repatriate,” regardless of their marital
status.10 This, too, would have been in time to prevent the distress of
many “derived aliens” in 1942, if they had known about it.11 Clearly,
many—including my Aunt Ruth and Laura Bartholomew—did not.
Indeed, even those who knew about the loss of citizenship
were confused about the legislation imposing it. That legislation was
the 1907 Nationality Act, also called the 1907 Expatriation Act.
Passed by Congress in the midst of the nativist fervor that gripped the
country because of the huge influx of immigrants from southern
Europe at the time, as well as the racist animosity directed toward
Asian immigrants, the Nationality Act for the first time defined a
woman’s citizenship strictly in terms of her immigrant husband’s.
That is, because women were said to derive their nationality from
their husbands, they forfeited their American citizenship when they
married a foreigner. The law’s operating assumption seemed to be that
a woman who chose to marry a foreign man was literally choosing to
become a citizen of another country. Section Three of the Act said:
[A]ny American woman who marries a foreigner shall take the
nationality of her husband.12
Nothing else—not nation of birth, parentage, independent
naturalization, or the crucial element of the woman’s intention—mat-
tered. According to the 1907 law, all that mattered, for a woman, was
the citizenship of her husband. And if her husband’s citizenship car-
ried with it stigmas such as race (as it did for Asians, disqualified from
American citizenship), or enemy alien status (as it did for Italian
immigrants during World War II), then those stigmas were automati-
cally imprinted on the woman.
It should go without saying that the opposite was not true;
that is, an American man who married a foreign woman lost no rights
whatever.13 Indeed, even a minor child born in the United States to a
non-citizen immigrant was considered an American citizen, this by
virtue of the ancient principle of jus soli or the law of ground, where-
by citizenship is granted to those born within a nation-state, regardless
of the citizenship of his or her parents. With regard to women, how-
ever, jus soli did not apply. Neither did the other pillar of citizenship,
jus sanguinis or the law of blood, whereby citizenship automatically
passed to the children of citizens. All that mattered to those who
passed the 1907 Nationality Act was the status of women—e.g., that
a wife was the property of her husband and therefore was indelibly
stained by whatever citizenship he happened to possess. If that citi-
zenship carried with it stigmas and alienation, so much the better for
the punitive purpose of the law—to dissuade American women from
marrying any of the “undesirable” foreigners then entering the coun-
try in such numbers.
It is now clear what happened to Laura Bartholomew in the
above-cited email. By marrying an Italian immigrant in 1921, she lost
her American citizenship via the 1907 law. But by the time she mar-
ried her second husband, an American citizen, in 1933, a new law had
been passed that changed the old one. Enacted in response to pressure
from the women’s movement for equal rights (which had already led
to the passage, in August 1920, of the Nineteenth Amendment giving
women the right to vote), the 1922 Cable Act overturned the 1907
Expatriation Act, ended derivative citizenship for women altogether,
and gave American women nationality and citizenship on their own.
Laura Bartholomew did not, therefore, regain her citizenship by mar-
rying an American citizen in 1933, because derivative citizenship no
longer applied. She had to take “repatriation” steps on her own, which
she did only in 1954, when she learned of her plight.14
This begins to resolve the related question as well: why did
Italian-American women remain in the dark for so long about this and
other matters? If, as Marian L. Smith and others have noted, a woman
automatically became naturalized when her husband did, why were so
many Italian immigrant women with naturalized husbands still clas-
sified as “enemy aliens” during WWII? That is, why didn’t the status
of their newly-naturalized husbands protect them, making them
American citizens via derivative citizenship?

Several explanations suggest themselves. The first is simple
lack of knowledge. As noted above, most Italian immigrants did not
read newspapers, and if they did, they read the ones in Italian. As far
as is yet known, during the war the only specific report about the
Repatriation Acts of 1936 (and 1940) appeared in the Stockton
Record, and it appeared once only. Though one might expect the INS
to have attempted to make the law known to the American-born
women affected by it, this appears not to have been the case. Women
who had lost their citizenship by marriage were simply allowed, and
in some cases, compelled by zealous officials to follow a mistaken
interpretation of the law.15 The second explanation is that the 1922
Cable Act, which finally gave women citizen status independent of
their husbands, and which was meant to liberate them, no doubt
helped many women. But it appears to have hindered many others.
That is, after 1922, an American-born woman could no longer lose her
citizenship by marrying a foreigner; but neither could she, if she had
lost it earlier, automatically regain it through her husband. Regarding
citizenship, after 1922 she was on her own.
In addition, consider the Italian immigrant woman who had
married an Italian-born man, and that man became naturalized after
1922. Historically, a non-citizen woman whose husband was natural-
ized automatically became an American citizen herself, via derivative
citizenship (as Angelina Bruno thought). But again, after 1922, a
woman’s citizenship was no longer derivative; it was hers alone.
Therefore, if her husband were naturalized in 1926, say, or any time
after 1922, it was his citizenship alone. His wife, if she were Italian-
born, remained an alien (often without knowing it) until she took her
own steps to naturalization. Thus, the plight of so many immigrant
women who had to leave their homes in prohibited zones while their
naturalized husbands were allowed to remain, stemmed from the 1922
law. Citizenship had become an individual matter, so women still
depending on a husband’s status were depending on what no longer
applied. When their adopted country went to war with their native
country, they, as non-citizens, became enemy aliens, subject to all the
restrictions and prohibitions thereof.
In fact, something like this seems to have happened to the
mother of longtime New Mexico Senator, Pete Domenici. According
to the Senator’s recollection of it, his parents, prior to their marriage
in 1926, were assured by their prominent lawyer that Alda Vichi
would automatically become an American citizen—via derivative

citizenship—when she married Cherubino Domenici, who had been
naturalized several years earlier. It was only in December 1940, after
the government commenced a public campaign to inform women that
the 1922 law had ended derivative citizenship, that Alda Domenici
seems to have realized that her 1926 marriage had not protected her
at all: she was still an alien. Though she then initiated proceedings to
naturalize on her own, problems confirming her ship’s arrival record
kept her petition from completion until after war broke out in
December 1941. It was then, as a non-citizen from an enemy nation,
that she became an “enemy alien,” though she seems not to have real-
ized it. This vulnerability led to her arrest—possibly for failing to
register as an enemy alien in February 1942, possibly for possession
of ’contraband’—some weeks before she was at last naturalized on
her own in late March of 1942.16
Finally, this latter ‘catch-22’ no doubt affected some of the
women at the heart of this story—American-born women who mar-
ried Italian immigrants between 1907 and 1922. If their husbands
subsequently became American citizens, but did it after 1922, the
newly-liberated status of all women would leave these wives strand-
ed. Having derivative status prior to 1922 had deprived them of their
American citizenship, while not having derivative status after 1922
prevented them from automatically regaining it via their husbands.17
Ironically, they would have been penalized by both the 1907 law that
stripped them of their rights, and the 1922 law meant to protect those
rights forever.
One wonders if the lawmakers responsible for such painful
outcomes can be absolved simply by noting that here, as elsewhere,
the law of unintended consequences ruled.
ENDNOTES
1. Personal email from Mary Bucci Bush, Dec. 14, 2009.
2. Indeed, as it turned out, Laura Bartholomew’s home was raided during early 1942 and the
radio with short wave removed. As her son John remembered it, “We had our short wave
radio removed from our home....but my mother never said why.” She may not have known,
since she seemed unaware, until 1954, that she had lost her American citizenship. In this,
she was similar to many other Italian Americans during WWII (see Alda Domenici’s story
below), large numbers of whom remained unaware of the full story of government
restrictions until years later when the Una Storia Segreta project revealed all that had
happened, and why. (See notes 5 & 6 below.)
3. “Local Aliens Tell Tales of Woe” Stockton Daily Evening Record, February 9, 1942, 5.
4. Marguerite Vezzolo was married on January 3, 1917 to Italian immigrant Battista Vezzolo,
who died January 27, 1941. Naturalization Records indicate that Mrs. Vezzolo finally got
to take the oath of allegiance to “repatriate” on May 7, 1942, though she had petitioned to
do so much earlier. She thus would still have been considered a non-citizen enemy alien
on February 24, 1942 (the deadline for evacuation from prohibited zones). But though her
diary farm’s proximity to the huge military base at Fort Ord put it in a zone prohibited to
enemy aliens, Vezzolo’s family testifies that she did NOT have to leave the dairy farm,
mainly because of the hardship it would have represented (personal communication from
Lila Vezzolo, April 21, 2010). It thus appears that the presentation of her case to the Tolan
Committee helped Marguerite Vezzolo avoid evacuation; her case would also have been
helped by the INS policy towards the American-born who had lost their citizenship
through marriage (see Feb. 18, 1942 Stockton Record, quoted above), i.e. that they were
not subject to enemy alien restrictions. The problem, as noted in the text, is that most
women were not made aware of this policy.
5. House of Representatives Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration,
77th Congress, 2nd Session, Pursuant to H. Res. 113, part 29 San Francisco Hearings,
February 21 & 23, 1942, “Problems of Evacuation of Enemy Aliens and others from
Prohibited Zones,” official transcript, 111126 & 111131.
6. Angelina Bruno, personal interview, as told in “Pittsburg Stories,” in Una Storia Segreta:
The Secret History of Italian American Evacuation and Internment during World War II,
ed. Lawrence DiStasi, (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2001), 57.
7. “Some Alien Problems Cleared by Lions Club Speaker Here,” Stockton Daily Evening
Record, February 18, 1942, 13.
8. As explained by Marian L. Smith, “Any woman who is now or may hereafter be mar-
ried…” Prologue Magazine, National Archives, Summer 1998, Vol. 30, No. 2. http://www.
archives.gov/publications/prologue/1998/summer/women-and-naturalization-1.html. It
should be noted that neither this article, nor Nicolosi’s (see note 13 below) mentions the
plight of women who married Italians and became enemy aliens.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. For example, if the INS had informed them that, due to the 1936 and 1940 laws, they
could now repatriate; and most particularly, that those married to Italian or German
immigrants were not in any case subject to enemy alien status, many women would have
been spared their ordeal. It should be noted that Marian Smith, op cit, maintains that the
INS had no way of knowing who these women were.
12. Expatriation Act of 1907, quoted in Candice Lewis Bredbrenner, A Nationality of Her
Own: Women, Marriage and the Law of Citizenship, (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1998), 47, printed online at http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/
view?docId=ft0g500376&chunk.id=d0e1630&toc.depth=1&toc.id=&brand=ucpress.
13. The deep political, social, racial and gender biases behind derivative citizenship have been
thoroughly discussed in recent years. See, for example, Candice Lewis Bredbrenner, A
Nationality of Her Own, op cit; and Anne Marie Nicolosi, “Female Citizenship and the
Law: The Strange Case of Louise Comacho,” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice,
2002; 18; 329; printed online at http://www.sagepub.com/prccj3/overviews/pdfs/Nicolosi.
pdf. Briefly, the 1907 law gave the state the power to control the social, sexual and racial
choices of American women by penalizing them for marrying Asians, southern Europeans,
and members of other immigrant groups perceived as “un-American” at the time. Though
nativists could not prevent women from choosing “foreigners” as husbands, they could,
via this law, punish them for doing so.
14. As in so many other cases mentioned here, Laura Bartholomew could have regained her
citizenship easily in 1936, if she had known about the new law. Apparently she did not; or
more likely, not even realizing that she had lost her citizenship, she had no interest in a law
enabling her to regain it. When she did take the necessary steps for repatriation she did
something like what the 1936 law required: she took a simple oath of allegiance.
15 It could also be the case that while some women may have heard of the changed law,
taking advantage of it took time and money. During the 1930s beset by Depression, many
families might have considered the required fees as beyond their means, and may have
decided they had ample time to do so in the future. Few would have reckoned on the war
and the harsh changes it wrought.
16. Indeed, it appears that when he told this story in 2006, Senator Domenici was not aware
that his mother’s arrest was due to her “enemy alien” status; rather, he assumed she had
been arrested as an “illegal alien” (one who enters the country illegally). Here is how he
told the story (see March 29, 2006 Congressional Record, S2518-19, printed online at
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgibin/query/F?r109:23:./temp/~r1097AD9fo:e58673):
“One afternoon when I am about 9 or 10 years old, sitting in the backyard, guess who
arrived? It was during the Second World War, 2 years before the end, or a year and a half.
Who were we at war with? Italy. The immigration officers arrived in their big black cars.
They pulled up to the house, and there was the Senator-to-be 45 years later—little PETE—
with his sisters, and here they come. Of course, we think what happened was there was a
flamboyant Italian man nearby that used to—excuse me—imbibe on weekends. They
think he had a little too much imbibing and he was singing a song out the window of the
third floor of a hotel, right on top of the grocery store, the Montezuma Grocery Store. Of
course, singing Italian, he probably excited some American who was a super citizen, right?
He was worried about these illegal aliens. So the immigration officers set about to see who
among us were illegal aliens, and there she was, my mother, Alda Domenici. They decided
she had to be arrested because she was an illegal alien. So, sure enough, they came to do
that and a neighbor had to come over to take care of us kids. I was about 9 or 10. I was
pretty frightened. I remember that we had a nice Zenith radio, a standup, and it had an
aerial in it that would permit you to get music and pick up noise from overseas. The agents
disconnected the radio so we could not communicate with the enemy. Then my father
arrived at home. But guess who else arrived. That lawyer who advised my parents on my
mother’s immigration status [John F. Simms, who advised the Domenicis that Alda would
derive American citizenship when she married Cherubino in 1926, ed.] came because my
father called him up. That great lawyer, whose son was later Governor of New Mexico
[John F. Simms, Jr. became New Mexico governor in 1954, ed.], got there to the house and
said: What is the matter with you guys? This is no lady to be arrested. She has been living
here since she was 3. Look at all her kids, and her husband has been running this business.
And the agents said: We have these orders that she has to be arrested. To make it short, the
lawyer answered: Why don’t you arrest me, too. So they had to arrest the lawyer, too. They
took him to wherever they were going—to Federal court, I suppose, and they took my
dad’s gun. A couple hours later they put up the bond and she came home. I don’t know
when—probably about 6 months later—she filled out all the forms to become a U.S. citi-
zen.” [emphasis added, ed.]
The signs in Domenici’s account are thus the classic ones of an arrest of an enemy alien
(note that the agents took the Zenith radio with short-wave band and guns, both listed as
“contraband” items prohibited to enemy aliens in WWII), perhaps for not having regis-
tered as an enemy alien in February 1942. In that regard, Mrs. Domenici was fortunate to
be who she was, and to have a lawyer right there to advocate for her—even though Simms,
the “best lawyer in Albuquerque” according to Senator Domenici, seemed unaware of the
Cable Act’s provisions, and thus wrongly advised her at the time of her marriage. Finally,
since Alda Domenici obtained her American citizenship shortly thereafter, on March 30,
1942 in Santa Fe, one can conclude that her arrest took place some time between then and
Dec. 7, 1941, when enemy alien restrictions were in effect. [Note: I am indebted to Marian
L. Smith for directing me to many of the details about Alda Domenici’s naturalization
procedure, ed.]
17. Until 1936 or 1940, that is, when the Repatriation Act was passed. Again, though, a
woman would have to know about the new law, and it is clear that many women, lacking
legal advice, did not, including my Aunt Ruth. Indeed, it may have been the case (if her
husband was naturalized after 1922) that it was her mistaken status as an enemy alien that
subjected her home to a raid—a further grim irony.
Italian-American Urban Hyphens

in Saturday Night Fever
MARGHERITA HEYER-CAPUT
University of California, Davis
On the thirtieth anniversary of John Badham’s Saturday Night

Fever (1977), the epochal movie that launched Disco music, the Bee
Gees, and John Travolta as Tony Manero, the young, working-class,
Italian-American dancer in search of a middle-class future beyond his
ethnic neighborhood of Brooklyn, the lead actor released an interview
for the major Italian newspaper La Repubblica. Asked to explain the
reasons why Saturday Night Fever became “the symbol of an epoch,”
Travolta replied: “Eventually it represented the identity of the seven-
ties and impressed the whole world. It was a decade that did not know
how to define itself. Our film took care of that with all of its rage and
with an energy, even a sexual one, that originated from a working-class
dream, from which I am proud to have come” (Bizio 41; trans. mine).1
Intrigued by what Travolta’s words omitted, i.e. the Italian-
American identity of his character, I revisited Saturday Night Fever
through an interdisciplinary and comparative approach. From this
perspective, the narrative and the visual focus of the film define the
Italian-American identity of the protagonist and his friends as a
bridge between the old and the new, Brooklyn and Manhattan, work-
ing-class frustration in the seventies’ recession and hopeful integra-
tion in the middle class. In other words, this contribution points out
the relevance of the bridge metaphor in Saturday Night Fever’s rep-
resentation of the Italian-American identity. According to the mod-
ernist poet Wallace Stevens, “Reality is a cliché from which we
escape by metaphor” (179). The aim of these reflections is to eluci-
date the bridge metaphor in Saturday Night Fever as the escape from
reality’s static boundaries that a cliché epitomizes. The first part
offers a formal analysis of the film that dwells on the significance of
cinematic metaphors as discussed by film theorist Trevor Whittock
(1990) and on the “expansive” interpretation of the metaphor offered
by I.A. Richards (1936).2 The second section connects Saturday Night
Fever to a controversial film by Edward Dmytryk, Christ in Concrete
(1949), and the novel of the same title published in 1939 by Pietro di
Donato.
Italian-American Urban Hyphens in Saturday Night Fever 35
The reference to the Brooklyn Bridge in Dmytryk’s film and in

relevant works by Italian-American painters such as Joseph Stella and
Oscar Louis Guglielmi, in connection with its architectural and socio-
logical history (Talese 1964), attests to the deep significance of the
bridge metaphor in the Italian-American imaginary. From this per-
spective, the bridge metaphor in Saturday Night Fever becomes the
urban hyphen that connects the old and the new, an ethnicity inherited
by “descent” and a culture acquired by “consent” (Sollors 1986) in the
construction of the (Italian) American identity.
During their first date in a modest café of the working class bor-
ough of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, NY, Stephanie Mangano (Karen L.
Gorney), the female lead of Saturday Night Fever, charts her existen-
tial journey as follows: “I’m out of this Bay Ridge scene… I’m get-
ting my own apartment in Manhattan…. I’m changing as a person.
I’m growing.” Conversely, she confronts the androgynous male pro-
tagonist Tony Manero with a piercing definition of his identity:
“You’re a cliché. You’re nowhere, on your way to no place.”3
Paradoxically, by using the “cliché” metaphor to negate any dynamic
potential of her dance partner, Stephanie sets into motion a filmic nar-
rative that hinges on dynamism and transformation. Stephanie’s self-
assessment hints at the visual metaphor at the core of Saturday Night
Fever, from the first shot introducing the opening credits to the last
one leading to the closing credits: the bridge, and particularly the one
that connects Brooklyn, the ethnic neighborhood in which both pro-
tagonists grew up, with Manhattan, the urban heart of “Americanness.”
While Stephanie’s harsh judgment in the dialogue previously
quoted negates Tony’s potential dynamism, the audience’s visual
memory goes back to the proleptic images of the film, a crane shot of
the Brooklyn Bridge first, of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge next,
then a tracking shot of a subway train entering Brooklyn and, last but
not least, an emphatically long take of Tony’s strutting through the
Brooklyn streets, with a hammering series of extreme close-ups of his
shoes. Thus, the contrast between the opening urban images and the
aforementioned statement implicitly invites the spectator to focus on
the bridge metaphor and the potential dynamism that it entails in rela-
tionship with Tony’s allegedly static identity.
For instance, the establishing shots of Saturday Night Fever visu-
ally connect the two bridge references through an eloquent dissolve.
First, the camera zooms out of the skyline of Lower Manhattan in a
long crane shot of Brooklyn Bridge that captures the imposing span
of the bridge joining the affluent heart of New York City with the
working class Brooklyn neighborhood. The impressive image of
Brooklyn Bridge fades out as the next long crane shot of the Verrazz-
ano-Narrows Bridge, superimposed upon the previous one, fades in.
The effectiveness of this dissolve draws the viewer’s attention to the
expressive power of cinematic metaphors, which Whittock has poi-
gnantly characterized as “ontological plenitude” (24).4 In his ground-
breaking Metaphor and Film (1990), Whittock illustrates how visual
metaphors, although derived from different aspects of film form in
different works, all concur to enhance an “imaginative account” of
metaphor (127). Whittock’s inclusive theory interprets metaphor as a
fundamental principle of human psychology that pervades any area of
human expression.
From an epistemological point of view, a metaphor entails the idea
of a connection through a transition that will shape a new meaning.5
Saturday Night Fever’s initial dissolve between the crane shots of the
two most significant architectural landmarks of the Italian-American
urban identity, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Verrazzano-Narrows,
conveys precisely this mobile, cognitive character of the metaphor.
Literary critic and philosopher I. A. Richard has captured the essence
of this figure of speech in its “expansive” nature. Richard’s seminal
study, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936), analyzes the metaphor as
an interactive process, “a borrowing between and intercourse of
thought, a transaction between concepts…” (94). As the film director
John Badham stated once in an interview (Breitbart 3), his shooting
style relies on a “very fluid and mobile camera,” subtly evoking the
dynamic, imaginative, expansive nature of Saturday Night Fever’s
concrete and metaphoric bridges. In this film, the bridge metaphor
indicates a tópos of losses, challenges, and possibilities, a liminal
space interweaving of the old and the new and the dangers and oppor-
tunities of each transition.
In other words, the “ontological plenitude” of the bridge metaphor
potentially encompasses life and death. Two key scenes of Saturday
Night Fever set on the Verrazzano Bridge bring the proximity of life
and death to the foreground. The first sequence hinges around the
prank of “The Faces,” Tony’s friends, who simulate a lethal accident
after a wild night at the 2001 Oddyssey [sic] Disco.6 The second one
offers a re-enactment of the acrobatic number, which tragically ends
with the (involuntary?) death of Bobby. In these scenes, the predomi-
nance of a vertical perspective with a tilting camera that cuts between
low and high-angle shots emphasizes the unstable condition of a

youth in search of an identity and a future, a youth that deems disco
music as the only possible escape from a dreary social reality.
Contrary to these tilted scenes, a reflexive pause at the center of
the film narrative focuses on the bridge metaphor. Tony and Stephanie
are taking a break on the Bay Ridge shore after coming back to their
neighborhood from Manhattan. With Tony’s help, Stephanie has relo-
cated to the city in her quest for independence and social ascent.
Finally relieved of the tension that her move caused, Tony and Steph-
anie sit down on a park bench. Immersed in the idyllic setting that
reunites human life and nature, they contemplate the suspended struc-
ture of the Verrazzano Bridge reaching out to Staten Island. It is at this
crucial intersection of their lives that Tony voices his admiration for
the beauty of the construction with the same knowledgeable and ratio-
nal attitude that characterized his approach to dance during practice
sessions with Annette, one of his disco admirers. Tony instructs
Stephanie on the record-setting facts of the bridge ranging from its
690-foot-high towers and 4,260-foot-long main span to the 40 million
cars that cross it every year, and from the 127,000 tons of steel and
the 3/4 million yards of concrete involved in it. At the end of this list
of “Facts about the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge,” which recites
almost exactly the homonymous section of Gay Talese’s 1964 book,
The Bridge, Tony adds a piece of information that, to my knowledge,
remains unaccounted for:
Stephanie:… You know all about the bridge, don’t you?
Tony: That’s right. I know everything about that bridge…
Know what else? There’s a guy buried in the cement….
Tony continues by explaining a deadly construction accident. A bridge
worker had slipped down during the cement pouring operation, thus
remaining imprisoned in the accumulation of concrete.7 The dialogue
concludes as follows:
Stephanie: What a way to go…
Tony: Well… I come here a lot… I get ideas…
Stephanie: What kind of ideas do you get?
Tony: I dunno… daydreams… I daydream a lot…
The camera focuses on the two friends in a medium close-up shot in
which the melancholic tone of the conversation is reinforced through
the subdued colors of their clothes–blue, white and black. A gray filter
infuses the whole scene with a foggy veil that hints at the act of fan-
tasizing about the future and remembering the past. Finally, after
Stephanie and Tony exchange delicate terms of endearment, the cam-
era zooms in on to the bridge once again from the point of view of the
two protagonists and captures its significance in a freeze frame. The
almost mythic aura of the frozen bridge image invites the spectator to
refer Tony’s daydreams to the past and the future of migration, thus
widening the scope of the bridge metaphor in Saturday Night Fever to
the Italian-American experience as a whole.
Therefore, it seems appropriate to refer to another cinematic rep-
resentation of the Italian-American experience in which a construc-
tion accident of striking resemblance to the one that Tony described
offers a tragic closure to the story of its protagonist. Christ in Con-
crete, based on the novel by Pietro di Donato bearing the same title,8
was directed in England by the then “blacklisted” Edward Dmytryk in
1949. This controversial film was first shown under the compromised
titles of Give Us This Day in the United Kingdom and Salt to the Devil
in the United States, and then vanished from the theaters due to the
politically provocative content that challenged the Red Scare ideology
of the fifties.9 In his narrative, which vividly captures the urban Italian
American community during the Great Depression, di Donato suc-
ceeded in creating not only “the prototypical ’ethnic’ American
novel” (Gardaphé 1993, xi), but also “one of the most mythical texts
of American literature” (xiii). Its heroic character is Paul, the older
son of the Abruzzese immigrant Geremio who, like di Donato’s father,
dies in a tragedy due to the consequences of the capitalistic exploita-
tion of construction workers at the expense of their safety. di Donato’s
novel as a whole focuses on the inherent dangers of the American
Dream for “America beautiful [sic] will eat you and spit your bones
into the earth’s hole” (3). The fundamental quest for a God of social
justice on earth appears to be doomed to failure because “Ahhh, not
even the Death can free us, for we are… Christ in concrete…”
(226).10
With a cinematic style that intertwines the film noir genre of Ger-
man Expressionism with Italian Neorealism, Dmytryk’s film capital-
izes rather on the existential significance of the immigrant experience.
Through a long flashback, Geremio (Sam Wanamaker) embarks on a
life journey that revolves around what Italian film historian Peter
Bondanella defines as “the ever-present temptation to assimilate, to
purchase the American dream at the price of losing one’s ethnic iden-
tity” (32). Not only does Geremio jeopardize his family unity and
happiness with Annunziata (played by the Italian actress Lea Pado-
vani) through his relationship with Kathleen (played by the Irish
actress Kathleen Ryan), a character completely absent in the novel,
but he even endangers the safety of his coworkers and his social con-
science when he becomes a foreman during the Great Depression. In
his cogent analysis of the film, Bondanella underlines that “both his
[Geremio’s] affair with Kathleen and his work as a foreman reflect his
refusal of proletarian solidarity with his friends” (33). The pervasive
leftist ideology of the production, which united the director with both
lead actor Sam Wanamaker and scriptwriter Ben Barzman, contrib-
uted to the film’s success in Italy at the height of the political engage-
ment of neorealist directors. 11
Geremio’s acknowledgement of his “sins” toward his Italian com-
rades on Good Friday enables him to become a member of his com-
munity once again, but does not save his life.12 As Bondanella shows,
“[h]is horrible death, drowned in a set of wet concrete with his arms
outstretched reminiscent of Jesus on the cross, emphasizes the bitter-
sweet reality of the American Dream for so many of his compatriots”
(33). In the dramatic long-take of neorealistic imprint that dwells on
the process of the accident, the low-angle shot of the cement plum-
meting into the pillar structure in which Geremio has precipitated
underlines the suffocating, destructive forces that drive capitalism.
The extreme close-ups of Geremio’s gradually submerged face offer
a tragic commentary on his final words, “Annunziata, forgive me. I
tried.…”13 From the spectator’s point of view, the long take emphati-
cally underscores the inherent danger of his attempt to oppose the
social injustice of capitalism.
With his moving plea, Geremio acknowledges that he betrayed
moral and social ideals because he “tried” to achieve the elusive
American Dream of material wealth. For Annunziata, the symbol of
this overarching goal of the migrant experience was the financial abil-
ity of buying a family home, which develops into an ever-present
obsession in the film. In the beginning of the filmic flashback Annun-
ziata had agreed to come to America from her native Abruzzi and
marry Geremio on the condition that they could live in their own
home. Unable to fulfill his promise from the onset of their marriage,
but determined to avoid a painful disillusion for his bride, Geremio
borrows the money for a temporary home during their honeymoon.
The house could become their own once they would be able to pay its
full value to Jaroslav, an older Slavic immigrant added in the film

adaptation, who points out the composite ethnic identity of the Amer-
ican dream.
Furthermore, a scene that Dmytryk inserts in his adaptation of
Christ in Concrete deems particularly relevant to my analysis of the
bridge in Saturday Night Fever. Following their wedding celebration
with good friends, traditional music, and delicious food, in a joyous
atmosphere that recreates the Old World in a modest underground
venue of Lower Manhattan, Annunziata asks Geremio to take her
“home.” The newlyweds get on a simple cart, and they go over the
Brooklyn Bridge. “What do they call this place we are going to?” asks
Annunziata. “Paradise” is Geremio’s reply.14 “No…” specifies
Annunziata. “I mean… other people…” “Oh… them! They call it
Brooklyn,” answers finally Geremio. A long shot lingers on the back
of the two passengers on the cart framed by the lit steel wire cables
that surge to the high tower of the Brooklyn Bridge. This image
evokes the same hope and trepidation that exude from the most strik-
ing among the numerous Italian-American art works depicting this
subject, i.e., The Bridge by Joseph Stella.15
Thus, the existential journey of Geremio, which finds a tragic clo-
sure at the construction site, acquires a new “ontological plenitude”
(Whittock 24) through the almost ritualistic passage over the Brook-
lyn Bridge. At the very center of the Saturday Night Fever narrative,
and almost thirty years later, Tony tells Stephanie about the alleged
death of a construction worker “buried in the cement” of the Verrazz-
ano-Narrows Bridge, whose voice could be Geremio’s in his final
moments, shouting “Save me! Save me! I’m being buried alive!” (di
Donato 16). Through the intertextual dialogue between Saturday
Night Fever and di Donato’s and Dmytryk’s Christ in Concrete, the
bridge metaphor germinates in a double-edged “mental geography” of
transitions.16 The bridge as the vehicle of transformation can unfold
into a “symbol of hope” (Talese 20) and, at the same time, a “symbol
of destruction” (23), as was the case of the Brooklyn Bridge and the
Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge during construction,17 and as is the case
of the metaphorical bridges in Saturday Night Fever.
The last film sequence featuring the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge
underscores the potential destruction inherent to every transition, and
particularly to the passage from adolescence into adulthood. This
sequence begins exactly as one of the previously analyzed key scenes
on this bridge: Tony and his friends Bobby, Joey, Double J., and
Annette have just left the 2001 Oddyssey Disco after Tony and Steph-
anie’s victory in a dance contest. Enraged over the racially biased
attitude of the jury, Tony has a violent altercation with Stephanie in
Bobby’s car, which becomes the stage of Tony’s attempt to rape her.
After Stephanie manages to escape, Tony and his friends, “high” on
alcohol and pills, enter the car and race all together toward the Verraz-
zano-Narrows Bridge. On their wild ride, “The Faces” pass the same
sign that marked their route in a previous scene ending with an acro-
batic prank on the bridge. Once again, a nocturnal low-angle shot
captures an illuminated section of the suspension bridge that sets the
stage for the dramatic action. But this time, what begins as a déjà-vu
trick by Joey and Double J. turns into a chilling exhibition of self-
destructive forces when Bobby joins his friends on the beam.
The upcoming tragedy is introduced through another, almost
equally macabre rite of passage. Annette, upset about Tony and
Stephanie’s evident relationship during the prized dance, flirts heavily
with both Joey and Double J. and eventually becomes the victim of a
double rape on the backseat of the car on the way to the bridge. While
a disgusted Tony and a sobbing Annette are left alone in the car, he
wraps up her coming-of-age story with a provocative question: “Is
that what you wanted?… Now you are a cunt.”18 Only when Annette
jumps out of the car, desperate and screaming, Tony and the others
realize that Bobby is mimicking an acrobatic dance on the bridge
structure. Frightened by his responsibilities under the social pressure
to marry his pregnant girlfriend, Bobby had begged Tony to call him,
but Tony forgot. When Tony offers him a hand and tries to convince
him to step off the bridge rail and go in the car to talk, Bobby cries:
“You never talked to me before… How come you didn’t call me?”
Bobby’s and Annette’s subplots poignantly dramatize the lethal dan-
gers of a “coming of age” in a community in which its younger mem-
bers feel literally “suspended” on the bridge to adulthood lacking in
the emotional and practical support of their families, teachers, priests,
and even peers.19
To emphasize this point, the camera alternates between reaction
shots in close-up of Annette, Joey, and Double J. as they stare at
Bobby’s distressing display of audacity and desperation, and point-of-
view shots of Tony and Bobby as they look down to the traffic-ridden
lower deck of the bridge on one side, and the deep darkness of the
ocean water on the other side. When Tony stretches out his hand in a
final attempt, Bobby loses his balance, and a dramatic high-angle shot
captures his deadly fall into the water. Upon concentrating on an addi-
tional series of reaction shots of the disfigured expressions of the
onlookers, the sequence ends with a long shot that tilts down from the
upper edge of a bridge tower to a shore-level foundation of the bridge,
where the police interrogate Tony, Annette, Joey, and Double J.
Tony’s cryptic answer to the question about interpreting Bobby’s
death as a suicide–“There are ways of killing yourself without killing
yourself”–marks a turning point in his maturation. Tony’s words sug-
gest that Bobby’s extreme gesture rejected life as a set of superim-
posed rules and values, which would have determined the fate of
Bobby and his girlfriend, deeply devoted to Catholicism, with an
inevitable wedding. The desperation derived from the apparent ines-
capability of traditions and the solitude to which Tony’s silence con-
tributed, forced Bobby to make the only statement he could make to
affirm his own identity. His remains an identity in motion, which is
not capable of surviving the challenges of transitions epitomized by
the bridge metaphor.
Yet, Bobby’s self-destructive gesture fosters also a new sense of life
as a quest for one’s own identity and it reaffirms life as an independent
journey. This enlightening albeit tragic experience empowers Tony to
continuing his journey. Tony abandons “The Faces,” his friends of
temporary escapes into the disco world, represented on the screen as
living images of a dead-end youth confined in the Italian American
working class neighborhood, as they leave the scene of the accident in
Bobby’s old car. To make a statement about his newly discovered inde-
pendent identity, Tony walks away, a lonely, white-clad, urban hero in
the dark night. Through a long take consistently shot in low angle, the
camera emphasizes Tony’s growth after a dangerous moment of transi-
tion.20 With a dissolve that underlines Tony’s dynamic essence, the
camera cuts to the subway station and an incoming train that will take
him to Stephanie’s new apartment in Manhattan.
Thus, Tony traverses once again the urban hyphen of the (Brook-
lyn) bridge, and hints at the positive polarity of the bridge metaphor.
The lighting of this final step in Tony’s journey from adolescence into
adulthood dramatically underscores the oscillation between hope and
despair that characterizes any existential quest for identity. Whereas
the lighting of the dance scenes in the escapist environment of the
nightclub was bright and colorful, infused with a dream-like sub-
stance, the dangerous bridge scenes are remarkably dark and the col-
ors are desaturated. While Tony is on the subway, the lighting repeat-
edly switches from dark to light in a series of Dutch angles. Tony’s

uncertain steps toward his own identity through self-expression are
marked by moments of confusion and disorientation, as the canted
framing of Tony sitting in the graffiti-vandalized car underscores.
The magisterial mise-en-scène of this subway scene, with the chro-
matic contrast and the opposition between the urban violence of the
vandalizing graffiti versus the alluring ad of a cheap flight to Miami
(“Take off to Miami–20 c”) culminates in a dissolve that intertwines
Tony and a Manhattan skyline with the World Trade Center towers
against a rising sun. The lyrics of the non-diegetic music, the Bee
Gees’ “How Deep Is Your Love,” reinforce the theme of a new dawn,
a “morning sun” in a “world of fools,” which is articulated during the
last sequence in Stephanie’s apartment.
While a high-angle shot emphasizes Tony’s smallness in front of
the stairs that will take him to Stephanie’s red-brick apartment, his
maturation as intellectual growth and social upward mobility is under-
lined through a low-angle shot that follows Tony going up the stair-
case inside Stephanie’s apartment. Once again, the mise-en-scène
provides us with seminal clues. Both Tony and Stephanie wear white,
a symbolic color of innocence, purity, and new beginnings. Moreover,
at the center of the frame during the conversation between a cautious
Stephanie inside the apartment and an apologetic Tony outside the
apartment, with a closed door between them, is a painting by Fauvist
artist Henry Matisse, Icarus (1947), a “gouache découpée” from the
book Jazz. Icarus combines the French artist’s consistent passion for
musical themes with his conviction of the creative function of color
in itself. A dancing, almost flying, black silhouette, brightened by a
pulsing red heart dot, stands out against a deep royal blue sky illumi-
nated by sparkling yellow stars.
In addition to the powerful expression of music and dance through
color, Matisse’s work evokes the classical myth of Icarus and Deda-
lus, recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. During an attempt to escape
from Knosso’s labyrinth by air with wings made of feathers and wax,
Icarus plunged into the sea. He did not follow his father Dedalus’
warning and flew too close to the sun, which melted the wax that kept
together the ingenious flying device. A symbol of hubris, the human
intellectual pride that dares challenge divine limits, Matisse’s Icarus
in Saturday Night Fever fulfills a twofold metaphoric function. On
one hand, the correlation between color, music, and the flight toward
freedom suggests that Tony might succeed in escaping his hopeless
environment if he believes in and capitalizes on his artistic talent

through dance. On the other hand, the dreadful end of mythic Icarus
expresses a warning. Tony’s ability of achieving the longed-for
upward mobility depends on his willingness to strike a compromise
with society’s expectations as the acquisition of a pragmatic, func-
tional knowledge that would enhance his economic independence and
open his door to the middle class.
This constructive attitude characterizes the conversation that Tony
and Stephanie entertain while sitting together on the windowsill. Tony
informs Stephanie that he is not going back to the dead-end life of his
neighborhood and the meaningless bravados of his friends. He is
poised to move to Manhattan and find a different job. When Stephanie
asks for more details, Tony underlines that he is determined to change
life through the acquisition of new knowledge and values: “Big deal
[being able to type, like Stephanie when she moved to Manhattan]…
I’m an able person… I mean, I can do these things.” “Of course you
can,” Stephanie answers back, and then she explains to Tony that the
true reason for her interest in him was his ability to offer her “admira-
tion… respect, support.”
As a consequence of his interaction with Stephanie, Tony perceives
that his new beginning depends not only upon his readiness to acquire
new knowledge, but also upon his openness to different values. One
of these is friendship as a relationship between equals, based not on
traditional gender roles identified through the macho culture of his
upbringing, but on mutual support. In his existential journey that,
according to film critic William P. Keeler, embeds Saturday Night
Fever in the tradition of “classic initiations” (158), “Tony must
change his attitude toward his family, his job, women, his buddies,
and ultimately death” (158). For this reason, Tony proposes that, once
he moves to town, he and Stephanie get together “like friends…. Like
you said: we could help each other….” When Stephanie ironically
inquires if he “could be friends with a girl…,” Tony responds quite
frankly, “…the truth? I don’t know… I could try, Stephanie. That’s
all I can say, I can try.” Stephanie seizes the potential of a new begin-
ning in Tony’s life and in their relationship and seals her words of
agreement–“OK, OK… Let’s be friends… friends, man”–with a ges-
ture that embodies the “ontological plenitude” (Whittock 24) of the
bridge metaphor. An extreme close-up shot captures the significance
of Stephanie’s left hand reaching out to Tony’s left hand and dwells
on a newly formed bridge between two friends toward the future.
Stephanie, as William P. Kelly has convincingly argued, “fulfills

the function of mythic mediation” between the fundamental opposi-
tion of self-reliance and freedom” and “the human need for commu-
nity” (245). The non-diegetic music of “How Deep is Your Love” here
underlines the positive function of the female character and recalls the
image of the “morning sun,” the opposite of the dark night in which
Bobby “killed himself without killing himself.” Thus, the same
Stephanie that negated Tony’s potential dynamism by defining him a
“cliché,” acknowledges Tony’s potential ability to escape the static
boundaries of his world by forming a hand-strong bridge. This final
close-up of the united human hands reinforces the significance of the
bridge metaphor, which has accompanied the viewer and the protago-
nists through an existential and cultural journey.
The historical references behind the Brooklyn Bridge and the
Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, the visual landmarks of Tony’s matura-
tion, have continuously inspired the Italian-American artistic imagi-
nary. To name only a few instances, from the “good old Brooklyn
Bridge” that defines home in a famous Frank Sinatra’s song21 to
Joseph Stella’s Brooklyn Bridge and Edward Dmytryk’s Christ in
Concrete, the bridge metaphor traces a “mental geography” that
embraces the potentially opposite directions of any transition, toward
life or toward death, self-fulfillment or self-destruction, a flying dance
in the morning sun or a fall into the dark sea. In the open ending of
Saturday Night Fever, with the two protagonists connecting through
their hands into a novel phase of their journey, the bridge metaphor
reappears to underscore the positive extreme of its dual nature.
The bridge that Tony and Stephanie build with their hands offers
an example of what film theorist Lester Friedman qualifies as “ethnic
semiosis” (18). This final gesture of friendship projected toward
future transitions symbolized by the window resolves with an open
end the enduring conflict between “ ‘descent’ (relations determined
for us by blood or nature) and ‘consent’ (relations we choose to
accept)” (19), which also distinguishes the ethnic (Italian) American
identity of the protagonists. Thus, the bridge becomes the most sig-
nificant metaphor of Saturday Night Fever. According to Thomas
Belmonte, “most Italian Americans mediate their existence in Ameri-
can society through a series of uneasy and shifting cultural compro-
mises” (14), through the fundamental contradiction “between Being
Italian by descent and Becoming Italian by consent and at a cultural
level–by constructing a cultural persona that maintains the creative
duality of Italian Americanness” (D’Acierno xxxiii). By widening the

scope of Belmonte’s and D’Acierno’s analyses to the essence of
American culture as incorporating “inherently oppositional belief
systems such as Old World hierarchies versus New World freedoms”
(Friedman 19), the bridge metaphor in Saturday Night Fever acquires
new expressive power and is reabsorbed in the open-ended gesture of
the protagonists’ united hands.
In conclusion, the bridge metaphor in Saturday Night Fever infus-
es with new hopes of liberation and self-fulfillment the urban hyphen
that connects “descent” and “consent” in the construction of the (Ital-
ian) American identity. It emphasizes the in-betweeness of any jour-
ney and the duality of any transition. In the specific case of Tony
Manero and his Italian-American identity, the urban hyphen of the
bridge underlines the liberating and empowering value of knowledge
and artistic self-expression that mediate between the past and the
future, tradition and innovation, “descent” and “consent,” thus pro-
viding new meaning to Wallace Stevens’s words on the pivotal role of
metaphors in breaking apart from (ethnic) clichés.
ENDNOTES
1. “Bizio: ’La febbre del sabato sera divenne il simbolo di un’epoca.’ Travolta: ’Finì per
rappresentare l’identità degli anni ’70, ed esercitò forti suggestioni in tutto il mondo.
Quello era un decennio che non sapeva come definirsi: ci pensò il nostro film con la sua
rabbia e la carica, anche sexy, del sogno della classe operaia. Di cui mi considero un degno
frutto.’ ”
2. For an overview of the controversy on applying the rhetorical trope of metaphor to film, I
refer to Pryluck, and Mitry 17, 180, 346, 374.
3. For a sociological analysis of Tony Manero as a “new masculinity” model in the seventies,
see Jordan 119. See also Altman on the reversal of the Hollywood musicals’ “dual musical
narrative” (200) and Yanc on the representation of gender ambiguities in Saturday Night
Fever. J.P. Telotte analyzes Saturday Night Fever as an example among of the revival of
the musical film genre. The common denominator of the “new” musicals is the
representation of music and dance as such, as performances in the limited and limiting
space of a stage. For this reason, Telotte argues, Saturday Night Fever indicates that “any
transformation which song and dance might work on our existence… is at best momentary,
a fleeting protest against a general loss of vitality afflicting modern society…. Still, a hope
is there, as these films attempt to offer us a context in which we might soberly celebrate
our persistent expressive abilities” (13).
4. Whittock points out how “the transparency and the immediacy” of film images are related
to the psychology of perception: “For all these reasons, film images are felt to possess great
designative authority--they seem to affirm the ontology of the objects they render” (23).
5. According to Whittock, the expressive power of film metaphors is inherent to the
definition of metaphor as a figure of speech that establishes relationships of similarity
between the “tenor”–the original idea that is presented in the terms of another belonging
to a different category–and the “vehicle”–the second idea introduced to transform the first
one (5). Both Whittock and Richard refer to Aristotle’s fundamental definition in his
Poetics I, xxi, 57b7 (1987, 28).
6. The intriguing name of the disco that functions as a catalyst for the protagonist’s dream of
escape and self-expression through dance not only alludes to Stanley Kubrick’s legendary
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), but also mirrors the “odds” of the Tony’s and his friends’
journey.
7. The overall serious, almost poignant tone of the construction accident’s account finds a
cathartic closure in Tony’s “Dumb fuck….” His half-laugh expresses embarrassment at the
unjust death rather than the idea of “dismissing a workman killed in the construction of the
bridge as a ’dumb fuck’ “ that Keeler suggests (162).
8. More exactly, Dmytryk’s problematic production was inspired by the first episode of the
bestseller by the Italian-American writer Pietro di Donato (1911-1992), as Geduld points
out (17-18). First published as “Geremio” for Esquire Magazine in 1937, this short story
recounts the death of the author’s father in a construction accident on Good Friday. Two
years later the best-selling novel Christ in Concrete was chosen over Steinbeck’s Grapes
of Wrath as the main selection of the “Book of the Month Club.” For an exhaustive
analysis of the filmic adaptation of di Donato’s novel, see Geduld 19-24.
9. On Dmytryk’s political in-volution, which explains the complex story of the film
distribution and reception until recently, see Bondanella 30-31, and Casciato 70-76.
10. For the deeply “revolutionary” character of di Donato’s novel as a “deconstruction and
remaking” of the Christian myth, see Gardaphé 1999, 170-71.
11. In Italy, Christ in Concrete was distributed in a slightly different version with the apt title
of Cristo tra i muratori (Christ among the Bricklayers) in 1950. A forceful attempt to
conjugate Christian faith with Marxist ideology, Cristo tra i muratori was well received
and was awarded the Premio Pasinetti at Venice International Film Festival of the same
year while Dmytryk was serving his prison sentence as a member of the leftist Hollywood
Ten charged with Contempt of Congress by the House Committee on Un-American
Activities. On the neorealist features of the film, see Bondanella 30-33.
12. After one of his co-workers points out that Geremio has become a part of the brutal
capitalistic system in order to achieve the American Dream and better support his family
(“There is no tyrant worse than the former slave”), Geremio embraces again the moral and
social values that he betrayed and concludes by saying, “… we’ll make the job safe…
Forget about speed”). Yet, the previous cuts in the construction safety determine the
subsequent crumbling of the structure and Geremio’s death.
13. Interestingly, Geremio implores a divine intervention in the corresponding passage in the
novel: “Show yourself now, Jesu! Now is the time! Save me! Why don’t you come! Are
you there! I cannot stand it–ohhh, why do you let it happen–where are you? Hurry hurry
hurry!” (di Donato 18).
14. Although Geremio’s words sound romantic in this scene, they carry a tragic irony since
the house contract hides great financial risks for the young couple.
15. Mesmerized by the dynamism of the New World, although deeply attached to his roots in
the Old World, the first-generation Italian American painter Stella captured the essence of
this dualism in his first Brooklyn Bridge (1920). This astounding painting, a figurative
bridge itself between Cubism, Precisionism, and Futurism, became the central piece of
Stella’s masterpiece, a five-canvas series entitled The Voice of the City of New York
Interpreted (1920-1922). The titles of its five paintings are: The [Brooklyn] Bridge, The
Port, The White Way 1, The Skyscrapers, and The White Way II.
16. I am here borrowing the expression from the title of Oscar Louis Guglielmi’s disconcerting
painting, Mental Geography (1938). While Stella’s rendering of “the” bridge sparkles with
the positive energy of transition, its representations offered by Guglielmi in The Bridge
(1942) and, even more forcefully, in Mental Geography (1938) unleash the bridge’s nega-
tive energy, the fear of loss and violent (self) destruction. An exponent of Magic Realism
in his prewar paintings, and later of Social Surrealism, Guglielmi painted a catastrophic
image of the Brooklyn Bridge about to collapse, its cables sagging in, a woman lethally
wounded by a rocket in her back. Although conceived “as a response to the Spanish Civil
War…. to be a warning of the extinction of political freedom in America” (Baker 16),
Guglielmi’s Mental Geography is embedded in his transitional spaces as an often relocat-
ing artist. Born in Cairo, Egypt, of Italian parents, the son of a violinist, Guglielmi moved
briefly back to Italy and then to Harlem’s Italian slums in New York City. There, his per-
sonal and artistic formation was shaped by the social tensions of the “mean streets” to
which he referred in various paintings.
17. The historical realities behind both the Brooklyn and the Verrazzano Bridges reinforce on
the referential plane the reasons for connecting the bridge metaphor with the potentially
opposite developments of any transition coming-of-age narratives in different artistic
realms of the Italian American culture, to which Saturday Night Fever belongs. Started in
1869 and completed in 1883, the construction of the first steel cable suspension bridge
involved the first use of pneumatic caissons but also reached the disturbing record of
twenty-seven deaths, one of which was John Roebling’s, the bridge’s visionary engineer.
At least equally remarkable, the Verrazzano Bridge, started in 1959, was inaugurated in
1964 and until 1981 represented the longest expansion bridge in the world. Named after
the first European explorer of the New York Bay in 1524, the Florentine-born Giovanni da
Verrazzano who had been commissioned by the French King Francis I to find a passage to
Asia (Mangione and Morreale 6-7), the Verrazzano Bridge was the object of a decade-long
naming controversy overcome by the Italian Historical Society (Talese 30-1). If, accord-
ing to the official website of the society, “the Verrazzano Bridge symbolizes the spirit of
committing to an idea and following it to the end,” its name epitomizes as well a “mental
geography” of discoveries, transitions, and displaced identities. According to Gay Talese,
the Verrazzano Bridge represented a “symbol of hope” (20) for the 225,000 residents of
Staten Island in the fifties, “the most isolated, the most ignored of New York’s five bor-
oughs” (18). For them and for the hundreds of “boomers” who built it, the Verrazzano
Bridge was also a “symbol of destruction, as an enormous sea monster that soon would
rise out of the water and destroy eight hundred buildings and force seven thousand Bay
Ridge people to move…” (23). An “enormous sea monster” that demanded the lives of
three ironworkers, as the bridge men proudly called themselves (80, 91-2).
18. In the first part of the movie, when Stephanie had not yet entered Tony’s life, Tony
confronted Annette with the alternative of being “a nice girl or a cunt.” According to
Keeler, “Tony is the knight of the disco and has no trouble applying his values to everyone
in the realm. The women he sees there can easily be placed into his preconceived
categories of virgin and whore” (161).
19. For example, Bobby repeatedly sought the help of Tony and his brother, Father Frank,
regarding his pregnant girlfriend. In a dramatic conversation at the nightclub–when Father
Frank asks him: “Have you talked to your priest about it?”– a desperate Bobbie mumbles:
”Yeah, I’ve talked to everybody about it. I mean, I’ve talked to a lot of people. Thank you!
Thanks a lot. You play, you pay, you know? It’s funny, right?”
20. For an interpretation of the film centered on the protagonist’s moral growth, see Kupfer:
“Through the character of Tony, the film explores moral personality and how its
development depends on the creation of a narrative of one’s life” (170).
21. In this text the architectural structure is personified as a woman who wears a crown made
of the clouds entangled in her hair, that is the strings of stone and steel through which the
wind blows “the song that sings for the town.” The following refrain spells out the
metaphoric significance of the bridge in Italian-American culture: “If you’ve been a rover/
Journey’s end lies over the Brooklyn Bridge/Don’t let no one tell you/I’ve been trying to
sell you the Brooklyn Bridge.” In the end, “You’ll miss her most when you roam/’cause
you’ll think of her and think of home/The good old Brooklyn Bridge.”
WORKS CITED
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Genre: The Musical. Ed. R. Altman. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1987. 197-207.
Aristotle, Poetics. Trans. R. Janko. Hackett: Indianapolis-Cambridge, 1987.
Baker, John. “O. Louis Guglielmi: A Reconsideration.” Archives of American Art Journal 15.2
(1975): 15-20.
Belmonte, Thomas. “The Contradictions of Italian American Identity. An Anthropologist’s Per-

sonal View.” The Italian American Heritage. A Companion to Literature and Arts. New
York-London: Garland, 1999. 3-20.
Bizio, Silvia. “30 anni di febbre. Travolta: io, il sogno della classe operaia.” La Repubblica
August 9, 2007: 41.
Bondanella, Peter. Hollywood Italians: Dagos, Palookas, Romeos, Wise Guys, and Sopranos.
New York: Continuum, 2004.
Breitbart, Eric. “Lost in the Hustle. An Interview with John Badham.” Cineaste 9.2 (1978-79):
2-5, 57.
“Brooklyn Bridge Website.” 5 Jun. 2005.
http://www.endex.com/gf/buildings/bbridge/bbridge.html
Casciato, Arthur D. “The Bricklayer as Bricoleur: Pietro di Donato and the Cultural Politics of
the Popular Front,” Voices in Italian Americana (Fall 1991): 67-76.
Christ in Concrete. Dir. Edward Dmytryk. DVD. Allday Entertainment, 2003.
D’Acierno, Pellegrino. “The Making of the Italian American Cultural Identity: From
La Cultura Negata to Strong Ethnicity.” The Italian American Heritage. xxiii-liv.
di Donato, Pietro. Christ in Concrete. New York: Signet Classic, 1993.
Friedman, Lester D. “Celluloid Palimpsests: An Overview of Ethnicity and the American
Film.” Unspeakable Images. Urbana and Chicago: Illinois UP, 1991. 11-35.
Gardaphé, Fred. Introduction. Christ in Concrete. By Pietro di Donato. New York: Signet
Classic, 1993. ix-xviii.
___. “Italian American Novelists.” The Italian American Heritage. A Companion to
Literatures and Arts. Ed. Pellegrino D’Acierno. New York: Garland, 1999. 165-91.
Geduld, Harry. “Christ in Concrete: dal romanzo al film,” Cinema & Cinema 11 (1984): 17-
25.
Jordan, Chris. “Gender and Class Mobility: ’Saturday Night Fever’ and ’Flashdance.’ “
Journal of Popular Film and Television 24.3 (1996): 117-22.
Keeler, Greg. “Crossing the Verrazzano Bridge.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 7.2
(1979): 158-67.
Kelly, William P. “More Than a Woman: Myth and Mediation in Saturday Night Fever.”
Journal of American Culture 2.2 (1979): 235-47.
Kupfer, Joseph. “Stayn’ Alive: Moral Growth and Personal Narrative in Saturday Night
Fever.” Journal of Popular Film & Television 34.4 (2007): 170-78.
Mayfield, Norma Lee. “The Bridge to the Other Side: The Language of Metaphor.” Diss.
Stanford U, 1985.
Mitry, Jean. The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema. Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana UP, 1996.
“The Naming of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. May 6, 2005.
http://www.italianhistorical.org/VerrazzanoBridgeStory.htm
Pryluck, Calvin. “The Film Metaphor Metaphor: The Use of Language Based Models in Film
Study.” Literature/Film Quarterly 3.2 (1975) 117-23.
Richards, I. A. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. New York: Oxford UP, 1936.
Saturday Night Fever. Videocassette. Dir. John Badham. Paramount Pictures, 1977.
Sinatra, Frank. “Brooklyn Bridge Lyrics.” 8 Jan. 2007. http://www.lyricsfreak.com.
Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity. Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York:
Oxford UP, 1986.
Stevens, Wallace. Opus Posthumous. New York: Knopf, 1957.
Talese, Gay. The Bridge. New York: Harper and Row, 1964.
Telotte, J. P. “A Sober Celebration: Song and Dance in the ’New’ Musical.” The Journal of
Popular Film and Television 8.1 (1980): 2-13.
Whittock, Trevor. Metaphor and Film. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.
Yanc, Jeff. “More than a Woman: Music, Masculinity and Male Spectacle in Saturday Night
Fever and Staying Alive. The Velvet Light Trap 38 (1996): 39-50.
Featured Poet Robert Viscusi:

Ellis Island as a Textual Condition:
Preface to Ellis Island 13.10, 14.2, 15.12
We may imagine Ellis Island as a former Babel where char-

acters, words, sentences, intentions, plots, premises, conclusions,
origins, and destinations were exchanged and confused as people
completed a crossing of the planetary ocean. By now we are very
familiar with that condition, which has left many traces among us. In
the poem Ellis Island, that condition becomes a lens for looking at the
contemporary enterprise of making sense and losing it as the world
crosses from the era of stable texts to the electronic era of sudden
leaks, floods, drifts, and random recodifications.
The three sonnets you read here belong to a series of 624 such
poems, arranged in 52 books of 12 sonnets each. This is an appar-
ently stable text. Its meanings are elusive, but one might track them
using a number of familiar forms of compositional graphia (see “Two
Kinds of Text” at ellisislandpoem.com). And the order of the words
and lines does not change. Then there is another text, not printed
here, formed from the lines of the stable text, restlessly jumbled and
reissued in chance sonnets (use the “Random Sonnet Generator” at
ellisislandpoem.com). Those sonnets are numerous: 62414. I could
never write, and you could never read, that many sonnets, not in many
lifetimes.
The stable text and the aleatory text use the same materials
and they share the sonnet form, but the results differ. The churning
ocean of the electronic archive is swallowing everything—even the
Gutenberg libraries full of books that we firmly believe to be always
dependably the same. Yes, they are the same. But they belong to the
ocean now, and that is another matter.
Three Poems from Ellis Island

13.10
no longer blind at summer’s end you see beaches plain again
every grain of sand glows with inner light like a mysterious jewel
now you see how birds outstrip all subtleties of human art
Poetry 51
each thing reveals not so much its colors as the colors of pattern
unfolding power through the universe paints september
one morning every tree begins to yield
sun rain earth air time devotion and gold mingle
the so great sweetness of fruit may mask its complexity
but no art can render the harvest calling out to the departing sun
in the old days painters sat on hills failing to capture the fall
then they gave up on the fall and tried to capture other painters
now they trace the logic of representation
looking at things draws upon all your resources of memory and of

thought
how you feel answers what things say in reply to every answer you
give
14.2
so you know the universe loves you because you are a part of it
you belong to it in this moment exactly as alpha centauri does
you cross oceans like a comet leaving a wake of stars on the void
spinning atomic resonances increase in richness producing life

embracing the globe italians multiply the earth with their antiquity
they follow garibaldi liberator of america to paraguay and brooklyn
come to america to free themselves they find the evil eye waiting
here they learn to make evil good and the crooked a perfect circle
some of them live on tightly strung cables that hold the world firm
others float upon water expressing the sexual nature of the earth
some study the philosophy and theology and mantras of free spirits
italians transmit and receive continuous messages around the world
together italians are discovering new ways of dividing the sunlight

pythagoras da vinci galileo garibaldi fermi ferlinghetti di prima
15.12
i breathe as if i had been running hard
the water here reflects november stars
we buried schnauzers in the neighbor’s yard
the man who lives next door came here from mars
he bought himself a coffin that could fly
it slept on rags in broken trolley cars
i always think if only i could cry
this feeling in my chest would go away
his daughter loves a lame retired spy
when he’s asleep she writes what he will say
even dreaming both are practiced liars
i find the best thing i can do is play
i make the most of what the game inspires
her book has found a hundred thousand buyers
—Robert Viscusi
Witnessing’s End
And dawn came, like
smoky pitch, to glue sky
and earth into a sticky whole.
Blackbirds ceased to sing the flowing
of days and the recurring of cycles, tunes
of becoming broken in their throttled throats.
And all went silent, frightfully beautiful by its grim
stillness, through time’s inexhaustible sublimation. Cosmic
awareness eventually erased from the eternal receding of galaxies.
—Alessio Zanelli
Samuel Menashe Reads at the Harvard Club

You’re reading your poems at the Harvard Club
in New York City. The hall, rimmed with oak,
sputters a dying light suffused with thick
brown shadows, like intellectual antelope
gazing at their reflections on the wall.
You can’t believe you’re here.

Poetry 53
Poems leapfrog
from your throat (already you’re older
than most of the old men in attendance here)
poems so short that if you miss a word
you miss the point. I listen, neither
graduate of Harvard nor university-bred,
but a young man seeking encouragement
from an elder such as you. Invited here,

I hold your book open and read along
but the light is bad. My clothes are shot. No tie
is knotted in the hollow of my neck.
My shoes, the worn-out patent leather ones
from the J.Crew catalog, are more like husks
that hug my feet.
In private, you told me
to give up poetry and dedicate
myself to writing narrative instead.
“No one reads poetry,” you said.

Certainly you spoke from experience.
They used to snicker when you’d ramble in
off 47th St. to the Gotham Book Mart.
“Here comes the poet Samu-el,” they’d joke.
“C’mon,” I’d say, “he’s really not so bad.”
You’d stop and talk about the war, recite
Blake and the Hebrew Bible (KJV)
and then your own compacted prosody
which stopped the tourists in their tracks. “A pot
poured out fulfills its spout,” your voice
intoned. Then you’d explain, to the stupefied
clientele, what the poem really meant
based on its lingustic roots (“the pot
fills up the spout, fulfilling it, etc.”).
You’d sign their books before they’d even bought:
“To Jo, from Canada. Best, Samuel.”

That said, your poems are now canonized
in the Library of America.
You snagged the “Neglected Masters Award,”
the kind of name you always called yourself

alluding to the New Yorker and “Talk of the Town,”
the only place they’d publish you back then.
You felt yourself a curiosity
in your hometown, an underdog, the last
of your generation, a congregant
of Homer’s, the Greek café long since shut down.

What more could anybody do for you?
Your wish-list is complete, you have become
a famous poet with a style, to boot.
Menashesque. I can almost hear it said
in college classrooms, by professors younger
than I am, too obliviously young
to have attended the Nutcracker with you
at Lincoln Center.
Wedged between Masters
and Michelangelo, your volume rests
on my bookshelf. I flip through it, recalling
your evening reading at the Harvard Club
ten years ago. Like Emerson, you blurred
the distance between poetry and faith,
the kind one has in literature, not God.

That evening you gave your best performance.
—Marc Alan Di Martino
The Sugar Thief

For my adoptive father Carmine
If it was free, you taught, I ought to grab it

as you did: McDonald’s napkins, pens,
and from the school where you were once employed
as one of two night shift custodians,
the metal imitation wood wastebasket
still under my desk. But it was sugar
that you took most often as, annoyed
Poetry 55
on leaving Dunkin’ Donuts, pancake house,

and countless diners, I felt implicated
in your pleasure, crime, and poverty.
I have them still, your Ziploc bags of plunder,
yet I find today, among the loose
change in my pockets, packets crushed or faded—
more proof of your lasting legacy.
—Ned Balbo
Parkside
The evening watch turns inward
when the fog lands
and streets dim from view.
With my door ajar
I’m a wave of a body
napping on the floor.
The surf of me circulates
through alleys with ceilings of fog.
At times I reach the storm drain
or swell toward street signs,
unreadable in the fog. The woman
who’s coming to visit me, illicitly,
decides to turn around.
—Stephen Campiglio
Where Have All the Epithalamiums Gone?

This house is damned
All inside: damned
The shutters tremble
The garden shrivels
Sparrows flee the attic
Bed sheets squeal
Photographs tear
in their gilt frames
A white dress dies
on the cellar floor
Clocks run sideways

The mirrors go black
The telephones rasp
The faucets whisper
A portrait of a woman
(a comely lady
in her fiftieth year)
flies from the wall
and crashes face down
on the Persian rug.
A love seat grows teeth
and devours itself
The living room sighs
This house is damned
God has turned
His back on it
Denies it is part
of His creation
Guardian angels
avert their eyes
and spit
on the
ground
as
they
float
by
—Joel Allegretti
Un film di Federico Fellini,

Musiche di Nino Rota
They say bread and work,
But wouldn’t
Bread and wine
Be better?
Every time I was

Full of hope,
Poetry 57
But it never
Comes to anything.
The mountains are all white.

Let’s go
And see the snow
On the sea.
Everything’s gone:
People, Trees,
Birds,
Wine.
This poem comprises English subtitles for lines from Amarcord, Fellini’s
delicious evocation of his childhood. The title comes from the film credits.
—Joel Allegretti
Found in Translation
No one knows the name of the song I’m whistling,
even when I honor my sister’s request to sing
the only words I know: You can get what you want
or you can just get old.
I might as well be eight years old, reading
the programs my Nonno Enzo highlighted
with yellow ink in the TV Guide
for the last time again:
His voice booms in response. His hands splash
through waves of cigar smoke
and Neapolitan accent filling the room, just off
the shoreline of my brain;
swimming with thoughts of my Superman action figure,
buried under piles of sneakers and jeans
in the suede and denim sands of my closet;
his frayed red cape, his muscular arms broken
like my Nonno’s English.
Then, rolling his espresso-brown eyes,
my nephew tugs the bottom of my sweater
and says, Vienna.
—Joey Nicoletti
Reverie #3 in Bourbon, Unfiltered Tobacco,

and Rust
Beer to chase the bourbon
and bourbon to chase
the women but if only
they would run
from young men
that they tortured
& teased
like little boys
they got tired
of babysitting
And only when

these young men
absent without leave
from everything
except a bar with
a Frank Sinatra-filled
juke box and a fanatical
religious devotion
to the Boston Red Sox
promised to act like gentlemen
will the ladies

go with them
in lipstick-colored
cars that grin like
sharks
to a hilltop cemetery
and toast with warm beer
a dawning day
where nobody
will be sober enough
to work but will still need
to do something
more illegal or outrageous
before everybody
can truly become
drunk
—Kenneth DiMaggio
Poetry 59
Name Dropping
those guys from Jersey
started it
when they heard
my long Italian name
Fragoletti
Fragile—we’ll call you
said Vinny, Tony, Rocky and Joe
as they spun me
around the basement dance floor
like I was cotton candy
on a stick
& when Zeke touched

my thigh at the movies
& Danny took me
to the boat show
& Artie kissed my stomach
at Vito’s house
I started to crack
like Venetian glass
each boy—those touches

so sweet, tender, sexy
the red hot burn
in the bottom of my stomach
when I told Father Frankie
in the velvet box in the dark
the burn reaching
through the screen
dividing us
fusing us
—Barbara Hoffman
Cape May in January

two empty rocking chairs
on the balcony rock in the wind
as though the ghost of my mother

is beckoning, waiting for me
to come out and sit with her

to watch the cold waves run up
to shore and back away, scared

at the breaching of the barrier
rock rock, the empty chairs rock

Barbara, come out, I’m waiting
Pay attention
I’m getting ready to leave
—Barbara Hoffman
Sad Laughter
after Salvador Espriu
My words, the only avenue

of escape, go astray
and find yourselves
on the lips of beggars,
tongues of the mad
who lick the sky clean.
The black curse bathes you
and boils over to earth.
Stay calm and bloom.
There’s nothing left
to lose but your selves.
—Leonard J. Cirino
Poetry 61
After Muso Soseki

...the moon is crossing it
pushing a cart.
Last night the moon passed over

pushing a cart and carrying a bag
of fruit. I saw this with my one
good eye and could hardly believe it.
But there it was, on the bridge

between heaven and earth,
a simple face gleaming,
body shaking with laughter.
—Leonard J. Cirino
A Creation Poem
“…and who could imagine the existence of a weak-kneed God?”
Jeremy Campbell in The Liar’s Tale: A History of Falsehood, p. 90
Create the universe in a single day?

Oh, my! Too short a time! I’ll need a week
At the very least. Perhaps I ought to pray
Before I try. But Who would I pray to?
Er…to Whom would I pray, perhaps? I’m sure
I do not know. Myself? But how to seek
Oneself when nothing’s finished yet? Oh, Lord!
Nor even started? Perhaps there is a cure
For my dilemma — I ought to have a Son!
Yes, that’s the thing! At least there would be Two
Of Us to put Our heads together. Not
The Ghost of a chance until I get things started,
I’m afraid.
How can I be afraid?
There’s nothing here to fear except Myself,
And I wouldn’t swear to that — swear at or to?
I’m winding myself up in uffish thought,

As someone will have said, perhaps, in time.
What is this stuff I’m doing? Call it rime
Or reason is my guess. But that’s a way,
A long way, off. Till then I’ll part the light
And dark so I can see, and then the seas
So Moses can get through to the other side….
What other side? Who’s Moses? What’s going on?
Wait, wait! Too fast! There’s Leda and the Swan!
—Wesli Court
Verrazzano Circle
American Society of the Italian Legions of Merit (NY)
Fred Rotondaro (VA)
Sons of Italy (Wash., D.C.)
Patrons
Thomas J. Bonomo (NY)
Frank J. Cavaioli (FL)
Umberto LaPaglia (NJ)
Pirandello Lyceum (MA)
Frank Mancini (RI)
Robert Minichiello (NY)
Bart Roselli (NY)
Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Vitale (NY)
Sponsors
Albert DiBartolomeo (PA)
Anne Corvino Goldenberg (MA)
Madeline Eboli Masterson (MI)
Raymond Pacia (RI)
Amelia Paolucci (NY)
Lawrence Sasso (RI)
Grandma’s House 63
Grandma’s House
MARY BUCCI BUSH

California State University
They were terrible words for a boy of nine to hear from his
mother: “You’re going to stay with your grandmother.”
I cried, kicked the wall, threw a fit. In the end I stuffed some tee
shirts and dungarees and underpants and socks into the brown card-
board suitcase I had inherited from my father—the one he had forgot-
ten to take when he packed his clothes and left for good a couple years
earlier.
“It’s only for a week,” my mother told me. “While I go to visit
Aunt Susie. Don’t be such a whiner.”
Aunt Susie was my mother’s sister, and she lived far away in a
city called Cincinnati, and she had just had her fifth baby. It was born
deformed, without any arms, and therefore I longed to see it. It was
because of the baby that my mother was leaving me.
“I’m not leaving you,” she told me. “Grandma will take care of
you.”
“But Grandma—” I said. “Grandma’s—”
“What?” she demanded, in that icy way of hers.
I hung my head. “Nothing.”
My mother put me and my suitcase and her own suitcase in the
rusty green Dodge Rambler, and she took me to Grandma’s house.
There was a good reason I didn’t want to be left alone with
Grandma. She used to be my best friend; we had spent hours togeth-
er playing gin rummy, sipping wine, and watching our favorite TV
show: Hogan’s Heroes. But she’d caught the flu last fall and then
ended up in the hospital with pneumonia. The hospital did what they
could for her, then sent her home to die.
My mother had to go over there every day to feed and clean
Grandma, which made Mom more cranky than usual. She was espe-
cially mad that her brother and his wife, my Uncle Charlie and Aunt
Dottie, who lived only a few blocks away, never offered any help.
Mom and Uncle Charlie had talked about putting Grandma in a nurs-
ing home, but nobody had that kind of money, and my mother said she
wasn’t using up her lousy life savings just to have somebody feed her
mother chicken soup.

Grandma lay on her bed, dead to the world, while my mother
explained to her where she was going and why, and that I would be
sleeping there and taking care of her—something I had never done
before. When Mom finished talking, Grandma let out a low moan,
about the only sound she made lately.
My mother waited a minute. Then she turned to me. “Well, that’s
settled,” she said. “You behave. Don’t let me come home next week
to hear that you were a pain in the ass, or I’ll give you what’s what.”
“Will you at least take a picture of that baby for me?” I asked her.
For answer she picked up her purse and drove off to the airport.
I stood staring at my half-dead grandmother. The room smelled
of alcohol and dirty sheets and unwashed old lady, and the air was
thick and stifling. It was summer, a good thing, for how could I go to
school where other kids might find out about my humiliation? I went
to open the window and had just managed to loosen it a little when
Grandma let out a screech. I jumped back from the window, catching
a large splinter of wood in my thumb.
But when I looked at her, her eyes were closed, as if she had never
uttered a sound. I tiptoed out of the room and carried my suitcase to
the spare bedroom, where I set it down on the floor near the window.
I stood looking out at Grandma’s tiny backyard, the grass over-
grown, brambles and roses winding up the side of the tool shed, the
wood fence surrounding her yard weather-beaten and missing a few
slats. I’d spent a lot of time in that yard while my parents tried not to
kill each other. I knew every inch of it—from the rusted metal urn
filled with dirt and stones tucked near the back steps to the two-foot
mound of sand that had been in a corner of her yard since I could
remember, to the jewels stashed in her shed: horseshoes of various
sizes, a squat brown radio shaped like a loaf of bread, old automobile
distributor caps and worn brake pads, a large antique mirror cracked
diagonally through the center, and an impressive collection of assort-
ed green wine bottles, some still holding dark liquid. Against one
wall hung a string of braided dried onions, and underneath it were
various flowerpots and bulbs, mostly dried brown puffs that held no
life.
A sadness came over me when I realized that my mother was actu-
ally flying toward Cincinnati. The house that had been my playhouse
was silent and full of frightening odors; and my grandmother lay gray
and ghostly on her deathbed. I could not believe that my mother
would leave me alone with Grandma, especially since she always paid
a babysitter to watch me whenever she went out.
As I stood looking out the window, I became aware of an odd
sound, a creaking, almost like the wind: “Vorr-ree-o.” I followed the
sound to my grandmother’s room.
It took me a minute to realize she was calling me by my Italian
name, Vittorio.
I peeked in. There she lay in a lump on her bed, just as I’d left
her, her sleeping face pointing to the ceiling.
I stepped cautiously into the stifling room. “You want some-
thing?” I asked her.
She opened her eyes and looked up at the ceiling.
“Vittorio, it’s come,” she said, her voice weak and shaky. “It’s
here.”
These were the first words she’d spoken in months. “What’s
here?” I asked, trembling.
There was a long pause, and then in that weak voice she rattled
out the words: “I’m dead.”
After a while she closed her eyes. I looked at her chest to see if
she was breathing, but couldn’t tell.
“Grandma?” I said. I stared at her pasty cheeks, the puffy eyelids.
The only sound was that of the faintly ticking clock in the hallway.
I wrung my hands and fretted out loud: “What am I gonna do?”
“Call the relatives and tell them,” she answered, her mouth barely
moving.
I backed out the door. Once in the hall, I turned to her.
“Tell them you’re dead?” I asked.
“Yes.”
In Sunday school we’d been taught that people had souls, and I
wondered, as I pulled Grandma’s worn phone book from its drawer, if
that was the reason she was able to speak to me now that she was
dead. On the back of the phone book she’d written the names and
addresses and phone numbers of every person she’d ever known.
They were scrawled in her trembling old lady’s hand all over the mar-
gins of the book, sideways, vertically, upside down. I turned the book
around and around in my hands, deciphering the maze, figuring who
to call first. I was vaguely aware of feelings trying to surface within
me: fear at what had just happened, then anger at my mother, and then
an odd feeling of comfort that Grandma had spoken to me.
I dialed Uncle Charlie’s number because, after all, he was

Grandma’s son, and his son, my cousin Little Charlie, was my age and
I hung out with him sometimes.
Little Charlie answered.
“Is your mother or father around?” I asked.
“Whattaya want them for?”
“I’m at Grandma’s,” I told him. “I think she just died.”
“No kidding,” he said. “Jeez.”
“I’m supposed to call people and tell them.”
“My Pop’s bowling,” Little Charlie told me. “Mom’s at the gro-
cery store.”
“Will you tell them?” I asked.
“Yeah, sure, Vic,” he said. “Did you see her dead?”
“Yeah.”
“Wow. What a lucky bum.”
Next I went to my room and took out Aunt Susie’s phone number
that my mother had written for me on pink notepaper and tucked into
my suitcase. I dialed the number and after many rings my mother
answered, breathless. I could hear kids fighting in the background, a
baby crying, the television.
“Mom, it’s me.”
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“Grandma—” I choked on the words. “She—she’s dead.”
“Oh my God,” my mother said. She sobbed—gulped would be
more like it—the sound that a frog makes as it jumps into water. Then
she composed herself. “She would have to go and do this to me now.”
“Are you coming home?” I asked.
“I just got here, for god sakes.” She blew her nose and yelled at
Aunt Susie’s kids to shut the hell up. “I’ll have to see about getting a
flight out,” she told me. “Damn, this makes a fine mess of things.”
“What am I supposed to do?” I said.
“Call Uncle Charlie.” She sniffed loudly. “I guess he’ll have to
call the undertaker.”
“Uncle Charlie’s bowling.”
“Uncle Charlie’s always bowling.”
“How’s that baby look?” I asked her.
“Don’t get started on that, Mister,” she told me. “You hang up
now. Call the bowling alley. Call Aunt Dottie. I’ll try to see about
getting out of here.”
“Grandma said I should call the relatives.”
My mother gave a choking sound. “So she knew,” she said. “She
knew she was dying.”
“Yeah,” I said. “She told me.”
“Oh my poor Mama,” my mother said, and she sniffled into the
receiver and hung up.
I didn’t call the bowling alley. Instead I went into the bedroom
and stood a distance from the bed staring at the pale form that was my
grandmother. She lay on her back, her head propped on pillows, a
serene expression on her face. It was the most peaceful I’d ever seen
her.
“Well?” she said.
I jumped.
“Did you call?”
She turned her head toward me and opened her eyes.
“Yes,” I said, nodding vigorously because her one gray eye was
staring straight at me.
Grandma gave a small, relieved smile. “That’s good,” she said.
“I’m hungry. Is there anything to eat?”
“Hungry?” I said in disbelief. Nobody ever talked to you about
dead people, told you what to expect. On television when somebody
got shot they dropped to the ground, and the show went on, so you
never learned anything useful.
“Help me,” she said as she tried to sit up in bed.
I held onto her cool, flabby arm while she grunted and pulled
herself to a sitting position. Dead people were supposed to be cold,
I’d learned that much from cowboy shows—and stiff, too, or so I
thought. I took a couple steps back from the bed.
“Whatsa matter with you?” she said. “Go get me something to
eat. Then we got arrangements to make.”
I went into the kitchen and leaned against the sink. I looked up at
the cupboards, feeling the sweat trickling down the back of my neck.
I looked at the clumsy black telephone on its frail wooden stand and
thought about calling my mother again, or Uncle Charlie and Aunt
Dottie, anybody. But Grandma wanted to eat, she was waiting for me
to feed her. I started opening cupboard doors and peering in, taking
out a box of crackers and a tin of sardines. I rooted around the refrig-
erator, opening plastic containers and glass bowls, most of them hold-
ing smelly and moldy messes I couldn’t identify. I took out a piece of
cheese, and put the cheese and crackers and tin of sardines on a tray
and carried them in to Grandma.
She was sitting up in bed poking at her hair with a comb, and she
eyed the tray hungrily as I set it down on her lap.
“That’s it?” she said. “No macaroni?”
“That’s all I could find,” I told her.
She made a disgusted face. “Your mother never feeds me,” she
said. “All the years I made macaroni by hand for her, lasagna, pies,
chicken soup with escarole and the little meatballs—” She handed me
the sardines. “Here, open this.”
I knelt on the floor and worked the key into the tab and started
winding.
“Tomorrow you gonna make me some macaroni. You make the
sauce for me, too, okay?”
I was spilling sardine oil all over her floor and my pants. “I can’t
cook. I don’t know how to make anything,” I told her, horrified at the
idea of getting up the next morning with a corpse, and then cooking
with a corpse.
“I’ll show you how,” she said. “It’s easy.”
She took the can of sardines from me, dipped two fingers into the
can and pulled out an oily, dripping piece of fish and popped it into
her mouth.
“Go get me the mapine,” she said. “In the kitchen, so I can wipe
my hands.”
When I came back with the dishtowel she had finished the sar-
dines and was munching away on the saltine crackers and cheese.
She wiped her mouth and fingers with the cloth and continued
chewing while I watched her. When she was done, she leaned back
against the headboard, sighed, then burped.
“Now I want a drink of water, and to go to the bathroom,” she
said. “Help me up.”
“Are you sure you should get up?” I asked. She hadn’t walked in
months that I knew of.
She waved her arm impatiently at me, meaning I should hurry and
help her out of bed.
I fitted her slippers onto her stiff, calloused, rooster feet, then
eased her off the bed. She stood, a terrifying corpse—short and
stocky, her faded nightgown reaching almost to her ankles, and her
straggly gray hair, which I had only ever seen curled and combed out
into a fluffy helmet or bobby-pinned and hair-netted to her head,
flowing to her shoulders and smelling strange and unwashed.
“Hurry up, Vittorio,” she told me. “Boy, how I gotta go.” I
shuffled her out of the room and down the hall to the bathroom. She
clutched my arm with one hand and held the wall with the other as we
walked.
The worst part came when she made me enter the bathroom with
her. “I’m all wobbly,” she told me. “You gotta aim me. Don’t make
me wet my nightgown, now.”
She clutched the nightgown in a knot high at her waist while I
guided her onto the toilet seat, my face turned away.
“Sometimes a boy’s gotta do things he don’t like,” she told me.
I left her clutching the side of the bathtub and the clothes hamper
for balance, and waited in the hall, listening to the gushing water
sounds and wondering if this was all part of the “preparations” I’d
heard about concerning the dead.
Finally she called for me, and I pulled her to a standing position,
then went back outside the door and waited while she washed her
hands and gulped several Dixie cups of water.
When she came out she paused in the doorway, her face pink and
fresh looking. “Boy, that was like Noah’s flood, eh?” she said,
pleased. “He’s gonna have to come get us in his ark.” She let out a
little laugh, the first laugh I’d heard from her in months. I eyed her
suspiciously. She was beginning to remind me of the grandmother I’d
grown up with, the one I’d lost to illness, the one I’d almost forgotten.
“I hope we don’t get sea sick on the boat,” I ventured.
“Well, maybe he’ll come in an airplane this time,” she said. “A
jumbo jet. I ain’t never been on one of those.” We hobbled back to
her room, and she got into bed.
“Now go get a piece of paper,” she told me. “You gotta do a
couple more things for me.”
I sat next to her bed, ready for the dictation.
“Call the priest.”
“I can’t call the priest,” I cried. I’d never spoken to the priest
because his black robes scared me. I didn’t even know priests had
telephones, let alone that they talked on them like ordinary people.
“You gotta call the priest tonight,” she said. “So he can announce
at Mass tomorrow morning.”
I looked at her warily.
“He’s in the back of my phone book.”
So I wrote down “Call the priest.”
“Then in the morning, call the paper. We gotta write the obituary.
And you gotta call the undertaker.”
“My mother says Uncle Charlie will call the undertaker,” I told
her, relieved.
She squinted at me. “That lazy bum is gonna do some work?”
“That’s what my mother said,” I insisted.
She shrugged. “Eh, we’ll see.”
Then she dictated to me her obituary: Mrs. Augustina Carlotti,
widow of Fabrizio Carlotti, passed away Wednesday night at her
home.
“I’m not gonna tell them my age, though,” she said.
“How d’you know how to write an obituary?” I asked her.
“Hey, what do you think?” she said. “I been reading them things
all my life. Keep writing.”
She’s survived by her daughter Rosellen and son Charlie—you
better say Charles— and a bunch of grandchildren, nieces, nephews.
I scribbled away, proud of my grandmother who was now writing
for the newspapers.
She paused and looked out the window, thinking. “You know, I
gotta put in something good, so I sound special.”
“You can tell them you went to Niagara Falls the time that kid fell
in.”
“Pah, that’s nothing. How about this: On her eightieth birthday
President Nixon sent her a birthday card.”
It was true. She’d gotten a card, but the President’s name was
printed, not signed, and we figured he sent them out to all old people.
“You still got that card?” I asked her.
“I threw it away. He was a dirty crook.”
After a minute her eyes narrowed and she got that faint smile on
her face that used to be so familiar to me.
“Write this down,” she said.
In 1982 Mrs. Carlotti won the million-dollar New York State
Lottery, but kept it a secret. Nobody knows where she put the money.
“That’s gonna send them climbing up a tree,” she said. “Now go
call the priest and then go to bed. We got a big day tomorrow.” She
sighed and looked out the darkening window, shaking her head.
“How many of these I been through already. Thank God this is the
last.”
I sat at the kitchen table staring at the phone while I shuffled a
deck of cards. I thought about just scribbling a note, telling the priest
what had happened and taking it to his priest house, ringing the door-
bell and then running like crazy with the note left on his step. But that
seemed scarier than making the phone call.

I laid the cards out before me for a game of solitaire, like Grandma
had taught me, thinking how maybe it wasn’t so bad being alone with
a dead person after all. Still, I wondered if my mother had gotten a
plane ticket and was on her way back home. When the phone rang, I
jumped.
“Victor? This is Aunt Dottie. Is your mother there?”
“No, she’s in Cincinnati.” The last thing I wanted was crabby
Aunt Dottie coming over. I knew Grandma would feel the same way.
“I mean she’s on her way home,” I said.
“Who’s there with you?”
“Just Grandma.”
“What?” she shrieked.
I did some fast thinking. “And the neighbor—Mrs. Rosebottom,”
I told her. Then I asked, “Did Little Charlie tell you?”
“Now why in God’s name would I be calling there otherwise?”
Then her voice softened, but not much. “Do you need anything?
Shall we come over?”
“Can you call the priest? So he can announce it at Mass tomor-
row?” I asked her. “Grandma—I mean Mom said to.”
“You poor thing, you’re getting all confused,” Aunt Dottie said.
“Of course I’ll call the priest.”
“And the undertaker too?” I said.
“Let me talk to Mrs. Rosebottom.”
“Uhh— she’s in the bathroom. My mother should be back pretty
soon,” I told her.
“You have her call me the minute she gets in.”
“Okay,” I said.
I won the first game of solitaire. I had a knack, a way of playing
that usually bent things in my favor when I played alone. I’d learned
it from Grandma.
In the morning, while I was still in bed, I heard the chanting from
down the hall: “Vittorio, Vittorio.”
When I went to her room, she was sitting up in bed looking young
and fresh, her face practically glowing. I helped her out of bed and
down the hall to the kitchen where she sat on a stool in front of the
sink and guided me in washing her hair with a shower hose attach-
ment.
“That’s good,” she said. “Scrub harder.” I had never touched wet
gray hair before—or any gray hair. It felt soft and tough at the same
time, like I would have imagined a Shetland pony’s mane to feel.
Slowly, the creepy old lady smell was replaced by the pleasant scent
of Johnson’s and Johnson’s. While she sat at the kitchen table with
her head wrapped in a towel, she had me fetch her shoebox full of
pink hair curlers and bobby pins, and her mirror and comb, and she
set her hair in curlers while I made coffee and boiled water for oat-
meal.
She almost seemed normal to me. She’d barely leaned on me
when she walked, and she moved faster and looked more full of pep
than she had yesterday. This must be the afterlife I’d heard about, I
reasoned, where they said all your problems were taken away. It had
never occurred to me that it would be spent here on earth living with
human beings, and I began to wonder how many of my other relatives
were really dead but living their afterlives with us.
Every time I turned from the stove I caught Grandma staring at
me, her arms raised in the air while she wound her hair into the pink
curlers.
“What are you looking at me for?” I finally asked.
“I gotta look at something, don’t I?” she said. Then she cocked
her head. “You ain’t very tall, are you?”
I fixed two bowls of cereal and sat down at the table with her.
“We gotta go for a ride later,” she told me. “When my hair dries.”
“Ride?” I said. “You mean in the car?”
After Grandpa died, Grandma kept their car parked in the drive-
way in good running order “just in case.” I’d never seen her drive the
thing.
“I don’t mean on no magic carpet,” she answered.
We ate in silence. I started wondering why I hadn’t seen Grandpa
since he’d died. I looked around the room, thinking maybe he’d been
in the house all along but just never showed himself. Grandma
chewed her oatmeal like she meant business.
“Where’s Grandpa?” I asked her.
She stopped chewing and looked at me a minute. “I don’t like to
think where he might be right now,” she said.
“Do you ever see him?”
She thought about this. “Maybe if I have a bad dream. Did your
Mama say when she’s coming?
“No.”
Grandma looked out the window and shook her head. “What a
bunch of kids I had.” She turned back to me, her eyes watery. “It’s
all up to you, Vittorio, eh? My bel’ ragazzo.” She smiled and nodded
her head. “But first you gotta make the sauce.”
She had me set out cans of tomato paste, the home-canned jars of
tomatoes, the garlic, oregano, basil and parsley. Then she opened the
cupboard and reached into her sugar bowl. “I had almost thirty dollars
in here last time I looked,” she said. “Those rotten kids, the way they
treat me.” She pressed a few dollars into my hand and sent me down
to Sal’s market on the corner for some beef and sausage and a loaf of
Italian bread. “I ain’t gonna ask you to make meatballs. You gotta
know something before you can do that.”
For all I could see, Grandma was in good enough condition to
cook for herself. But I followed her directions, lugging the big stain-
less steel pots from the back room, cutting up the meat and onions and
garlic, sautéing and sizzling and simmering. The kitchen started to
smell the way I’d remembered it.
While the sauce was simmering she took a fresh towel and wash-
cloth into the bathroom for her sponge bath. Then she headed for the
living room, to sit under her plastic hair dryer and watch The Price is
Right. “Go call the newspaper now,” she told me before she turned
on the dryer. “We ain’t got no time to waste today.”
I was looking over the neatly printed obituary I’d written when
Uncle Charlie called. “Jesus, kid, put your mother on.”
“She went out,” I told him.
“What the hell,” he said, flustered. “You alone? You want me and
Dottie should come over?”
“No.”
“Vittorio, stir the sauce,” Grandma called over the sound of the
TV.
“Who the hell’s there?” Uncle Charlie asked.
“Just the lady next door.”
I heard him remove the receiver from his ear and mumble to Aunt
Dottie, “Here, you talk. He’s got the next door neighbor over there.”
“Vic? Victor? This is Aunt Dottie. Let me talk to Mrs.
Rosebottom.”
“She’s—she’s busy in the bathroom,” I said.
“She was in the bathroom last night when I called. What’s wrong
with her, she can’t use her own bathroom?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did your mother make it home all right then?” Aunt Dottie asked
in a voice that said she was suspicious.

“Pretty much,” I answered.
“Just where is she?” she asked.
“She went out to make arrangements,” I told her.
“Oh,” aunt Dottie said, sounding disappointed. “Did the under-
taker come already?”
“Yeah,” I lied.
“Victor, I want you to have your mother call me the minute she
gets in.”
“Okay,” I said.
The TV went off, and I heard Grandma shuffling around in her
bedroom. I listened to her open and shut her dresser drawers and sigh
as she eased herself into stockings, a slip, and dress.
When she came into the kitchen I gasped.
“Whatsa matter?” she said.
What was the matter? Only that she stood freshly washed, clean-
ly clothed, her hair brushed out in that familiar old lady helmet.
Everything came rushing back to me—the hot summer nights rocking
on her porch slurping bowls of ice cream, the early evenings together
hunched in front of the television hooting over another idiotic blunder
by Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz, the walks downtown that
would end at Rinaldi’s five and dime store where Grandma would buy
me a toy pistol with caps, or smoke bombs or small firecrackers which
we would then take to her backyard and set off, sometimes tossing
over the fence into Mrs. Rosebottom’s hydrangeas.
“You—you look nice,” I told her.
“I oughta look nice,” she said. “What you think I am?”
I turned off the sauce and followed her to the dining room. She
pulled a fat white envelope from behind her 50th wedding anniversary
plate in the china cabinet. “Here’s one little chunk of money nobody
found yet,” she said. Then she took the car keys from the drawer full
of screws and nails and bottle openers and rubber bands, and snapped
the money envelope into her big black pocketbook. She took her cane
down from where it had been hanging for months, over the doorknob
to the spare bedroom.
“Well?” she said. “What you waiting for?”
I had never driven her car before, although I had started ours up a
few times and sat with it in the driveway pretending I was going
places until my mother came out screaming and made me give her the
keys. Grandma had me sit in the driver’s seat while she sat beside me,
pressing her cane to the gas pedal with some difficulty. I could
barely see over the steering wheel. “Boy, this is gonna be a pain in
the ass,” she told me.
“Where we going?” I asked.
“I gotta get a new dress, don’t I?” She looked up at her house with
its peeling paint, then over at the lawn that needed mowing, and the
brambles growing up the side of the garage. “Look what a hole this
place is turned into. If I was alive they wouldn’t let my house get this
bad.”
“You want me to mow the lawn when we get back?” I asked her.
She patted my leg. “I’m gonna make your Uncle Charlie do it,”
she said. “With his teeth.” She jammed her cane down on the gas
pedal and the car jerked and screeched out of the driveway. Near the
end of the block she hit the brake pedal with her cane, and I swerved
to the side of the street and sent a couple of garbage cans flying, then
rocked to a halt at the stop sign. “This ain’t no rodeo,” Grandma told
me. “You gonna kill us if you keep driving like that. Steer it like you
riding your bike.”
The thing I didn’t like about Rinaldi’s five and dime was some-
body was always following you like they thought you were going to
steal something. Old lady Rinaldi cocked her eye at us as we walked
in the back door off the parking lot. Grandma leaned one arm on me
and the other on her cane while old lady Rinaldi and her check-out
clerk Angie Ruberti watched. Everybody knew Grandma had been in
the hospital, and that now she was home and dying. “Where’s your
mother?” Mrs. Rinaldi asked me, like she didn’t believe that was
really Grandma there with me.
“See what a daughter I got?” Grandma told her. “Sending me here
alone with my grandson while she goes grocery shopping. The way I
am besides.” She gave my arm a squeeze. “What a good boy my
Vittorio is, though, eh?”
“We’re here for a dress,” I explained.
Mrs. Rinaldi pursed her lips. Finally, she pointed us to the dress-
es in the middle of the store, and she and Angie Ruberti watched us
with narrowed hawk eyes.
I found a gray dress flecked with red and gold autumn leaves that
I thought Grandma would like. “You crazy?” she yelled at me. “You
can’t wear red at a funeral.” Instead, she chose a silky dark blue dress
with tiny lighter blue stripes that you could barely see. I had to admit,
it looked classy, even coming from Rinaldi’s.
When Grandma saw a display of shoes, she decided she had to
have a new pair, even though she had some new ones at home that she
never wore. They had never fit right, she said, and she didn’t want
shoes pinching her feet the whole time she was dead.
Ordinarily, she’d go down the block to Aldeman’s shoe store and
look through his discount shelf. But his prices, even discounted, were
high, and Grandma always complained that his store smelled like wet
diapers and she didn’t like the way his fat, mushy hands felt when he
helped her try on shoes.
Old lady Rinaldi watched Grandma sit on a chair and slip her
stockinged feet into a pair of black shoes that looked like all of
Grandma’s other black shoes. You’d think, from the expression on
Mrs. Rinaldi’s face, that she’d just swallowed a dead rat. “You’re
feeling better?” she finally asked Grandma, her chin tucked toward
her chest.
“What’s better?” Grandma said. “My age, nothing feels better.”
Mrs. Rinaldi peered down her nose at Grandma for a long time,
but she didn’t say anything back.
Before we left, Grandma insisted she wanted to buy me a toy for
being such a big help, and I could pick out anything I wanted, as long
as it cost under three dollars. I lingered over the shelves of cap pis-
tols, toy microscopes, footballs, and yo-yo’s, unable to decide what I
needed, when Grandma pointed out a “Mars Rocket” half buried
under a pile of stiff, naked dolls. The rocket could travel one hundred
feet on special pellets you mixed with water. It promised to leave
behind a trail of smoke and make a loud whistling sound as it
launched. I touched its shiny silver sides, and my fingers seemed to
tingle.
But when I saw the price, I shook my head. “It’s three-fifty.”
Grandma turned to Mrs. Rinaldi. “This toy’s no good,” she told
her. “See that scratch on the side, and the box is falling apart.” I
couldn’t see any scratch, but it was true that the box the rocket lay in
was crumpled on one side.
Mrs. Rinaldi peered closely. “There’s nothing wrong with it.”
“I’ll give you two-fifty,” Grandma said.
“I couldn’t possibly—” Mrs. Rinaldi answered.
Before she could finish, Grandma staggered against one of the
display bins. Her head drooped, her knees buckled. Startled, I
jumped to hold her up. “Grandma, you okay?” I cried. I looked to

the two women for help, fearing the worst. Angie Ruberti ran for a
chair. “Shall I call the ambulance?”
“No ambulance,” Grandma moaned. She sat in the chair, fanning
herself. “I gotta croak right here in the five and dime store?” she said
bitterly.
Mrs. Rinaldi brought her a glass of water. “You want me to call
somebody?” she asked. “Is there anything I can do?”
Grandma leaned heavily against the display bin, her head in her
hand, like she was going to faint. “You can sell me that rocket for
two-fifty.”
I was afraid old lady Rinaldi would call the police after we left, or
try to call my mother or Uncle Charlie, but as far as I knew she did
none of those things.
“Can we go home now?” I asked Grandma. I wanted to play with
my new rocket, and I had had enough of trying to drive Grandma’s
Chevy with her working the pedals with her cane.
But she had other plans.
I’d only been to the cemetery a few times, with my mother when
she brought geraniums to Grandpa’s grave on Memorial Day, and
once with some school friends when we rode our bikes there last
Halloween. We’d dared each other to lie down on the graves in the
old section, where ancient people with strange names had died as far
back as the 1800s.
Grandma had me drive through the rutted dirt roads, up a slight
hill, and stop in front of Grandpa’s headstone. She crossed herself
and looked hard at the grave. Grandpa’s name and the dates of his
birth and death were chiseled into the granite. Next to his name was
Grandma’s name and date of birth; the other date was left empty.
Weeds choked the few scraggly, dried-up geraniums that grew in a pot
tilted against the base of the stone. “Hmph!” she said. She turned her
back on the grave, and I did the same. A field of headstones spread
out below us, criss-crossed by a few dirt roads, all sloping down to the
main paved road. There were lots of people down there Grandma
knew—relatives, friends, old people from town—and she seemed to
be taking inventory of them. I felt my throat tightening, my eyes
beginning to sting as I thought of Grandma joining them. To the left
lay the low-lying blue hills of the Oxbow. To the right lay the flat
farmland and beyond it a thin line of blue that was Oneida Lake where
I’d spent many summer days with Grandma while my mother waited
impatiently for us to emerge from the arcade or the bumper car rides.
“At least you got a nice view from up here,” Grandma said, almost to
herself.
She turned to me. “I don’t want you coming here no more. But
you make sure your mama keeps my grave clean, you hear? And I
want some flowers, planted in the ground, not in the pot. A nice pink
peony. This ain’t no place for a boy.”
“Not even at Halloween?” I asked her.
She smiled and winked at me. “Halloween, okay.”
She took a long time trying to clear her throat and cough up some-
thing, then finally leaned to one side and let loose with a hawker.
“Okay, I’m done,” she told me. “Take me home.”
Grandma hung up her dress and laid out the new shoes while I
boiled water, heated the sauce, and set the table. “Don’t make that
macaroni too mushy,” she called to me. “I gotta chew, you know.”
We spooned sauce over the steaming rigatoni, grated parmesan
over it along with a pinch of pepper, and we dug in. Grandma gnawed
on the pieces of beef and sausage in a way that reminded me of a lion
I’d seen on a Wild Kingdom TV show ripping into its prey. We
hardly said a word as we shoveled in the rigatoni and sopped up the
sauce with chunks of Italian bread. Everything was good, better than
any food I’d tasted in a long time.
“I did all right, huh, Grandma?” I asked her as she licked a dribble
of sauce from her thumb.
“You was always my favorite,” she told me. “Now you gonna
wash all these dishes.”
While she lay in her bedroom resting from the huge meal, I
attacked the pile of dirty pots and pans. First I dragged one of the
vinyl kitchen chairs to the sink to give me better leverage; then I knelt
on it and went to work.
The late afternoon sun was filtering through the window, and the
light, mixed with the effects of the heavy meal, made me sleepy. I
wondered if my mother would return by nightfall, and what would
happen if she never came back. I imagined myself living alone with
Grandma, free of my mother’s rants, driving Grandma to the store or
cemetery, or setting off firecrackers in the backyard, playing gin
rummy, or watching Hogan’s Heroes with her. It seemed like a swell
life to me—except for the cooking and cleaning, which I was certain
I could convince Grandma to take over.

I was just placing the last pot cover on the drain board when I
heard the familiar rumble of my mother’s car pulling in the driveway.
I swiped the dish towel over the wet counter and the puddles of water
I’d splashed on the floor, tossed the towel in the sink, and went out to
meet her.
“My poor baby,” she cried as she hurried to embrace me. Then
she pulled back. “You’re all wet.”
“I did the dishes,” I told her.
She stifled a sob, as if doing the dishes was the most impressive
and heartbreaking thing I’d ever done.
“Where is everybody?” she asked, taking in the empty driveway
and the quiet house.
“Home, I guess.”
She dabbed at her nose with a tissue, and we walked into
Grandma’s house. My mother paused in the kitchen, looking at one
thing and another. When she saw the pile of washed pans and dishes,
she lightly touched my shoulder. And then she walked around the
room, stopping to linger over the religious calendar tacked on the wall
near the stove, Grandma’s apron hanging from a doorknob. She
picked up a plastic lemon from the fruit bowl on the table, touched it
to her cheek, then put it back. “My mama,” she murmured.
“She’s in the bedroom,” I told her.
“What?” she shrieked.
I froze, realizing I had said the wrong thing.
“They didn’t take her to the funeral parlor yet?” She started for
Grandma’s bedroom, then stopped, making me bump into her.
“Where did you stay last night?”
I pointed toward the spare bedroom.
“You slept in this house with—with grandma—” She stifled a
sob, and then she stepped into Grandma’s bedroom.
The new dress hung on the hook near the closet; the empty shoes
sat on the floor beneath it. The shades were half-drawn. A crucifix
stood on Grandma’s dresser; on her bed stand were a rosary and glass
of water.
Grandma lay nearly hidden in the tangle of sheets on her unmade
bed, dressed in her faded nightgown, her body small and dry, her gray
hair curled and clean. One ashen arm lay at her side; the other hand
clutched a corner of the sheet. Her face pointed to the ceiling, the
eyes closed and the cheeks sunken.
“My God,” was all my mother said.

I, too, stared. My throat tightened and burned as a jumble of feel-
ings—shock, grief, rage at my mother for what she had caused—
washed over me.
She backed out of the room. “Did Uncle Charlie even call the
undertaker?”
“I guess not.”
She stormed back into the kitchen, and I followed. “Where the
hell is that idiot brother of mine?” she yelled. “What the hell’s wrong
with him? And with that wife of his?”
“It wasn’t his fault,” I stammered as we stood in the living room.
“It was a mistake. They were going to come but then—”
“But then what? Did Uncle Charlie come here at all?” she yelled.
“Not really.”
While Mom was on the phone screeching at Uncle Charlie, I went
outside and sat on the porch. The air was warm, the light slanting as
the day moved toward dusk. Small dark birds flitted from one tree to
another, chirping softly. Now and then a car moved down the street,
and I listened to the quiet slapping of the tires against pavement,
growing louder and then quieter as the car approached, then passed.
Behind the sounds came the muffled screeching of my mother. I
knew I’d be next once she got off the phone and found out all the
things I’d done with Grandma. But I didn’t care much right then.
As soon as things calmed down I was going to try the rocket. I’d
fill an old tomato paste can with water and take the rocket to the back-
yard where I’d use the pile of sand as my launch pad. I’d remove the
silver cone as instructed, drop a pellet down the cylinder, add a half
can of water, and replace the cone. After a minute, the rocket would
launch into the air with a loud whistling sound, trailing smoke, as
promised on the box. I’d watch with satisfaction as it shred some of
the leaves on Mrs. Rosebottom’s hydrangeas, cleared her yard, and
kept going.
Gifts Of Grief 81
Gifts Of Grief
MIRIAM POLLI KATSIKIS

Unlike Gregor Samsa, who awoke one morning to find him-
self a bug, I woke one morning to find my dead mother doing the
Tarantella at the foot of my bed. For twenty years I prayed to be able
to spend a few moments with her, but now that she was here I was
seized with panic.
“Just what in earth are you doing?” she demanded, as if I had
overslept on a school morning. Her blouse was a floral pattern and
her silver-gray hair was neatly coifed in the way Tessa’s Salon did
every Friday afternoon. She was a short woman, and my mahogany
footboard was high, so I couldn’t tell if she was wearing pants or a
skirt, but I would have bet she wore slacks. She looked around my
bedroom, her head spinning, faster than humanly possible. “Nice
place you have here.”
I struggled to sit up. It was four days since my sister
Dorothea’s funeral. Four days since I’d been out of bed, with the
exception of basic foods and the toilet. Something about my mother
irritated me. “What are you doing here?” I said, sounding rude.
“What do you think I’m doing?” She kept twirling. “Get up.
Come on. Enough is enough.”
This really was my mother; she had the same sweet, raspy
voice. Not to mention her choice of words.
“I’m not getting up,” I said.
“Your staying in bed is not going to help the situation. Where
are your kids?”
“My children? They’re grown ups living their own lives,
what do you think?”
“Listen, I had it tougher than you, and you never saw me in
bed.”
“Don’t worry. After you died I stayed in bed for almost a
week.”
“You didn’t come to my funeral?”
“Of course, I did. What kind of a ghost are you? I thought
ghosts knew everything.”
She giggled in that girlish way of hers. “I was just testing.
Trying to cheer you.”
I slid back down under the covers, “Some cheering,” I mum-

bled, “talking about your funeral. It isn’t fair.”
“What isn’t fair?”
“All of you, dead,” I said into my pillow.
“Why? Do you want to be dead?”
“Damn,” I tossed the pillow. “Why are you so flippant? It’s
not like you.”
“Stop being a baby.”
I couldn’t believe my ears and eyes, my mother telling me to
stop being a baby
while doing the Mambo, no less.
“Whatever,” I said sounding glib like my teenage grandson.
“Don’t you whatever me, little girl.”
So now I was “little girl.” I covered my head with another
pillow, positive she would disappear in a few moments.
“I would call your father, but he’s not very accessible. I hear
he’s still talking politics, battling Khrushchev and Mussolini. Would
you like me to call your sisters?”
“Can you?” I sat up quickly. Besides Dorothea she was talk-
ing about my sister, Rosalia, dead almost five years now.
“Only if you get out of bed.” Her body twirled like a spindle.
I thought of the bobbin on her old Singer where she made outlandish
dresses for me and my sisters. Embarrassing dresses with ruffles and
sequins, which she expected us to wear to school. She wanted us to
“stand out.” And we did. Until the Principal sent a letter home with
Rosalia saying that our “outfits” were distracting to the other students.
Weeks before Dorothea died she had helped me rearrange my
bedroom. Moved the chair across the room near the window, where
the desk and computer used to be.
“Sit,” my mother said, pointing to that chair now. I realized
the floral pattern my mother was wearing was the same as my recent-
ly reupholstered bedroom chair. Navy background with large white
peonies.
Her head spinned around once more. “Why do you have a
television in your bedroom? You never liked to watch TV,” she said
looking at my computer. After my divorce I had moved to Brooklyn.
My mother had never seen this apartment.
“Okay,” I said, “I’m sitting.”
“Now, what’s this all about?”
Gifts Of Grief 83
I scratched at the heels of my feet. “You really don’t know,

do you?” My skin had dried into flakes; the beginning of bedsores, I
thought. “It’s called depression,” I said. “Giving up.”
She did a quick two-step and said, “Tell me something I don’t
know.” Ironically her cheeks were rosy with a healthy glow.
This woman looked and sounded like my “living” mother, but
her zany attitude was not my mother’s. I was right; she was wearing
slacks, full, pleated, hands in her pockets slacks.
“Depression is such a waste. You’re living. We’re not.” She
was pacing in front of my chair, no; actually it was more like skip-
ping. “Why throw away your happiness?” She stopped whatever
ridiculous thing she was doing, and focused on me. “When you try to
hold onto everything, you’re not living.”
I had almost forgotten how dark and deeply set her Sicilian
eyes were. The way they caught available light: tricking me into feel-
ing safe.
And now those eyes were staring off into space. “Confucius
and I were talking the other day,” she started.
Now this really sounded like my mother.
“We were having a brandy…”
“But you never drank.”
She dismissed me with the wave of her arm. The liver spot
on her hand seemed smaller, but it was still, as she’d always said, “the
shape of Italy.”
“…and Confucius said to me, ’The one who would be con-
stant in happiness must also change.’” She was still into fortune
cookie philosophy. She propped herself onto my bed and sat. Her
fingernails were painted misty lilac, and she wore the ring my father
gave her when they first met. Black onyx wrapped in marcasite. I
rushed to my dresser to look inside my jewelry box and saw the ring
there. “You see,” she said, “none of this stuff really matters.” Her
ring finger pointing at me, now idiotically larger than the rest of her
fingers. Her legs were in yoga position and she started to sing one of
Rosemary Clooney’s songs; “C’mon a my house/my house/I’m a
gonna give you candy….” There was something grotesquely beauti-
ful about my mother’s voice. “You were always a true traditionalist,”
she said. “Always resistant to change.”
She was still in lotus position floating a fraction of an inch
above my comforter. Her bottom never touched the bed. “We live, we
die, but you seem to want everything. You’ve got to stop being so
selfish.”
“Selfish?” I felt outraged. “Selfish? Who’s the one who has
been taking care of the dying? Me, the caretaker. Not you. You left.
And boy, you sure were in a hurry. You left me with that cranky old
husband of yours. Think about it.”
She lowered her head and started humming. It sounded like
Ava Maria. I got up and turned my newly upholstered chair to face the
wall, and sat down again. She appeared on the wall in front of me.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said, “you see,” her voice low and scratchier,
“it’s really not the unknown that frightens you. What you really fear
is the loss of the known. Undoing who you were with that person.
Learning to let go of your own senses.”
There was some wisdom in her words, I thought, but still a lot
off.
“It’s selfish to want to hold on. And painful. If you didn’t
want to hold onto your sisters so badly, you wouldn’t be so depressed
and unhappy.”
I felt like crying. I couldn’t understand how she could speak
so matter of factly about her own children. “I have this emptiness
inside me,” I said. Feeling like a child again, I asked, “Why am I the
one left behind? Is this some sort of punishment? You don’t know
what it feels like.” I was immediately sorry for saying that. She had
lost her baby, her youngest when he was sixteen. Mine were healthy
with families of their own. Now she turned her back to me. I noticed
some stray silver hairs on her shoulder, and felt an impulse to whisk
them away. I waited for her say something, but she was suddenly
gone.
“Mama,” I called.
Silence.
I felt as if I were losing my mind, I walked back to my bed,
and took a couple of aspirin from the night table and swallowed them
dry.
“Let me show you something.” I heard her voice, but she
was nowhere in sight. “Go ahead, go back to bed, but I’m still going
to show you.”
Somehow, someway there was loud music; my bedroom
walls trembled with the sound of violins. So loud I had to cover my
ears.
Gifts Of Grief 85
“Sorry. Oops. Just a second.” I heard her voice once more.

“What are you doing?” I shouted over the music.
“I’m new at this,” she said.
“New at what?”
“Hold on. I’ll be right there.”
Suddenly on the ceiling above my bed, there was an 8mm
home movie but it was in color, not black and white. My sisters were
sitting in a garden on a heavily carved stone bench. Roses, bougain-
villea and gardenias all around them. I could actually smell the garde-
nias. The film had no sound. My sisters were laughing. They looked
wonderful.
Dorothea was wearing the bracelet I gave her right after
Rosalia died. We had gone shopping and bought each other gifts of
grief. It dawned on me that this film wasn’t a home movie after all.
I was witnessing some grand illusion, but I didn’t care, I had gone
mad and it wasn’t so bad.
“How did you do this, Mama? Mother, can you hear me?”
The music was loud again.
Mother reappeared. Her hair and face looked like she was in
a wind tunnel. Comical. I actually laughed out loud.
“See you’re feeling better already,” she said.
“Feeling better? Not really, just totally amused by your
antics.”
“You see your sisters? They’re happy, not depressed like
you.”
“Can I speak to them?”
“Can’t do. They have to earn their ‘status.’ It takes about, let
me see,” and she began to count on her fingers, “diciotto, diciannove,
venti. Twenty years before they’re allowed to leap stars and have a
conversation with someone.”
Mother was no where in sight once again.
I fell back onto my pillow and found myself smiling as I
watched my sisters on my newly painted pale pink ceiling. They
talked, tried on each other shoes, and made the familiar gesture of
touching each other’s hand when wanting to make a point. A young
woman entered the film. I was unable to see her face. She looked
familiar. The back of her hair was wavy, no, curly. I knew this young
lady, but couldn’t pin her down. The Easter Hymn from Cavalier
Rusticana started to play and the chorus began its ascent, O’Signor,
O’Signor, Signor. A child entered the film and seeing the young
woman sitting on the grass, he playfully jumped into her arms. I
began to smell the gardenias, their scent sweet, sickening, filled the
room. My sisters appeared joyous. Hugging one another, embracing
the young woman and the child. I felt myself break into a sweat. My
brother, Randy, still sixteen ran towards the others. The chorus spi-
raled upwards, O’Signor, O Signor. Signor. Everyone rejoiced, cele-
brating their encounter with more hugs. I began to feel queasy. All
at once I knew the young woman and the boy. “No, no,” I screamed.
Mother appeared at the side of my bed. “You give me no
choice.”
Electrified by fear, I swung at her, tried to push her away, but
my hands went right through her.
“What have you done?” I couldn’t bear to see my daughter
and grandson in this place for the dead. “No,” I pleaded. I was that
child again; waking in the night, filled with a terror so intense, it
owned me completely. “Take it away, I won’t look at it. Hold me.”
My plea for her to hold me went unfulfilled. It wasn’t possible. Not
any more, not ever again. The film was gone, and the music had
stopped. My mother’s face was close to mine, but now her eyes
looked different. Light shone in the center of each dark, moist pupil,
like a small glistening cross.
“Mama,” I said, “This isn’t real. Is it?”
“Remember when you were little, the drawings you made for
me? Well, I made this one for you. My working title is: Things Can
Always Be Worse.” She cleared her throat. “You lost your parents and
siblings, but when you lose a child….” She was silent for a moment.
Crosses still sparkled in her eyes. I thought of Brenda Starr, the comic
strip. “Well, I did cheat a little,” she winked. “Fellini shares a lot of
his secrets with me.”
Mother was now on my bedroom ceiling. “Go down to Little
Italy, have some sasizza with vermicelli and a cannoli or gelato. Go
to the beach,” she said. “Call your children and your grandchildren.
Take them to Coney Island, dance in the waves. Scare them on the
Cyclone.” She was somersaulting. “Mama,” I said, through my relief
and slobbering, “It’s winter. There’s still snow on the ground.”
“So what?” she laughed, “Vivi, mia cara, vivi. Just live.”
And then she twisted her body at the waist and tangoed her way right
out of my bedroom.
Any Place You Go Is America 87
Any Place You Go Is America

ERNEST E. ROSSI
One day when I was finishing my PhD dissertation, my immi-

grant Italian-American father asked me if I had any job opportunities.
I answered there was a job possibility in the Far West, and I wondered
whether I should bother applying for it. His unexpected comment to
me in his native Abruzzese dialect was, “Why does it matter? Any
place you go is America.”
I immediately took his meaning: it was not about the com-
mercial sameness of American cities, with their neon strips, malls, fast
food enterprises, auto dealerships, gas stations, supermarkets, drug
stores, and the like. He meant that it little mattered that the job was in
a distant city so long as it was in America, that any place in America
is good, the American system of opportunities, abundance, and
democracy extended across the land. Besides, and more important I
suppose to his mind, was, you speak the language and you’re edu-
cated, so what’s the problem? One goes where there is work. He never
thought that an American-born, educated person would undergo the
experiences that he endured. His unspoken message was be grateful
as I am that I left Italy and raised my family in America.
Indeed, he did not have to say this, for having studied and
lived in Italy, and having visited his home town and met his younger
brothers and their families, I realized how uncertain a life I—or some-
one born in my place—would have had if he had decided to remain.
An Italian American
In the period 1880 to 1924 over four million Italians came to

the United States; in earlier periods most Italian emigrants went to
South America. My father, Gaetano Rossi,1 was one of the over three
million Italians who emigrated to the United States in the years 1900-
1914. The U. S. Census Bureau estimated there were 17,235,000
persons in 2005 (some of multiple ancestries and some not counted)
who can be classified as Italians or of Italian descent (Stat. Abstract
48).2 Some activists and scholars estimate about twenty million per-
sons in the United States can trace their origins to Italian immigrants
(Juliani 62, n. 1). Gaetano was born and raised on a sharecropper’s
farm3 in the northern-most southern region of Italy, the Abruzzi, near

the Adriatic seacoast. The landlord took his share of the product of the
farm, amounting to fifty percent. Gaetano never went to school, for
his father forbade it, as he was needed to work on the farm. The farm
work was done by the families of two brothers, Gaetano’s father and
his uncle. My father sometimes would say to me that he was tired of
working by the age of eight or nine.
Gaetano came to America twice, once in 1913 when he was
twenty-one, and a second time after World War I. His older brother
also came but returned to Italy, while Gaetano stayed in America. His
younger sister married an Italian and their family lives in the U. S. A
number of scholars have noted that Italians, like my father’s brother,
returned to Italy. Apparently some came for seasonal work, to make
money that they could use in Italy. About thirty to fifty percent
returned to Italy for various reasons, but a number of them, like my
father, came back and stayed.4
A large number of Italians participated in wave migration,
that is, settling in the same place as others from their community or
region, where it was possible to find work. After arriving in the U. S,
my father went to Philadelphia for a short time and then moving to
find work, he took a job in a coal mine, which, having been raised on
a farm, he did not like at all. He then heard there was work in
Pittsburgh, and moved there and got a job in a steel mill. Throughout
these moves, he stayed in Italian boarding houses and heard rumors
about jobs available in a distant city. In 1914, he was recruited by
Italian agents who convinced young Italian men that they could get a
free trip to Italy to see their family, do their duty of compulsory mili-
tary service in the Italian army, and serve la patria.5 Most likely the
men thought that it was also a way to find a wife or become betrothed
to a young woman––which my father did. He did not speak much of
his service in the Italian army, except that one of his jobs was to take
care of an officer’s horse. The officer had to instruct him not to use
the informal you (tu) when speaking to him, but to use the formal you
(Lei). When Gaetano was discharged in 1919, my younger brother
says our father was offered money for a trip back to America, a suit
of clothes, or a “cannon.” He took the money for a trip back to
America. I suspect that he was not offered a “cannon,” or even a hand-
gun, but my younger brother says he always told my father that he
should have taken the “cannon.” At any rate, this story is an indication
of how much my father wanted to return to America.
The war lasted four years and Gaetano never thought that he
would return to America, yet he did in 1919. On the return voyage, the
returning Italian veterans were in steerage and were told at a stop to
load coal for the ship. When he arrived in America, my father vowed
he would never return to Italy. “I kissed the ground when I returned
to America. I made a sign of the cross on it. I never will go back to
Italy.” He lived as a bachelor with Italians and later called for his
fiancée, who arrived at the age of twenty in 1922. My mother went to
the third grade and knew how to read Italian. She would write letters
to Italy and read the replies to my father, letters that acknowledged the
small gifts of cash they had sent to relatives. Often she could not make
out the horrible handwriting of the letters from Italy, and my father
would offer suggestions, usually to no avail, while I listened.
I write less about my mother, Anna D’Angelantonio Rossi,
since this is an essay about my father, his work, and his view of
America. Like many Italian women of her generation, she was a
housewife and never worked outside the home. She gave birth to five
children, four boys, and a girl who died at the age of three, an event
which broke my mother’s heart. My mother taught my father how to
write his name so that he could sign the compensation checks that
came after he was injured at work. His signature was excellent.
Earlier, the workers in the steel mills were paid by cash in little brown
envelopes.
My mother did the cooking, canning, cleaning, and washing,
as well as drying on clothes lines in the back yard, raising the chil-
dren, buying the groceries, paying the bills, buying the clothes for her
children and her husband, and keeping the house. She spoke in
English to the neighbors and she taught herself to read English. It was
she who read the fine print in the newspaper of army units of returning
veterans of World War II in Europe. I recall disagreeing with her that
it was not my older brother’s unit, but she was right, for about a week
later he showed up. In 1941, she became a U.S. citizen (my father
became a citizen in 1929). She, like other prospective citizens, was
given a pamphlet of questions and answers about American govern-
ment and history, and she would ask me to test her knowledge, which
I usually begged off because I found it boring. She did this exercise,
expecting she would be questioned, but no citizen applicant was asked
such questions. They simply had to swear allegiance to the United
States.
When my father was over seventy, my older brother tried to
encourage him—my mother having died several years earlier—to

take a trip to Italy and see his younger brothers, since they were young
men when he left after World War I. He was tricked once in 1914 by
a pezza novanta (big shot) to return to Italy and he vowed never to go
back. He did not want it known that he had once been in America and
then left. I imagined the reason for this was that he considered it dis-
loyal to America to leave and do his compulsory military service in
the Italian army.
This was said not so much as bitterness to Italy, but in grati-
tude to America, for taking him a second time. Perhaps he feared that
even a visit by an American citizen after World War II would trap him
there by some bureaucratic rule, and cause him to lose his American
citizenship.6 Italy had dual citizenship and compulsory voting,
although I doubt whether he knew that.7 In his last years, when his
imagination was affected by his advanced age, I thought that he some-
times believed that we—my brothers and I—were planning to send
him permanently back to Italy because of our suggestion to visit Italy
as a number of his friends had done. It saddens me that he might have
believed we would pull this dirty trick on him. Not I, who had been
to Italy and shuddered to think how easily I, or some boy born in my
place, could have been born an Italian and not an American. My
Italian uncles and their children of my age were common laborers
who were looking for work in the late 1950s. Perhaps, my father,
more of a go-getter, would have moved north and raised his family in
the industrial areas of Italy, but that was not possible in his time.
Benito Mussolini came to power in 1922 and enacted laws that
restricted internal migration, compelling southerners to remain in a
“state of overpopulation and underemployment.” These Fascist laws
were overcome by democratic reforms during the period 1954–64
(Lopreato, Peasants 31-33). My father was sixty-two years old in
1954.
My father was not an educated man, and his stubbornness was
often disturbing to me; he sometimes accused me of displaying la
superbia, pride, aloofness, something that I silently accused him and
his cousin of. Yet, he was wise in the ways of the world; of course,
we seldom realize this while our parents are alive: a trite observation.
He never regretted leaving Italy and never wanted to return. He
understood, deep in his heart, the greatness of America, even though,
after forty years of working in steel mills, he was cheated out his
small pension by a failing corporation and an ineffective union.
He was a man who only wanted to work for a living and raise
his family. He understood the greatness of America, and he, unlike
some of his acquaintances, never cursed the day he set foot here. As a
boy, I heard him curse the lack of work, the thieves that stole from his
garden, a nasty neighbor, the cheat, the drunkard, the nail that would
not be driven straight—yet, never America. This land to him was
sacred. He blessed the land when he returned after World War I. This
land had its faults: lack of steady work was probably at the top of his
list. But by comparison with the only other country he knew, it was
the land of his dreams for himself and for his family.
A favorite toast of his, usually said at holiday meal when the
food was piled high, and the family back home and healthy was,
“Sempre cosi e qualche volte piu meglio.” May it always be like this,
and sometimes even better. He said this even when the steel mill plant
was shut down, the workers laid off, and his pension denied.
It is hard for me to say how proud he was that I had gone to
college. My older brother had to drop out of high school to earn
money for the family; he later was a newspaper distributor, and I
delivered papers in the morning before school started. When I was
about fourteen, I had a job as a stock boy after school and all-day
Saturdays in a grocery store (for three dollars a week, I might add).
My father approved. “You will never go hungry,” he said. “When the
boss isn’t looking, you can quickly eat a piece of fruit or something,
and they would never miss it. Working in a grocery store, you will
never go hungry.” Hunger to him was a possible reality, but even in
the depths of the Depression, I never felt hunger, for my parents
always managed to put food on the table. Taking a job as a boy in a
grocery store was a wise move, he must have thought, for one avoids
the uncertain role of a steelworker (which my older brother became)
and possibly one day, one might go into the business.
After high school, I joined the U. S. Air Force and after the
service, I took advantage of the G.I. Bill and went to college, the only
one in my father’s family to do so. My father sometimes warned me
about the “evil eye” of an Italian neighbor he thought was particu-
larly envious. Gaetano had heard of the sons of Italians who had
become lawyers and physicians, and something similar was happen-
ing to a son of his. Once I overheard him say to a friend, speaking of
me, “He goes to work in a white shirt.” In his world, this was a mark
of achievement, a symbol of making it in American society. Had I
gone into law, instead of political science, a decision I sometimes
regret, I am certain that my father would have burst with pride. A

lawyer, he could understand, but a political scientist, what’s that?
Many times he asked me, “What is it again you are studying?” I usu-
ally said that I was a teacher at the college level so he could under-
stand.
His ideal was the medical profession. One day when I was
well along in my graduate studies and had only to write my disserta-
tion, he said. “Now, don’t misunderstand me. I am just trying to
understand. Suppose you were to change what you’re studying.
Suppose you wanted to become a physician. Now, don’t get mad. Just
suppose, just for the sake of conversation. Suppose you were to
switch to become a physician. You would have to go to school a little
bit longer, no? Another year, maybe? It would be worth it, wouldn’t
it?”
I explained as best I could that the fields were quite different.
I could never become a physician, since I had low tolerance for chem-
istry or anything similar. In college I took the required science cours-
es, biology and physics, avoiding chemistry, and although I did well,
I was glad to get them out of the way. As it was, it took me years to
finish the dissertation in political science. Although ignorant about the
academic life, the old man was wise about life in America. He misun-
derstood the world of academic study, but he thought, why not, since
you have all the benefits of being an American, why not go all the
way, why not try to be number one, a social and financial success,
why not become a medical doctor?
I never heard my father talk of the politics of Italy, or of
radical Italian groups in the United States, or of Benito Mussolini. My
older brother says that our Dad as a young man liked the king of Italy,
Victor Emmanuel III, but he did not like Mussolini. When he became
a citizen in 1929 and a voter, he was incorporated into the two-party
system of the United States. The simple two-party system may have
its advantages and disadvantages, but is a powerful factor that distin-
guishes the American polity from that of Europe, and it speeds up the
process of assimilation. In this period, Italian-American politics acted
more as an interest group within the two-party system; it agitated for
particular policies and sought patronage and offices within the sys-
tem. As third and fourth generations become more and more assimi-
lated into American politics, it is projected that they become less and
less “ethnic” in their demands, and “ethnicity” takes on a symbolic
role.8
As a boy, I somehow gravitated to the Republican Party. Later

in college I could never figure out why I had had these feelings, until
one day I pieced it together. Pop once said he voted Republican. That
comment made a partisan out of me then. (Do political scientists real-
ize how simple the process of political socialization can be?) Why
would an illiterate, unemployed laborer, working on odd jobs vote
Republican? The answer is clear: the boss votes Republican. If you
want a job, vote Republican. The voting process is not secret, he must
have thought, and anyway the company makes jobs, not the unions.
Later he and my mother voted the straight Democratic ticket. In
Pittsburgh the poll watchers permitted old world immigrants, hus-
bands and wives, to go into the voting booth together. I thought that
curious, given the secrecy of the ballot, but I did not account for per-
sons who were illiterate or blind. Just pull the first or second lever, is
all one needed to know, or vote for the picture of John Kennedy.
In a small town during a lull in employment, it was necessary
to buy the boss drinks in order to be recognized and get a job. My
father took the cash that he and my mother had squirreled away and
went to the bar where the boss would go after work. There was a
group surrounding the boss at the bar, drinking Pittsburgh boilermak-
ers, a shot and a beer. My father came home half-looped, his money
gone, and he told my mother what happened as I quietly listened.
When it was his turn to buy drinks, he had to buy for everyone. This
procedure sometimes paid off, as it did in this case, for he was hired.
Men out of work can do disagreeable things to get a job and they’ll
even take dirty jobs. Unlike my father, the boss was a heavy drinker;
he would down Pittsburgh boilermakers so long as they were offered.
Three or four boilermakers and my Dad was finished, his money
gone, while the boss was just getting started. Buying drinks was an
investment in job opportunity.
My home town Ambridge is named after the American Bridge
Company, which was founded in 1905, a subsidiary of U. S. Steel.
Previously the location, about eighteen miles north of Pittsburgh on
the Ohio river, was named Economy, the last home of the Harmony
Society, a group of German pietists. Practicing celibacy, the society
slowly lost membership and was dissolved in 1905; a museum,
including the number of communal buildings, is maintained on the
site.9 The American Bridge Company, whose factory prided itself as
“The largest bridge and structural steel center in the world,” built
many famous bridges and skyscrapers throughout the world, such as
the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, the Verrazzano-Narrows

Bridge in N.Y., the Mackinac Bridge in Michigan, the Empire State
and Chrysler Buildings in New York, the Sears Tower, and Prudential
Tower in Chicago. Other steel mills and factories also moved into
Ambridge; the town grew from 5,205 in 1910 to 20,227 in 1930. The
1940 census listed its population as 18,989 people, of which 73.8
percent were foreign-born, showing how much the factories depended
on foreign labor. In 2007 the population of Ambridge was 7,078, a
substantial drop that shows the extent the town depended on the fac-
tories, which ceased operations (Census 1930: 83; Census 1940: 938;
Amer. Fact Finder, Web. n. pag).
Across the Ohio river in Aliquippa, the Jones and Laughlin
(J&L) steel company was the fourth largest steel producer in the U.
S., and its factory ran five miles along the river. Political Science
students usually study the famous case of National Labor Relations
Board v. Jones and Laughlin Steel Corp. in which the Supreme Court
upheld the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 that authorized
unionism. J&L had fired ten workers at the Aliquippa plant who
wanted to join a labor union. The Court ruled that the company had
engaged in unfair labor practices as defined under the law; the case
reversed the trend whereby the court had previously struck down the
economic legislation of the New Deal, thereby increasing the powers
of Congress concerning the interstate commerce clause of the
Constitution. J&L collapsed with the fall of Big Steel in the 1980s,
and its steel mill was dismantled. The population of Aliquippa was
reduced over the years from a population of 27,023 in 1940 to 10,759
in 2007. In 1940, sixty-six percent were foreign-born (United States
Reports; Census 1940: 83; Amer. Fact Finder Web. n. pag).
In 1927 a bridge was built across the Ohio river linking
Ambridge to Aliquippa and its great Jones and Laughlin steel mill.
The steelworkers at J&L who lived on the Ambridge side of the river
before the bridge was built would walk to the ferry that would take
them across the river and walk to the plant. When the bridge was
built, the ferry closed and the men had to take a bus over the bridge
and across the river to the plant. This involved more expense and
more time, and dialect-speaking Italians soon coined a curse:
Mannagg’ lu pont’. Damn the bridge. I heard this often and I under-
stood the words, but could never figure out why old-world Italians
would damn the bridge; for me, it was convenient way to cross the
Ohio river. But for the Italians, it was a play on Mannagg’ l’America.
I never heard my father express himself that way. He might damn the
bridge, but never America.
I recall the neighborhood sot who when pie-eyed would stag-
ger home after midnight down the alley, waking up all with his loud
rendition of “God Bless America” in a voice that would rival Kate
Smith’s. He only knew the first line of the song: “God bless America”
and listening in my bedroom with the open window on a hot sum-
mer’s night, I always expected the next line: “Land that I love.” But
he would mumble the next line and end in a fit of coughing, only to
start the song again at the top. His devotion to the song was a great as
his devotion to the country, and although he expressed himself only
when he was drunk, he had many occasions to do so.
Once when I was visiting Florence, Italy, I stopped at a pen-
sione, and the proprietor was a friendly man who made conversation
with his guests. Seeing that I had an Italian name, he asked where my
father came from. “From the Abruzzi,” I said. He immediately replied,
“Oh, then he must be a very gentle man.” I was more than curious.
How did this stranger who just met me have an insight into my
father’s character? “Ah…yes…yes,” I mumbled, dumbfounded. I
never thought of my father in that way; certainly “gentle” never
entered my mind. A man whose family nickname (soprannome), as
best as I could decipher it, was Dragon or Dragoon (a cavalryman).
Many thoughts flashed before me of my father’s behavior, both good
and bad. I had recently visited his younger brothers, and they
remarked on how Gaetano controlled them in a gentle way. I weighed
it all in a second and concluded that, yes, it is true, he is a kind or
gentle man.
Much later I learned that it is an Italian saying that people
from the Abruzzi are forte e gentile. Strong and kind or gentle, or solid
as a rock and civilized. The pensione-owner simply repeated a com-
mon saying. Yet, it was true: at bottom, Gaetano was certainly strong
but also a gentle man, although as a boy I never thought of him as
having the quality of gentleness. I was reminded of the many times he
used his strength carrying heavy loads that I could not handle, and
how he and my mother assisted me and my brothers, at some incon-
venience, cost, or even suffering insults to protect or help us.
Gentle and accommodating people were thrown into the caul-
dron of industrial labor in a pre-union period, forced to fight for jobs
to support a family, patching together as best they could in the great
Depression a hodge-podge of odd jobs, junk scavenging, growing
vegetables, public relief, and credit freely given at the local grocery
and doctor’s offices. The credit my mother ran up at the grocery store
amounted to at least one hundred dollars then; in today’s terms, it
would be about $1,124 (Bur. Labor Statistics: 1).10 Can one believe
that Kroger’s or Safeway today––or the rare neighborhood grocery
store––would let you run up a $1,000 tab if you were out of work?
Today, food stamps help poor folks get by, and credit card companies
and charge cards have taken over the credit business. Yet, one won-
ders how to get a charge card or credit card if one is unemployed.
There was also the family doctor, a WASP (we called them
“Americans”) who gave credit, taking two or five dollars on bills run-
ning into the hundreds. What hospital or doctor would do that today?
In many medical offices without an insurance card you cannot get
medical attention. It was the WASP doctor who removed my swollen
appendix when I was about eleven, and he stitched up my arm when
I caught it on a rusty nail sticking out of a joist in the basement. The
doctor carried a wad of cash in his pocket, and one would pay him
directly. He treated African Americans who came from a town ten
miles away, taking all day with a bus and a long wait in the waiting
room. Why would anyone go to all that trouble, I used to think as a
boy, surely there are doctors in their town? I did not understand then,
but I do now––the doctor gave credit.
The good doctor was killed at dead-man’s curve while speed-
ing to the hospital one night. After he died, my parents continued to
pay his widow to cover their debt. My brother or I ran this errand.
She was reluctant to take the five or ten dollars, and she never kept
track or gave a receipt, for she took the money apparently to make us
feel better.
This is why when I was a boy, I always respected the
“Americans,” for as individuals they were kind to us. A doctor who
gave credit, a grocery store that gave credit, a hardware owner who
not only gave credit, but helped fix our house for free, a dentist who
would fix our teeth for doing his lawn work, a next-door widow who
gave me a banana when I ran an errand for her. A banana was a real
treat, never having bananas at home. She kept them in an old-fash-
ioned ice-box, the same as we had. My mother ordered ice by placing
in our window a card that had the pounds of ice printed on its four
edges. The passing ice man in his truck would read the sign and cut
ice from big block, and we kids would pick up and eat the little bits
of ice that fell from his ice pick: a Norman Rockwell picture of life in
small-town America.
It was a shameful thing to be on relief in the Depression. We
had a wagon that my father cobbled together and my job was to take
it downtown with my mother and bring home some supplies, such as
a twenty-five pound-bag of flour and a paper bag of navy beans.
During World War II when jobs were plentiful, my parents sold the
bungalow that we lived in for years, and paid back all the relief
money.
Did my father carry in his mind the myth of America when he
first came? Today the image of America is much more realistic, and is
influenced a great deal by U.S. government actions and foreign poli-
cies, but when my father emigrated, it was more traditional. America
was a land where one could find work, raise a family not subject to
extreme poverty, and have a good life, unlike the prospects in Italy.
The traditional myth of America is a mixture of fact and romance, of
experience and imagination, of reality and fantasy, of harsh living
conditions and hopes, dreams, and wishful thinking. Emigration to
America contributed much to the myth of America, particularly the
good life one can find there, and returnees regretted the day they came
back to Italy. The myth was strongest in southern Italy and Sicily. It
is estimated that one-half of the adult male population of some south-
ern villages emigrated to the U. S. Carlo Levi, an anti-Fascist who
was exiled to southern Italy, wrote that America was a large part of the
peasants’ daily life, where implements, pictures, beliefs, place names,
and mementoes were mingled with local customs and beliefs (Levi
102, 104–05).
It is hard to say whether my father was influenced by the
myth of America when he first came, but in the Great Depression of
the 1930s, and with a growing family, he was constrained to find and
keep a job. After 50 years of working in America, he sometimes took
odd jobs after retirement, taking less pay, sometimes being cheated
out of a standard wage. Yet he did not regret emigrating to America.
This was I think especially true when he considered that his offspring
were in a higher socioeconomic class that he could ever attain, either
in Italy or America.
In addition to his belief that work results in food and shelter
for the family, he had two economic principles: (1) if you can, buy
land; there is only so much of it, and it will always be there; (2) learn
a trade; no matter what happens, they can never take that away from
you. When Gaetano first came to America as a twenty-one year-old,
he had neither land nor a trade. Having been brought up on a share-

cropper’s farm, he was well aware that who owns the land has prop-
erty rights. When I was about five years old, he partly acted on the
land idea: he bought a four-room bungalow, next to WASPS, with a
big yard in back where he made a vegetable garden. This was a house
that required a lot of maintenance, which he did, often calling on his
cousins to help him. It had a front porch where my friends and I
played, and my father built a grape arbor in the back, where we kids
played out of the sun. He also made wine, buying the best grapes from
California.
Over time Gaetano became a semi-skilled worker in the steel
mills, and he soon learned the importance of having a trade, for he
often saw what the millwrights, electricians, masons, and plumbers
were capable of doing. Their knowledge was in their minds and the
skillful use of their hands. Nothing could take that knowledge away,
and if you lost your job, one’s knowledge could help you get another
one. Once when he was moving between jobs, the hiring boss said
that he did not need unskilled workers, and my father replied that he
did not want a common laborer’s job, that he had experience in know-
ing when the raw iron is hot enough to take it out of the furnace and
place it onto rollers to form it into pipes or couplings. Too hot and the
iron won’t form into solid couplings; not hot enough and the rollers
won’t form couplings. This got him the job.
Both principles, ownership of land and having a trade, reflect-
ed a permanent aspect of life, he must have thought. Neither can be
taken away, for one is part of nature, God’s gift to humans, and the
other is in your mind and hands, one that you learned with hard work
and experience. I sometimes reflect on these principles and wonder
why I did not take full advantage of the opportunities that came along
in my life.
When I was a sixteen year-old during World War II, a friend
and I went to a steel mill and got a weekend and summer job. We and
other boys unloaded refractory bricks from box-cars and did other odd
jobs. One weekend we were told to get the air-hammers and cut down
a platform of concrete, which required some strength and skill in
using the air-hammers. I sometimes stuck the drill bit into the con-
crete and could not pull it out; the trick is to hold the drill bit on a slant
and near the edge. Another weekend we were told to remove the col-
lapsed bricks from the inside of an electric furnace; the more we
pulled out, the hotter the furnace became; salt pills did not help at all,
for, as I learned, they were to replace minerals lost through perspira-

tion, not to lower the heat. We were boys, sixteen and seventeen year-
olds, full of energy and playfulness when we were waiting for the
boss to assign us work. Instead of resting, as the ethnic men would do,
some boys played tricks, or tossed a ball around, and the most daring
would do hand-stands in dangerous places. We were terrible workers,
and I often noticed that the jobs we did not finish were done well by
ethnic men during the week when we went to school.
During my stint as a boy steelworker, I realized that men who
had learned a trade by watching skilled men do their job were protec-
tive of their knowledge. The skilled tradesman would sometimes send
an assistant off to do a meaningless errand, and while the assistant
was gone, the secret knowledge was put to use and the work was
done. Later, I found this curious, for as a teacher, I would tell students
everything I knew. Chaucer in the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales,
says of a scholar, “gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.” (Chaucer
10.) This is a mark of a true teacher, but for immigrant men in a tight
market, keeping their special knowledge to themselves was a form of
job protection.
I am fond of saying that there are two kinds of Italians: brick,
stone, concrete Italians and vegetable garden, flower-growing, land-
scaping Italians. In my experience, working-class Italian Americans
combine both types. My father worked with hot metal in the steel mills
but he was a vegetable and concrete man at home, and he did every-
thing to get by. I recall the many times I worked in a vegetable garden
and mixing concrete for a house or sidewalk repair. Once my father
mixed some cement and used it as a cast around my sprained ankle. I
guess it worked, for I did not go to the doctor’s office. He also tried to
wrap up with a cord a cut I suffered on my wrist, but later in the day
he asked my brother to take me to the doctor, where the doctor sewed
up the cut with eight stitches. I suspect that something similar is occur-
ring today for those immigrant families who lack health insurance.
After he retired, my father often went to a public park to pick
young dandelions for a salad. Today, I kill dandelions in my lawn and
resent neighbors who do not do the same, for the seeds are carried by
the wind to my lawn. There is no better way to show—despite my
doctoral degree, college professorship, salary, and life style—that I
am in a higher social class than my father. Of course, he and my
mother would be pleased that my brothers and I had a much better life
in America than we would have had in Italy.
The New Americans

Was my father’s image of America true? Did he after fifty
years of working still retain the Italian myth of America? It is clear
that the New Americans (Latin Americans, Caribbeans, and Asians,
for the most part), do not carry the image of America that the emi-
grants of Italy had in the 1920s. They do not believe that the streets
were lined with gold—and neither did the Italians. But they do come
to the U. S. for the same reasons as my father: to work, for a better
life than one can make in one’s native land, and raise a family in a
land that was more democratic, egalitarian, and had more opportuni-
ties. Some come to escape from despotic, authoritarian or weak gov-
ernments, or to help their families in the native lands with financial
remittances. Some are sojourners, earning enough money to help rela-
tives back home, or to make enough money to go back home. The new
Americans are a mixed lot: high school uncompleted, college and
professional or graduate school educated. Some have escaped revolu-
tions and resolve never to go back. Some bring children with them or
many have children born in the United States.
The combination of freedom, abundance, democracy, and
opportunity that makes achievement possible contributes to the great-
ness and exceptionalism of America. In America, there are many
examples of avarice, greed, corruption, classism and racism. Yet, ava-
rice in the land of plenty compared to avarice in the land of scarcity
is a quite different animal. The on-again, off-again regulations of the
economy and the exposures of corruption by government prosecutors
and media provide some sanctions. The immigrants of yesterday, like
many of the immigrants of today, however, had to endure sweat shops
and deprivation and scorn. The working class looked for work as a
means to feed their families, and they knew that their American-born
or raised children would be much better off than they. It is clear that
the second generation of the working class New Americans are in a
higher socioeconomic class, some perhaps not moving as quickly
along as the Europeans, but they intermarry, acculturate, and assimi-
late into the core American system as did the sons and daughters of
Europeans (Chavez A23).
The primary objection to this last observation is the future of
the Mexicans in the United States, especially the unauthorized immi-
grants. The Census Bureau estimates in 2006 there were 43,168,000
Hispanics in the United States of which 28,323,000 were Mexicans,
constituting over 14 percent (Hispanics) and over 9.5 percent
(Mexicans) of the U. S. population. (Stat. Abstract, Table 39, p.41)

Also it is estimated that there are eleven to twelve million unauthor-
ized residents in the U. S. in 2008, with Mexico the leading source
with nearly six million in 2005 (Homeland Security 1). In his sensa-
tional book, Who Are We?, Samuel P. Huntington, a Harvard
University professor, forecast that the United States was becoming a
bicultural society because of the Hispanicization of Miami and the
southwestern states and California. American core beliefs, which
were founded on Protestant culture is being challenged by the influx
of Mexicans, whose great numbers, including unauthorized immi-
grants, proximity to Mexico, persistence over time, dual loyalties, and
large-scale remittances contribute to the breakdown of what it means
to be American. The book and a preliminary article were widely
reviewed and caused an “explosion” of criticism (2004 A). Critics
charged that Mexicans were like any other hard-working, working
class immigrants, that there was no good evidence that Mexicans
wanted to “reconquest” the former Mexican lands won by the United
States in the Mexican-American war of 1846-1848, and that while
assimilation takes time, the Mexicans are learning English and were
moving at a recognizable pace (Johnson and Hing, passim).
Conclusion
It will be some time before the ideas of Huntington and the
contrary ideas in defense of Mexicans and Latinos, especially the
unauthorized immigrants, will be resolved. Much depends on the
developments in Mexico and Latin America, where a great deal of
emigration to the United States originates. American immigration law,
globalization of the world-wide economy, and the low birth-rate in
Europe contribute to the uncertainty. All this adds more work for soci-
ologists; perhaps they will develop new concepts of assimilation, or
popular writers will coin a new metaphor to replace “the melting pot”
and its substitutes.
Do the New Americans of today find that “anyplace you go is
America”? Yes, for in this land, one can find work, affinity with
similar people, freedom to move to where work is available, and a
culture that promotes charity, citizenship, self-reliance and rewards
hard work. Mexicans are found at work in every state of the union.
Asians seem well on the way towards assimilation. It is a mark of
opportunity that many Asians have opened successful retail shops and
restaurants, moving beyond serving people of their own nationality.
Professional Asians have little trouble finding rewarding work in uni-

versities, medical offices, and administrative positions. While one
must wait for the third or fourth generations of the New Americans to
reveal themselves, the prospect is that America will integrate the new
immigrants and that anyplace they go in this land they will find the
America my father expected his son to encounter.
ENDNOTES
1. This essay is an account of my father, his work and his view of America. He was an
illiterate Italian American who worked as a laborer in the steel mills of Western
Pennsylvania. For much of his life he lived in a small town. Consequently, his life is,
in many respects, different from those immigrants who lived in Little Italies of big
cities. Yet, he had an Italian wife, spoke to his family in his mixture of dialect and
Italian, belonged to an Italian-language church, joined an Italian mutual-benefits
society (so that he could afford to bury any of his children who might die), and did those
things that Italians do, such as eating Italian cuisine, vegetable gardening, making
sausages and wine, keeping flowered the grave of his daughter, and visiting relatives
and friends who also spoke his language. He made his living in a world what is quite
different from that of his youth or Italian enclaves in metropolitan areas.
2. Scholars estimate that about over twenty million persons of Italian ancestry can be
found in the United States, although about one-half have multiple ancestry. For a
discussion of the twenty million number, see Juliani 62, n. 1.
3. Sharecropping (mezzadria) was a traditional feature of farming in Italy, authorized by
law and custom. Typically, the landlord owned the land, farmhouse, working animals,
and received fifty percent of the product of the farm and other farm products. The
landlord was responsible for making improvements to the land and farmhouse, and the
farmer and his family provided the labor and one-half of the working capital. In 1947
after unsuccessful attempts were made by the government, an agreement was reached
to raise the farmer’s share to fifty-three percent, while still retaining property rights of
the landlords. Beginning in the 1950s, the mezzadria declined as sharecropper youth
left the land to seek other opportunities that arose in the postwar period (Belco 397–
405).
4. The number of Italians who returned to Italy permanently can be confusing, for the
statistics do not account for those persons who came back to the United States. The
number of returnees range from 1.5 million to 500,000, which includes my father’s
brother, but not accounting for persons like my father, who came back. A number,
called “birds of passage” (sojourners) made several trips back and forth. For the
reasons why it is difficult to put a number on Italian return migration, see Caroli 549;
for repeated trips, see Magione and Morreale 89.
5. About 90,000 Italian immigrants returned to Italy for service in the Italian armed forces.
An estimated 300,000 Italian Americans fought for the American armed forces, and
about 20,000 of these gave their lives. Belmonte estimates that between 300,000 and
400,000 Italian Americans served in the American armed forces in World War I, and
between 1.5 million and 500,000 served in World War II, a wide range that includes my
older brothers (DeConde 144-45, 156-57; Belmonte 6).
6. In the period shortly after World War II, when Communist and left-wing parties were
threatening to take over the Italian government, about 3,000 to 4,000 Italian Americans,
eighty percent of whom were American-born, happened to be in Italy during the Italian
elections of 1946 and 1948. Under Italian law, which provided for dual citizenship and
required compulsory voting, these American citizens received summons to vote and
were pressured by American officials and private parties to vote. They lost their
American citizenship under the Neutrality Act of 1940. After much debate and editorial
opinion, in 1951 Congress passed a law which authorized these persons to regain their
original American citizenship status without going through the immigration quota
system and the naturalization process. The bill was supported by anti-communist
legislators who inserted a provision that required these persons to take an oath that they
did nothing to support the cause of communism. As an example of strong public
support for the legislation, the New York Times editorially pleaded for “mercy for those
who helped democracy win in Italy.” Currently, the exclusive concept of American
citizenship is not enforced, for the U. S. has recognized dual citizenship. (Judiciary 4;
New York Times, 3 Feb. 1950: 9).
7. The Mussolini government forced Italian American men in Italy to enter the Italian
armed forces and arrested naturalized American citizens for evading the military service
under the Italian concept “inalienable allegiance.” Although my father had already
served in the Italian army, he might have heard about the Italian law, but I think that he
especially did not want to violate his vow never to return to Italy. In 1970, when he was
seventy-eight years old, he (and other Italian veterans of World War I) received a
certificate (and a very small pension) from the Italian government appointing him a
cavaliere in an association of veterans of World War I. This was authorized by an Italian
law passed in 1968, fifty years after the close of World War I. Currently, although
citizenship law is complex, Italian law, under the principle of juris sanguinis, one can
get Italian citizenship, with proper documentation, through the paternal line or through
the maternal line with restrictions. Italian citizenship can be specifically renounced. In
2001 an Italian law made military service completely voluntary. According to Italian
law, an American citizen, who is also an Italian citizen can vote in Italian elections. In
1986 the United States recognized dual citizenship. (DeConde 193–94; Italian Dual
Citizenship, n. pag.).
8. This assertion may be questioned by cultural pluralists and multiculturalists. In the
1960s there was a burst of ethnic pride among European Americans, following the
success of African Americans in the civil rights movement, and the recognition and
analysis of this pride among scholars. Sociologists, showing the rate of intermarriage
and the identity of Italian Americans, argued that they can be lumped into a category of
European Americans. For the books that analyzed the trend of ethnic pride, see Nelli,
(1983: 216); for the rate of intermarriage and the identity of Italian Americans, see Alba
13–14, 290–319.
9. The Harmony Society split from the German Lutheran Church in 1805, and under
George Rapp (1757–1847) settled in the United States. It first founded Harmony, in
Western Pennsylvania, then moved to New Harmony, Indiana, (where, lacking markets
for its products, it sold its land and buildings to Robert Owen, the British utopian), and
then moved back in 1824 to Western Pennsylvania, where it founded the commune of
Economy. The frugal and industrious community became very profitable, but its
theology regarding the second coming of Jesus Christ in their lifetime, the consequent
practice of celibacy, a failure to make converts, and another leader who claimed to be
“the anointed one” and took his followers elsewhere––all these contributed to a decline
in the community. By 1868 only 140 members remained. The American Bridge
Company bought 2,500 acres from the society and established a town named Ambridge.
Later, the real property of the society reverted to the state of Pennsylvania, which
created the village of Old Economy located within Ambridge (Arndt 73–84).
10. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, using its consumer price index, calculates that $100 in
1944 would be $1,234.27 in mid 2008. I recall the day my mother paid off the grocery
bill in 1944; she was very pleased. My father earned about $1.50 an hour in 1943. Web.
8 Aug. 2008. data.bls.gov.cgi.cpicalc.
WORKS CITED
Alba, Richard D., Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America. New Haven, CT: Yale
UP, 1990.
Arndt, Karl J. R., “George Rapp’s Harmony Society.” America’s Communal Utopias. Ed.
Donald E. Pitzer. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.
Belco, Victoria. “Sharecroppers, War, and Social Change in Central Italy,” Journal of Modern
Italian Studies, 12.4 (December 2007) 397–405.
Belmonte, Peter L., Italian Americans in World War II. Chicago: Arcadia, 2001.
Chaucer. Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales: Nine Tales and the General Prologue. Eds. V. A.
Kolve and Glending Olsen. New York: Norton, 1989.
Caroli, Betty Boyd. “Return Migration.” The Italian American Experience: An Encyclopedia.
Eds. Salvatore J. LaGumina, Frank J. Cavaioli, Salvatore Primeggia, and Joseph A.
Varacalli. New York: Garland, 2000.
Chavez, Linda. “The Great Assimilation Machine.” Wall Street Journal (Eastern Edition): 5
June 2008: A23. Web. 19 June 2008. http://proquest.umi.com/libproxy.library.
DeConde, Alexander. Half Bitter, Half Sweet: An Excursion into Italian-American History. New
York: Scribner, 1971.
D’Epiro, Peter, and Mary Desmond Pinkowisch. Sprezzatura: 50 Ways Italian Genius Shaped
the World. New York: Anchor, 2001.
Johnson, Kevin R., and Bill Ong Hing, “National Identity in a Multicultural Nation: The
Challenge of Immigration Law and Immigrants.” Michigan Law Review, 103, 6 (May
2005). 1347-1390.
Juliani, Richard N., “The Position of Italian Americans in Contemporary Society,” The Melting
Pot and Beyond: Italian Americans in the Year 2000, eds. Jerome Krase and William
Egleman (New York: American Italian Historical Association, 1987): 62, n. 1.
Italian Dual Citizenship. Web 5 Sept. 2008. http://www.italiandualcitizenship.com.
Lopreato, Joseph, Italian-Americans. New York: Random, 1970.
—. Peasants No More: Social Class and Social Change in an Underdeveloped Society. San
Francisco: Chandler, 1967.
Mangione, Jerre, and Ben Morreale. La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American
Experience. New York: Harper, 1993.
Nelli, Humbert S., From Immigrants to Ethnics: The Italian Americans. New York, Oxford UP, 1983.
—. “Italians.” Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. Eds. Stephan Thernstrom,
Ann Orlov, and Oscar Handlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980.
New York Times, 3 Feb. 1950.
Huntington, Samuel P., “The Hispanic Challenge.” Foreign Policy, No. 141 (March/April
2004): 30–4
—. Who Are We? The Challenges to American National Identity. New York: Simon, 2004.
U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Consumer Price Index.” Web. 8 Aug 2008. http://data.bls.
gov.cgi.cpcalc: 1.
U. S. Census Bureau. 1930 Census, I, Sec. 9. Population of Pennsylvania, Table 4: 938;
Population of Counties by Minor Civil Divisions, 1930, 1920, 1910, Table 5: 938. Web 13
Sept. 2008. http://www2.census.gov.ptod2/decennial/documents.
—. 1940 Census. II, Part 6, Table 28: 83. Web 13 Sept. 2008. http://www.census.gov/prod/
www.abs/decennial/1940/htm.
—. The 2008 Statistical Abstract, American Community Survey, Population by Selected
Ancestry Group: 2005, Table 51: 48. Also on Web. http://purl.access.gpo.gov/GPO/
LPS52878.
U. S. Department of Homeland Security, Office of Immigration Statistics, Population Estimates.
Michael Hoefer, Nancy Rytina, and Christopher Campbell, “Estimates of the Unauthorized
Immigration Population Residing in the United States: January 2005: 1-7. (August 2006). Web
19 July 2008. http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/statistics/publications/ill_pe_2006.pdf.
U. S. Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Restoration of Citizenship (Italian Elections), Report
351, 82d Cong, 1st Sess., 1951: 4.
The Day Frank Sinatra Soothed the Savage Beasts 105
Editor’s Note: This is another essay published under the guest editor-
ship of Christine Palamidessi Moore who presented “Songs of
Affection” in the journal’s last issue.
The Day Frank Sinatra Soothed the

Savage Beasts
KENNETH DiMAGGIO
Father Paul was our priest, but Sebby was our bartender.
When you’re eighteen on academic probation at the local community
college, and just can’t get laid, (no matter how hard you pray) then
you need a bartender.
Fortunately for us, it was 1976. Everybody had an awful hair-
style (which we would not discover until much later). But it was legal
to drink at eighteen in a burned out engine block of a town in
Connecticut.
At eighteen, we still went to St. Ann’s…well, Christmas,
Easter…but on slow Sunday afternoons, we went to The Roma Bar &
Restaurant, permitted by Sebby Carpino, who took a shine to my two
friends and me.
“You know those monkeys? See no evil, hear no evil? Well,
for Vito, Johnny, and Nick, it’s common sense that you don’t got.”
Here we go; every time we sat at the mahogany counter,
ordered Heineken, and got served Schaffer, Sebby had to give us the
spiel.
“Eighteen, and you get arrested for shooting out street lights!
You can’t join the police force and get paid for shooting guns?”
Vito Antonucci just liked weapons. Sling shots, brass knuck-
les, bowie knives, nunchucks…not that he ever used them on any
living thing.
“I’m a collector,” Vito shyly said. “Besides, I get faint at the
sight of blood!”
“Hey Sebby, when ya gonna serve Heineken? This is the
modern age. People drink foreign beers. For that matter, guys don’t
wear pants with suspenders and ties about as short and fat as a slice a
pizza!”
Sebby shot a sidelong glance to Johnny. “A man with a

future! Johnny Benedetti! Instead of apprenticing with his Uncle in
the plumbing business, his life’s going into the toilet.”
“Just like you never heard a Heineken, you never heard a
word like entrepreneur!” Johnny said.
“Yeah. Entrepreneur. Selling firecrackers to twelve-year-
olds,” Sebby shrugged. “And here we have the scholar.”
Which must be me, Nick DiFazio.
“Sebby, the Dean personally spoke with me the other day,” I
boasted.
“Yeah, to personally tell him he was on probation!” Johnny
said.
“Like I was saying,” Sebby said, “see no intelligence, speak
no intelligence…but sooner or later guys…”
“Sebby, spare us the stuff that Father Paul used to tell us.
We’ll drink the Schaffer.”
“You’ll drink nothing until you put a quarter in the jukebox.”
Sebby wiped the counter before he smacked a quarter down on the bar
and slid it over to me.
“You’re not going to serve us…until we play you a song?” I
said.
“You’re catching on,” Sebby said.
“Oh-kayyy…” I said. “Any particular request?”
“Led Zeppelin!” Vito snickered.
“Naw, not for a guy who never heard a Heineken! Some
Country and Western shit!” Johnny said.
But when I got to the jukebox I saw that all the songs had
been changed to Frank Sinatra.
“There must be at least thirty of his songs in here. And all of
them from Sinatra.”
“Enough to teach you guys a little class, instead of always
acting like a bunch of clowns.”
“Hey bartender! I read books; not Mickey Spillane, but
books! Nietzsche, Camus, Sart—” I started to say.
“I bet you ain’t even danced with a girl!” Sebby said. “None
of you! But maybe you will…once you learn about those things…and
the best person to learn those things from…well, you going to play a
song kid? Or are you still going to stay a kid?”
This was crazy. Some old singer was going to get me laid;
The Day Frank Sinatra Soothed the Savage Beasts 107
well, teach me to dance, maybe just sing some hokey song. And the
brass intro to “Come Fly with Me” was hokey enough for me, Vito,
and Johnny to laugh. But after a few seconds…when Frank started
singing about drinking exotic booze in some bar in Bombay or…
wherever it was, it wasn’t The Roma Bar & Restaurant in New
Britain, Connecticut. And Frank wasn’t drinking by himself, but with
some woman whom he was holding—excuse me, gliding with. Best
of all was the ending, where Frank says as if he is winking, “And
don’t tell your Mama.”
After about thirty seconds, it was clear that we weren’t going
to say anything. Sebby finally asked; like a first time teacher, who all
along was afraid of his students, despite the tough act he used to teach
his lesson, “Well…?”
“You got another quarter, Sebby?” Johnny asked.
And for the rest of that summer, it would be a lot of quarters;
it would be songs like “That’s Life,” “Luck Be a Lady,” “A Summer
Wind.” Eventually we began to request more selections from Sebby,
and he would try to oblige, not being able to get all of Frank’s music
into that box. Didn’t matter, what he couldn’t get, we got on our own,
first in LP, then 8-track, then cassette, and just when I thought CD was
the last form you could hear the Chairman of the Board on, there’s—
why mention it. That technology will be old by the time you finish
reading this story. But Frank Sinatra’s music? When I get a chance, I
play some for my freshman college students today, some of whom
groan, smirk, or snicker the same way me and two other friends once
did before our bartender. Because when you’re eighteen on academic
probation at the local community college, and just can’t get laid, (no
matter how hard you pray) then you need a man like Sebby Carpino.
And music from Frank Sinatra.
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Sacco, Vanzetti, Parmenter, and Berardelli:

90 years of Confusion, Clarity, and Innocent Victims.
A Review Essay.
Exhibition: Sacco & Vanzetti: A Retrospective, In Remembrance of
Parmenter and Berardelli. Braintree Town Hall, Braintree, Massachusetts,
April, 2010.
On April 15, 1920, at about 3 pm in South Braintree, Massachusetts, a

robbery and double-homicide occurred at the corner of Railroad and French
streets outside the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company. Alessandro Berardelli,
guard to the paymaster, died that day, together with paymaster Frederick
Parmenter. The accused gunmen, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti,
were tried for capital murder, sentenced to death, and after denial of appeal,
were executed in 1927. Their trial became an international cause célèbre,
which forced a profound reconsideration of judicial fairness in American law
as well as the rights of immigrants with unpopular political beliefs. On the
ninetieth anniversary of the crime, the town of Braintree sponsored a week’s
worth of events coordinated by the town’s Mayor, Joseph C. Sullivan, and a
large committee. The purpose of the retrospective was two-fold: it served to
remind citizens that innocent people died on April 15, 1920 in South
Braintree; and more broadly, it sought to acknowledge the contributions of
Italians and Italian Americans in the town of Braintree and the nation at
large.
Braintree’s history is rich and deep, dating back to the earliest days of the
Pilgrims, but the events of 1920 altered how people thought about the town,
forcing residents to reconcile two incongruous narratives. Located ten miles
to the south of Boston, the town had long emphasized its celebratory, official
history—the birthplace of two U.S. presidents, John Adams and John Quincy
Adams, and Brigadier General Sylvanias Thayer, the “Father of West Point”
(earned for the modernizing reforms he made to the curriculum at the mili-
tary academy in the early nineteenth century). The Sacco and Vanzetti case
exposed a darker, violent side of the town’s history. The remaining doubts
about the guilt or innocence of the men, the brutally ugly words spoken by
Judge Webster Thayer (a descendent of the general) at Dedham County
Court during the trial, and the international outrage that followed the execu-
tion challenged the town’s consensus driven, official history. Now, 90 years
after the crime, the town was confronting its past—not by re-trying the
case—but by simply acknowledging the violent deaths of the forgotten
Parmenter and Berardelli. Additionally, the town, for the first time, officially
marked the scene of the crime with a memorial plaque.
The Sacco and Vanzetti case cannot be understood without considering
the historic epoch. The years after World War I were marked by waves of
isolationist and anti-immigrant sentiment. In response to European instabil-
ity, the U.S. Congress, reflecting the national mood, passed the Emergency
Immigration Act of 1921 which erected an immigration quota system. Three
Reviews 109
years later, The Immigration Act of 1924 (known also as The National
Origins Act) became law, setting a 2% quota on admission to the U.S. of
foreigners (calculated at 2% of the number of people from a given country
already residing in the U.S. based on the 1890 census). The clear intent of
returning to the 1890 census (to a period prior to the dramatic increase in
migration from, say, Russia and Italy) was severely to limit the number of
people who could come to the U.S. from those and other places in Europe.
Russia was looked at suspiciously after dropping out of the Entente in 1917;
the Bolshevik Revolution uprooted Russian society after that date. Italy—
despite joining the Entente in 1915 against Germany, Austria, and the
Ottoman Empire—was viewed derisively in America as an unstable or
worse. Americans perceived recently arriving Italians in U.S. cities as poor,
uneducated, and clannish. Adding to American prejudice was the Southern
Italian Catholic religious practices and their “un-modern” Italian dialects.
In the midst of the hostile, anti-Italian immigrant environment in places
with large concentrations of Italian immigrants (Baltimore, New York,
Boston), Sacco and Vanzetti’s case was further complicated by their political
beliefs. They were known “anarchists,” a word that might be synonymous
with today’s “terrorist.” Although they were never involved in or accused of
any violent acts prior to their arrest in 1920, Sacco and Vanzetti were deeply
committed to the anarchist cause. Pamphlets recovered at Sacco’s home,
including Luigi Fabbri’s, L’Ideale Anarchico, were presented at trial to show
that Sacco read anarchist literature. Many anarchists believed that private
property was theft, and in the most extreme cases, they called for the aboli-
tion of the state and all private property. A “deranged” anarchist killed
President McKinley in 1901 and anarchists were responsible for the assas-
sinations of President Carnot of France (1894), Empress Elisabeth of Austria
who was stabbed in the heart (1898), and King Umberto I in Italy (1900). In
America, where private property was held as a sacred right and stable demo-
cratic government was seen as the best way to protect people and property,
anarchism was completely anathema to the national ethos and discourse.
Though neither physical evidence nor eyewitnesses situated Sacco or
Vanzetti at the site of the crime scene, the two men were arrested and
accused. Under interrogation, they lied to state officials to hide their unpop-
ular political views. State prosecutors, therefore, established a “conscious-
ness of guilt” theory as the main source of “evidence” against them. Their
trial took place from May 31 to July 14, 1921 at Dedham County Courthouse.
Judge Thayer, who presided at the trial, admitted that “the evidence that
convicted these defendants was circumstantial and was evidence that is
known in the law as ’consciousness of guilt.’” He was heard commenting,
outside the courtroom after the trial, that “a bunch of parlor radicals are try-
ing to get those Italian bastards off. I’ll see them hanged and I’d like to hang
a few dozen of the radicals.”1 All attempts to appeal the death sentence failed,
and on August 23, 1927, the two men were electrocuted, together with
Celestino Madeiros who was convicted in a 1924 murder of a bank cashier.
Madeiros had confessed (in November, 1925) to participating in the 1920
South Braintree crime with “four other Italians,” and his signed confession
stated that “Sacco and Vanzetti had nothing to do with this job.”2 The State
viewed Madeiros’s confession as political posturing and denied the new trial
sought by Sacco and Vanzetti’s defense attorneys. Sacco’s last words were
recorded as “Viva l’anarchia. Farewell to my wife, my children and all my
friends. Good evening, gentlemen.” Vanzetti’s final statement was more suc-
cinct: “I am innocent.”
Frederick Parmenter III, of Lakeville, Mass., the grandson of Paymaster
Frederick Parmenter, attended the South Braintree retrospective and com-
mented on the difficulties that the events of April 15, 1920 brought to his
family. “My parents wouldn’t talk about it,” said Parmenter. His son Brian
Parmenter concurred: “The family really kept it quiet on that part of the fam-
ily history.” The great-granddaughter of Alessandro Berardelli said she knew
nothing about her family’s connection to the famous case until her 13 year-
old daughter, Alessandra, “began researching the family history for a school
project.”3 The overwhelming international publicity of the case, and the
focus on the larger legal issues, created a plethora of commentary by the
leading legal minds of the time, including Harvard University Law Professor
Felix Frankfurter who later sat on the United States Supreme Court. The
April 15, 1920 homicide victims, their families and their stories were pushed
to the background in the intense scrutiny of the innocence or guilt of Sacco
and Vanzetti.
Like Sacco and Vanzetti, Alessandro Berardelli was a first-generation
immigrant. Born in Cascalenda, Italy on November 1, 1876 to Michelangelo
Rinaldi from Sant’Elia a Pianisi (Molise) and Maria Donata, he arrived at
Ellis Island in 1890 aboard the S.S. Alesia. He became a naturalized U.S.
citizen in 1904 and was married in 1912. He left a wife, Sarah, a son,
Michael (b. 1913) and a daughter Ida (b. 1915). Berardelli died from four
bullet wounds, performing his assigned task, guarding the paymaster who
also perished alongside him. Were it not for the publicity generated by the
case, Berardelli might have been forgotten by history as one more immigrant
homicide victim.
In 1977, fifty years after the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti,
Massachusetts Governor Michael S. Dukakis issued a proclamation, in
English and Italian, which fell short of pardoning Sacco and Venzetti, but
questioned the criminal proceedings against them. The Governor wrote how
“the trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti should serve to remind all
civilized people of the constant need to guard against our susceptibility to
prejudice, our intolerance of unorthodox ideas and our failure to defend the
rights of persons who are looked upon as strangers in our midst.”4
Town officials in Braintree, in coordinating a weeklong Retrospective,
understood—90 years after the event—that the names Parmenter and
Berardelli could only be understood by juxtaposing them with the names
Sacco and Vanzetti. The focus on two innocent victims in 2010 in Braintree,
MA forced a re-evaluation of a murky, troublesome homicide, arrest, and
trial. A town’s historic consciousness is critical to its future and marking the
site of the infamous robbery is culturally responsible and socially significant.
Reviews 111
The larger lessons for the town and for those who study the details of this
case center on the historic struggles faced by immigrants in this nation of
immigrants, a topic as timeless today as was 90 years ago.
Beltrado Brini, a witness for Sacco and Vanzetti at the trial, commented
on the reaction of the Italian immigrant communit: “We felt that Italians
didn’t amount to anything, that anything we said wasn’t valued . . . we were
without power. No one cared to listen to us. It didn’t make any difference
even if we were innocent: we didn’t amount that much to society.”5 These
words remind us that forgetting the tragic events represents a path of least
resistance for a people, a town, or a society, while remembering forces re-
evaluation and helps in the understanding of intolerance, prejudice, fear, and
anger as historic continuities.
MICHAEL LaROSA
1
Quotation from Judge Thayer on display at the Braintree Retrospective, attributed to
Massachusetts-born humorist and drama editor at Life Magazine (1920-1929) Robert
Benchley. See also, Eliot Lee Grossman, “From Sacco and Vanzetti to Mumia Abu-Jamal:
Is Innocence Irrelevant?” in Jerome H. Delamater and Mary Anne Trasciatti, eds.
Representing Sacco and Vanzetti (New York: Palgrave, 2005), p. 148.
2
Bruce Watson, Sacco & Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, & the Judgment of Mankind (New
York: Viking, 2007), 258-59.
3
Fred Houston, “Sacco-Vanzetti Victims Honored,” Patriot Ledger (Quincy, MA), 16 April
2010:.10.
4
“Governor’s Proclamation,” 23 August 1977,t Boston, Massachusetts.
5
Text from Exhibition, “Sacco and Vanzetti: A Retrospective, In Remembrance of Parmenter
and Berardelli,” Braintree Town Hall, Massachusetts, April, 2010.
Point Omega by Don DeLillo. New York: Scribner, 2010. 117pp.
From beginning to end, temporality is the main concern in Point Omega.

Or rather, temporalities, with their varying pace and scale—biographical,
historical, cosmological—and their different reverberations in human per-
ception: especially in that enhanced form, artistic representation.
The opening section, “Anonymity,” one of a pair of bookends that frame
the story, ushers in the theme with hypnotic clarity. Set in a gallery of the
New York MOMA, the scene presents the thoughts of a nameless man stand-
ing against a wall hour after hour, obsessively watching Douglas Gordon’s
24-Hour Psycho, a video installation that plays Hitchcock’s Psycho at two
frames per second, extending its running time to twenty-four hours. This
section could be seen as a long ekphrasis of sorts, rendering the performa-
tive, interactive quality of contemporary art as perceptive experience rather
than self-contained artifact: a mise-en-scène of postmodern representation,
DeLillo’s equivalent of Michel Foucault’s famous reading of Las Meninas at
the beginning of The Order of Things. As the man watches the movie “imper-
ceptibly” unfold at its slowed-down pace, we watch him form thoughts about
space and time, sound and vision, sensation and representation, science and
philosophy, identity and existence. Altered temporality de-realizes the world,
or rather, it changes our very notion of what is “real,” reducing the outer
world to a mere “intimation of life-beyond, world-beyond, … the thing that’s
not the movies,” and offering an object lesson in defamiliarization as a
device for renewing perception: “The less there was to see, the harder he
looked, the more he saw. This was the point. To see what’s here, finally to
look and to know you’re looking, to feel time passing, to be alive to what is
happening in the slowest registers of motion.”
While reading this scene, one is as yet unaware of the tenuous and hypo-
thetical, but material and possibly even sinister links that connect its anony-
mous protagonist to the characters in the story. What one can and does sur-
mise, as an educated DeLillo reader, is the way its abstract, surreal quality
will reverberate on what follows, suffusing the rest of the novel in the same
trademark combination of self-aware “postmodernism for dummies,” evoca-
tive indefiniteness, and haunting linguistic precision. The thin but closely-
knit story unfolding in the four chapters that make up the novel’s central
section has the same quality of unearthly abstraction, the same slowed-down
pace, and is equally interspersed with its characters’ memorable, if occasion-
ally overblown, utterances. Its setting, too, is as bare, self-contained, and
remote from the “world-beyond” as a museum gallery, however superficially
different: the California desert, “a spiritual retreat” where a few days’ stay
can extend indefinitely, as urban chronological time—“the minute-to-minute
reckoning, … dimwit time, inferior time”—evaporates into geologic time,
the cosmic, dehumanized temporal dimension of pure, immobile space: “Day
turns to night eventually but it’s a matter of light and darkness, it’s not time
passing, mortal time. There’s none of the usual terror.”
The line is spoken by Richard Elster, a seventy-three-year-old academic
and former Pentagon adviser, called upon “to conceptualize” the Iraq war,
which he unsuccessfully attempted to aestheticize into “a haiku war,” “a war
in three lines … a set of ideas linked to transient things.” (The Modernist
flavor of this notion is reinforced by overt or covert references to Zukofsky,
Pound, Rilke, Stevens, Eliot). Jim Finley, an obscure, thirty-something film-
maker, has accepted Elster’s invitation to his isolated desert property in the
hope of convincing him to collaborate on a film project: a documentary con-
ceived as an extended monologue-confession, featuring Elster alone, “just a
man and a wall,” shot in one continuous take, after the manner of Aleksandr
Sokurov’s Russian Ark. The implications of the Sokurov allusion in DeLillo
go beyond cinematic technique to suggest, once again, an engagement with
time, be it historical (Sokurov’s series on twentieth-century rulers, a possible
intertext for Finley’s project, along with Errol Morris’s film on Robert
McNamara) or transhistorical, as in Russian Ark, with its ghostly time-travel
through Russian history effected in a dreamlike wandering within the
Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg. Stylistically, as well, Sokurov’s unset-
tling elusiveness, the translucent mysteriousness of his artistic world could
provide a visual parallel to the effect DeLillo pursues.
Reviews 113
The novel’s elusiveness and mysteriousness reach their climax with the
sudden vanishing of Elster’s abstracted,“sylphlike” daughter, Jessie, who
had joined the two men in the desert, possibly to escape the potential threat
of an anonymous suitor and telephone caller. Her disappearance, in some
ways a disembodied doubling of Janet Leigh’s disappearance in Psycho,
marks a decisive moment in an ongoing process of decreation: Jessie seem-
ingly evaporates (“her element was air”), Elster falls apart at the loss of his
daughter, Finley’s project gets undone. The destruction that Elster aestheti-
cized as transience when applied to the distant Iraq desert (“Things in war
are transient. See what’s there and then be prepared to watch it disappear”)
strikes back in the California desert, bringing home to Elster the full impact
of his abstractions. Jessie’s evanescence thus ironically fulfills Elster’s pro-
phetic stance, his version of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s theory, pushing the
transcendent moment of supreme consciousness and complexity into its
reverse, the final entropy of the human as species: “the omega point. A leap
out of our biology. … Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is
exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to
be stones in the field.”
As it folds back upon itself after the characters have exited the stage, lead-
ing once more into the MOMA gallery with its solitary watcher, Point
Omega equally pursues its own plan for decreation: its spare prose and rar-
efied atmosphere have created a dilated temporal dimension, heading
towards another form of novelistic dematerialization.
DONATELLA IZZO
Università di Napoli “L’Orientale”
A History of the Italians in the State of Maine by Vincent A. Lapomarda.

Lewiston: Edward Mellen Press, 2010. 232pp.
What wonderful tales can be told of Etna, Naples, Palermo, Rome,

Sorrento, and Verona—all towns in Maine. This book richly details the
Italian presence in the state, historically, from Verrazzano’s meeting with
Chief Marchin on a peninsula near present-day Portland in 1524, to recent
elections and cultural events; geographically, from York to Machias on the
coast, and from Mont Desert Island to Aroostook County in the far north. The
northern third of the state remains one of the least known parts of America,
less traversed than the deserts of Nevada and the mountains of Wyoming,
and therefore Lapomarda’s pages are all the more fascinating.
Based on a large number of local historical studies and personal inter-
views, Lapomarda explores the gradual penetration of Italian immigrants
into the state in the late nineteenth century, for example, into the mill towns
of Rumford and Millinocket, or deep into the interior through the construc-
tion of the inland railroads. The methods range from the statistical (20
Italians in Maine in 1820; 5000 in 1910) to the colorfully anecdotal: the
shoemaker Peo Massaroni was able to determine who were the hooded
Klansmen from the shoes that he himself had mended. The chapters cover
society, business, law and politics, religion, culture, doctors and the medical
community, and sports. The presentation is objective and balanced, e.g., the
portrait of discrimination, the ill-conceived urban renewal project which tore
the Little Italy out of Portland (and much history besides—it happened in
Chicago and Boston, with the same tragic results), the mafia, the floral indus-
try, fishing. Some topics receive lengthy treatment. The development of the
fruit and produce industry is closely examined, sufficient to show that the
materials could make a book in itself. Again, the details are compelling: the
fruit crates most favored by southern Italy’s distributors were imported from
Maine: 90% of the boxes made of maple and birch in Bangor were shipped
to Italy where they were filled with oranges and lemons and shipped back to
the US and elsewhere.
What state could not use such a volume as Lapomarda’s? What state does
not yet have its historian of the Italian American presence? All too many.
And much of our knowledge, which must be collected orally, is not likely to
survive another generation.
JOHN PAUL RUSSO

University of Miami, Florida
The Imagined Immigrant: Images of Italian Emigration to the United

States between 1890 and 1924 by Ilaria Serra. Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, Madison-Teaneck (NJ), 2009. 313pp.
The Italian “immaginario” as well as its Latin root “imago” have a double
meaning: a collection of images, but also a complex of representations,
almost bordering on the meaning of “immaginazione.” While framing her
original research, Ilaria Serra underlines how the English words “imagery”
and “imaginary” could convey the meanings of their corresponding Italian
words linking mental categories and reality. Because of the duplicity of
immaginario, the book’s task consists in analyzing the different gazes of the
examined subjects. Italianicity obviously does not coincide with Italy, but is
rather the condensed essence of everything that could be Italian, from pasta
to paintings. Italian immigrants had to build their individuality fighting
against a spectrum of stereotypes. In Frank Pisani’s words, the typical opin-
ion about Italians could be summarized by the sentence: “they were of the
earth not of the clouds” (22)—meaning that Italians have been perceived as
closer to the world of nature and instinct. This primary image, borne through
the harsh conditions Italians had to accept in their massive immigration, has
been over time hypostatized in representations.
Within this overarching perspective Serra divides her book into two parts.
In “The Promised Land: the Italian Immigrant from the American Point of
View” she describes how representations were formulated and diffused
through mass-media. Her research in the San Francisco Chronicle, the New
York Time, and other newspapers impress by their creative use of sources in
Reviews 115
assessing what problems immigration was raising in American society. In

order to be accepted as American citizens, the immigrants had to renounce
much, though certainly not all, of their original cultural affiliation, which
was often treated as “naturally” deviant or even criminal. Often enough,
Hollywood exploited this image.
The second part of the book, “The Immigrant Tale: Immigrant Self Images
and the Images of America,” focuses on the way immigrants express their
condition and life-style in letters, interviews, etc. Their reaction to assimila-
tion swings between self-reclusion in a preserving ethnic enclave and intense
idealization of the new country as the land of the yet to be realized dreams.
In her interviews Serra underlines the individual nature of the immigrants’
contributions to their host society, either in the form of creativity or resis-
tance. She emphasizes the ways in which collective memory and history are
based fundamentally on fragments of individual memories. Researchers con-
densing these memories into general statements must necessarily respect
their rich multiplicity more than their uniformity.
FABIO BENINCASA
Duquesne University/Rome Campus
Old World Daughter, New World Mother. An Education in Love and

Freedom by Maria Laurino. New York: Norton, 2009. 223pp.
Half journal, half socio-political tract, this book is not easy to label. In
the first part, “Daughters,” Laurino gives an account of her struggle to find
her identity and discusses what it meant to grow up between Italian and
American culture. As a teenager, she starts to reject the idea of motherhood
as self-sacrifice, which she sees embodied in her traditional Italian mamma.
Leaving home, she embraces feminism and moves on to become an indepen-
dent, fulfilled woman. In the second part, “Mothers,” Laurino becomes a
New World mother and realizes how deep her connection to those long for-
gotten “Old World” values is, exploring emotional and socio-political impli-
cations. Having recognized that motherhood is an overwhelming experience,
involving sacrifice, and arousing primal instincts of protection, Laurino tries
to reconcile this awareness with feminist views. On a broader level, she
problematizes the concept of “dependency,” which holds exclusively nega-
tive implications in American society, and searches for ways of reconciling
freedom with the full experience of love.
Laurino’s approach is both personal and general, where the emotional
quality of her writing is always counterbalanced by a sharp focus on the
issues at stake. Drawing on her experience, she offers an in-depth, penetrat-
ing analysis of American, post-feminist society, calling for a more compre-
hensive notion of feminism, which includes a woman’s right to motherhood.
The book’s only flaw lies in the sometimes stereotypical presentation of
Italian culture and tradition. Statements like “in Italian families, firstborn
sons and daughters are supposed to be named after their grandparents” (18)
are scattered throughout, giving the impression of a superficial, almost tour-

isty knowledge of Italy. However, what may look like an “exoticizing” strat-
egy is not merely used as a narrative device; rather, the construction of Italy
as the Other allows Laurino to criticize certain aspects American society,
calling for a critical re-appropriation of some of the forgotten values embod-
ied by the Old World.
Old World Daughter, New World Mother is an accessible book which
engages readers in an absorbing journey into the experiences of women in
modern Western societies. As an Italian-American woman, Laurino is able to
move in and out of different social contexts, thus turning her condition of
marginality into a privileged point of view on fundamental issues of modern
America. In quoting Kittay’s phrase that “Everyone is some mother’s child,”
the author argues for the universality of motherhood as a central aspect in
everyone’s life, and shows its connection with the social and political ques-
tions of our day.
CATERINA SINIBALDI
University of Warwick
Peace Tower by F.G. Paci. Toronto: Guernica, 2009. 193pp.
“When I reached my thirtieth year, I found it wasn’t good for me to be

alone anymore.” So begins F.G. Paci’s twelfth novel and seventh installment
in the semi-autobiographical fleuve begun in 1991 with Black Blood. Mark
Trecroci, an aspiring writer who, as a child, emigrated with his family from
Italy to Ottawa, falls in love with Jennifer Drury, a hospital nurse, and
decides to marry her. Their love is genuine, but in their first year of marriage
the couple must adjust to the painful discovery that, though linked by the
sacred marriage bond, they remain “still separate people” (64). Paci describes
the story as a brutally honest examination of the “harsh reality behind the
love they have for each other” (qtd. Elaine Della-Mattia, The Sault Star).
Such difficulty takes on overtones of a personal struggle with the English
language in Paci’s writing. Born in Pesaro in 1948, Paci—much like Mark
Trecroci, “raised on a language that was no larger than the walls of [his]
father’s house” (68)—emigrated to Canada with his parents in 1952 and
grew up in the immigrant West End of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. He attend-
ed the University of Toronto and Carlton and in 1978 he published his first
novel, The Italians, one of the first books to deal with the Italian Canadian
immigrant experience. The novel became a bestseller, and following Black
Madonna (1982) Paci has become one of the most prominent Italian-
Canadian novelists writing in English.
Peace Tower is an insightful journey into the mind of a young man cop-
ing with his Italian heritage as well as with his scholarly aspirations. Mark’s
voice is heard throughout the book as he explores philosophers such as
Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Husserl, trying to fit their thoughts into his
daily life where he confronts the “Dictatorship of Everyday Averageness and
Reviews 117
Dullness” (108). In conversation with his professor Ruskin and his friend
Billy, he tackles ways of engaging in social, intellectual, and sentimental
relationships, while with his girlfriends he discovers the allure of extra-
marital sex. The women let him catch a glimpse of an ideal intellectual
relationship that proves an illusion, leaving him with nothing more than “the
peculiar smell of the Playboy magazines” (131) of his boyhood. The path
leading to a working peace with himself, with his wife, and with his adopted
country lies elsewhere.
The 302-feet Peace Tower in Ottawa that gives the book its title is a
national landmark. Erected after World War I as a tribute to the war dead, the
tower haunts the narrative and beats the time of Mark’s days, as he contem-
plates it from his balcony or drives past it, until it becomes the multifaceted
symbol of his struggle. “I knew all about towers,” says Mark referring to his
Catholic heritage, “I had climbed to the summit of churches and steeples and
towers ever since I could remember” (165) Though he initially fails to rec-
ognize the sacred value inherent in the ceremony of marriage, considering it
only a “last act of homage” (28) to family tradition, he nonetheless has a
deep sense of spirituality derived from his Italian background. His mystical,
at times sacrilegious fascination with language, “the black blood tattooed on
the page,” lifts him “higher than any tower into the awe and ecstasy of light”
(61). Yet while words make him fly, his wife keeps him anchored to earth; is
it possible, he asks, “to yearn for the infinite while tethered to the body of a
woman?” (107). The novel’s climax provides an answer, when Mark must
choose between his marriage and his “visibility in the ordinary world” (167).
Though Peace Tower conforms to the tradition of the Bildungsroman, its
spiritual dimension broadens the scope of the narration to other topics—the
relationship between knowledge and humility, the value of virtue and reli-
gion in academic life, the importance of tradition in a foreign and widely
secular contest. Despite the frequent excursuses on Heidegger that some-
times seem forced, when not simplistic, the characters’ voices are convincing
and the language is as direct as it is heartfelt.
PAOLO SIMONETTI
University of Rome “Sapienza”
Welcome to Venice: Replicas, Imitations, and Dreams of an Italian City

edited by Guido Moltedo. Venice: Consorzio Venezia Nuova, 2007. 138pp.
While we are forced to witness the slow sinking of the Italian Venice and
to accept (at least) the idea of its vanishing in the not so distant future, this
book arrives to give unexpected encouragement, dedicated as it is to the ever
more numerous Venices scattered across the planet. Good news: the original
city may die, its replicas are destined to live forever – or even better, to con-
tinue to multiply and create new copies. As Giovanna Franci wrote in
Dreaming of Italy [rev. in Italian Americana, 24, no. 1 (2006): 102-105], “the
copy . . . often results in something more real than the real thing.”
A “place of the imagination” even more than a real city, and the protago-
nist of several literary and artistic masterpieces (the authors quote
Shakespeare, Thomas Mann, Henry James, Canaletto, Guardi and Bellotto,
but seem to forget Patricia Highsmith and Turner), Venezia reappropriates its
corporeity through the series of “twin” towns that we meet in these pages.
“Venice is so unique that there are over one hundred in the world”: such is
the paradoxical incipit of Guido Moltedo’s introductory essay, “Venice a
hundred times over,” which opens with Venice, Utah, buried deep in the
Mormon state. We learn that Amerigo Vespucci was the first to mention
Venice in the New World; that thirty-six gondoliers were imported at the
beginning of the twentieth century by Abbot Kinney, the visionary founder
of Venice, California; that there is a Gondola Society of America and even a
newspaper, the Venice Gondolier Sun. At the end of the essay we find Venice,
Florida, designed by John Nolen, the founding father of New Urbanism, in
1925.
Judith Stiles’s “Palladio in Upstate New York” contains personal memo-
ries of her visit to tiny Venice, New York, proud of its pre-industrial, rural
world where there are no grocery stores, nor theatres, nor hospital. Another
essay by Stiles (“Kinney’s Folly”) is dedicated to Kinney and Venice,
California, from its origins to the hippie days and from these to the yuppie
generation. One wonders why she does not mention the cinematographic
fortune of the town: as widely illustrated in Jeffrey Stanton’s books, many
movies have been filmed on or around Venice’s streets, piers, and canals, but
above all the “Venice of the West” provided the setting for the opening
sequence of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958), maybe the most famous
tracking shot in the history of American cinema. Moltedo’s “Las Venice”
focuses on the Las Vegas “biosphere in the middle of the desert,” which
includes The Venetian hotel-resort-and-entertainment center, a bizarre repli-
ca of the heart of Venice and one of the most famous fakes in the world.
Alessandro Carrera’s “End of the Road in America” describes Venice,
Louisiana, which is now nothing more than a solitary spot at the end of the
road and the Mississippi, but has a turbulent history that includes the Ku
Klux Klan lynchings of Italians and attacks on Vietnamese families.
Rita Ciresi’s “Going to Venezia” takes the reader back to a more subjec-
tive free style. She tells the story of her many encounters with Venice: first
as a child, through pizza parlors smelling of tomato sauce and parmigiano
and through a plastic Viewmaster in the shape of a gondola, then thanks to
such novels as Death in Venice and The Aspern Papers, and finally, as an
adult, as a tourist and visitor. Similarly, Carlo Benucci (“Canals and Boats.
In London”) writes about his visit to “Little Venice,” the evocative name
given in the mid-nineteenth century by Browning to the junction between the
Grand Union and Regent’s Canals in London, and one of the first residential
areas in the second ring of the capital.
Elza Maria Das Neves Fraga’s “The Lion in the Jungle” introduces the
Brazilian towns of Nova Veneza and Nova Venécia. A perfect copy of the
Lion of St Mark was shipped to the latter town in 1925; it was supposed to
Reviews 119
have been delivered to the former, so a second identical lion was ordered by
the Italian immigrants who resided there. Enrique M. Butti’s “Casimiro
Cabiollo’s Water City” brings us to Argentina where a Nueva Venecia was
built on some of the Paranà River islands. Cabiollo’s bizarre plan was to
transport the Adriatic city there piece by piece; this was replaced by the idea
of reproducing just a few of its canals. At the end of the book, a section
entitled “One Hundred Venices” includes a map (which does not claim to be
exhaustive) and a long list which show as many Venices scattered throughout
the Americas, from Bolivia to Ecuador, from Brazil to the United States, etc.
And do not forget Venezuela!
In an epoch when conceptual boundaries between the original and the
copy or fake are increasingly blurred, this very pleasant book is not only a
nice “kaleidoscope of Venetianness” (whatever that means) but also a multi-
layered, transhistorical, and transnational homage to diversity and to the
human skill of reinterpretation which in the course of time has made it pos-
sible to give this unique city so many second lives. The great number of fine
pictures and the variety of stylistic registers give this virtual tour an uncom-
mon cultural depth and a worthy multiple perspective.
ALESSANDRA CALANCHI
University of Urbino (Italy)
Claiming Kin by Laura Marello. Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2009. 171pp.
This novella hinges upon family secrets. Thus it’s only fitting that the
story begins in a dream-like landscape. Young Andrea stands behind the
barn, slapping at mosquitoes, trying her best to conjure an anonymous “him”
who turns out to be her “Papa.” But who really is Andrea’s father? “Fumes
like burnt hair, sweat like iodine:” the child Andrea, ever-concerned with the
smells of the earth, grows into a chemist who invents “a pheromone pater-
nity test for humans.” Marello takes us from North Carolina and California,
back to Italy and onward to France as Andrea follows her nose to claim her
kin and solve the mystery of her own identity.
Readers should be forewarned that Claiming Kin is not a traditional immi-
grant family saga. There’s no family tree printed at the beginning of the story
to help us understand the complex relationships. Instead, in the tradition of
Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner, Marello intentionally blurs the boundaries of
consciousness. Although the story ultimately belongs to Andrea, it does not
have a central point of view. Time and place seem equally fluid. Relationships
unfold in lines like “No one knows but Grandma that they are all children.
No one knows who Grandpa is to her. The eggs spit in the skillet.”
Accordingly, the novel lacks much direct dialogue; when it does appear, it
does not always follow traditional conversational patterns. Accidents,
dreams, games, and storytelling propel the plot rather than clearly discernible
action. All of these authorial choices serve to highlight descriptive gifts.
From the “frogs woosh[ing]” out of the pond at the start of the novel to the
intriguing question “Does the sun smell?” that comes in the epilogue,
Marello delights in the sounds and scents of her varied landscapes. Of par-
ticular interest is a finely-wrought dreamlike sequence that takes place in the
catacombs.
Structurally, the novel feels more like a novella followed by a series of
related short stories. The first two-thirds operate in worlds that are fluid and
informed by both childlike and adult perceptions. The latter sections of the
novel bring a more gratifying clarity to the story, yet some of Marello’s lyrical
gifts naturally are sacrificed upon the altar of plot. Readers seeking to confirm
that family sagas need not be told in conservative and formulaic fashion
would do well to pick up Claiming Kin to study both its form and content.
RITA CIRESI
University of South Florida
Bitter Spring by Stanislao Pugliese. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2009. 426pp.
This is the first biography in English of one of the most controversial

figures of twentieth-century Italian politics and literature. In the 1920s
Ignazio Silone was a leader of the newly-founded and soon to become clan-
destine Italian Communist Party. By 1930 he was expelled for his reluctance
to toe the party line, but three years later he re-emerged as the author of
Fontamara, the most successful anti-fascist novel published in the interwar
years. Despite a burgeoning literary career, Silone’s critique of Stalin’s
Russia made him an unwelcome presence among the Italian Communist
intelligentsia whose influence on the cultural establishment in the postwar
years was very substantial. Equally, his unambitious prose style was often
considered below par in many literary and academic circles. The same could
not be said outside Italy. Silone became an internationally renowned figure
as an outspoken critic of all forms of totalitarianism.
His private life was also marked by controversy and a heavy deal of trag-
edy. Born in the harsh and rugged countryside of Abruzzo, he became an
orphan and lost most of his relatives at the age of fifteen when an earthquake
struck his hometown in 1915. After a troubled education in Catholic institu-
tions he became a militant socialist, quickly rising to the upper echelons of
the party. Once the Fascists were in power, he struggled to live the life of a
hunted insurgent, mainly in Switzerland. In the meantime his only remaining
brother was arrested by the Fascists and died in an Italian jail. Silone contin-
ued to be haunted by depressive crises, sometimes needing the help of a
psychologist among whom figured Jung. During the war, he collaborated
with US intelligence and later edited a journal which turned out to be dis-
creetly financed by the American administration. Silone’s moral stature
among independent left-wing thinkers was dented, but most controversial of
all was the recent accusation of having been a Fascist spy throughout the
1920s. The documented facts emerged about twenty years after his death and
Reviews 121
have since informed all discussions concerning his persona and his political
and literary work.
Pugliese’s biography steers a difficult course in attempting to take on board
the new baggage added by recent revelations whilst at the same time preserv-
ing the old image of Silone. Can the great icon of moral and political integ-
rity survive the accusation of eleven years of betrayal? Pugliese’s answer is
that it can, and readers will find it hard not to agree with him. Silone’s secret
collaboration with the police ended with his exit from activist politics and
there is a sense (corroborated by a letter he wrote in 1930) that the two were
strictly linked. Perhaps ending his political militancy was the only way to
convince the Fascists to let go. The politician emerged from the crisis as a
most creative fiction writer and from then stayed faithful to his ideals. It is
only right that Pugliese should remind us that in those dark years Silone was
an avid reader of Dostoevsky. Indeed, this biography shows more than a
Dostoevskyian trait in the man, and Silone emerges out of it as a more inter-
esting character than his hagiographers—or detractors—might have hoped
for.
GUIDO BONSAVER
University of Oxford
Sicilian Mimes: a Gallery of Sly and Rustic Tales by Francesco Lanza.

Translated by Gaetano Cipolla. Mineola, NY: Legas, 2010. 143pp.
On the heels of his exquisite translation of Antonio Veneziano’s poetry

from the Sicilian (Ninety Love Octaves, Legas, 2006) comes this spritely
performance by Gaetano Cipolla, scholar, critic, linguist, editor, translator,
and general communicator of the Sicilian language and culture. Francesco
Lanza (1897-1933) was born in Valguarnera in the province of Enna, studied
law at Rome, served in the World War I, and completed his degree at Catania.
He opened a section of the Socialist Party in Valguarnera and published an
Almanacco per il popolo siciliano to foster literacy. Later he joined the
Fascists, believing that Mussolini “intended to improve the lot of the poor
people” (5). The first of his mimi (“mimes”) appeared in 1923. His career
was cut short by septicemia contracted by an improperly sterilized syringe.
Originally Lanza had used the general term storie to define his clever tales
but was persuaded to adopt the more colorful, if less accurate, mimi, a term
that had been introduced by the nineteenth-century Sicilian ethnologist
Giuseppe Pitrè. A collector of oral culture whose Sicilian folk and fairy tales
have been translated by Jack Zipes and Joseph Russo (reviewed in Italian
Americana, 27, 2 [2009]: 228-31), Pitrè employed the term to describe the
work of a third-century BC Greek poet Hero(n)das (Eronda) whose “mimes,”
possibly written for the stage, have been called “essays in mannered realism”
(W. Geoffrey Arnott). In Palermo I recall hearing tales of a similar nature
recited at receptions by some particularly talented guests, leaving the rest of
us in a state of hysterical laughter.
The mimi cover a range of topics from sex and marriage, to hunting and
farming, crime, cumpari, and religion and death. Rich in fantasy, Lanza sati-
rizes the knaves and fools, chiefly fools, exposing their gullibility, zaniness,
gluttony, vanity, and sloth, and mocking one city and town after another
across the island: Calascibetta, Mistretta, Licata, Caltagirone, Ragusa,
Palermo, Catania, Petralia, Acireale, Leonforte, Aidone, Pietraperzia,
Sciacca, Troina, Pollina, Barrafranca, Nicosia, Mazzarino. Inter-regional
rivalry comes at the expense of Calabria. There is even a mime about the fool
Giufà, the Sicilian folk-hero who turns up often in Pitrè. All the mimi are
short, a page at most, and they begin with a simple premise, e.g., “A
Calabrian considered his neighbor his mortal enemy . . .,” “Not knowing how
to make a living, a man from Prizzi went beyond the se . . .”
“The Man from Piazza” gives an idea of the mime’s operative power. The
title serves also as a frame, as if to give the name of the town clues the audi-
ence into what one could expect to happen there, confirming what we already
know. A superlative translator, Cipolla captures the speed, clarity, and sheer
brio of Lanza’s writing:
A man from Piazza was so valiant that he refused to eat because
he was too lazy to raise his bread to his mouth and he preferred to
starve to death.
He lay down underneath a fig tree laden with ripe fruit and
waited there with his mouth open for figs to fall in, never reaching
with his arm or bending his head to catch those that fell around him.
As time passed, finally, a fig fell in his mouth, but not to move
his teeth to chew it and swallow it, he did not even touch it and
remained like that until he died like the dumb Piazzese he was.
The premise contains three propositions that are absurdly related: (a) bravery,
(b) starvation, and (c) death. The last words, “like the dumb Piazzese he was,”
could be spoken almost as a refrain drowned out by the admiring laughter of
the audience. Piazza figures in other mimi as a place where one expects the
unexpected, usually bad.
There is no intention on Lanza’s part to attack Sicilian immobilism,
amoral familism, any other ism or the so-called cult of death. Heaven for-
fend!—these stories are universal. One cannot resist citing another, “The
Legs of the People of Lecara”:
On a feast day the people of Lercara went to the countryside to
celebrate and moved en masse to a field where they ate and they
drank and sprawled on the ground as they pleased.
But when it came time to get off the ground, seeing all those legs
of males and females mixed up, they no longer recognized their
own and they were in a quandary:
“Where are my legs? And yours? What about this one, to whom
does it belong? Gee, I am missing one leg!”
And they are still looking for their legs.
Does it not suggest something like the brilliantly shot Dinner in the Piazza
scene from Fellini’s Roma?
JOHN PAUL RUSSO
Reviews 123
University of Miami, Florida

Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture edited
by Edvige Giunta and Kathleen Zamboni McCormick. New York: The
Modern Language Association of America, 2010. 360pp.
This work, the most recent addition to the Modern Language Association’s
“Options for Teaching” series which dates back to Elizabeth Wootan
Cowan’s (ed.) 1975 Options for the Teaching of English: The Undergraduate
Curriculum, demonstrates the diversity, complexity, and challenge of teach-
ing Italian in U.S. universities at a time when pragmatism, politics, and
economies of scale have pushed students away from the classics and
Romance Languages (with the exception of Spanish) and towards the study
of Chinese and Arabic. Giunta and Zamboni McCormick’s book, a spirited,
if uneven, defense of the study of the Italian language and Italian and Italian-
American literature and culture offers useful pedagogic parameters, but in a
collection of thirty-three essays some selections, naturally, work better than
others.
The book strives for a comprehensive review of research, writing, and
teaching on a wide variety of humanistic topics thematically related to Italian
America. For example, Autobiography and Memoir appropriately receive
four chapters; two chapters are dedicated to Oral History; Theater and
Performance are given three chapters; and Race and Gender Politics are
considered in four chapters. The breadth and scope of the collection militates
against a thorough, cover-to-cover reading. More likely, individuals will
study chapters of particular interest to them as the book contains an abun-
dance of carefully scripted suggestions for designing syllabi, based on tested
classroom practices, and other tools for teaching Italian American topics.
Unfortunately, a long, aloof and undisciplined introduction, authored by
the editors, sets the tone for the book. Two recurring themes, in the intro-
duction and text in general, are the negative images of Italian Americans and
race. Many of the scholars in the book are so forward focused on negative
stereotyping and the Italian-American experience that they almost reinforce
it, and it is not until page 220 that Peter Bondanella addresses “demographic
change” which helps push the reader away from an excessively reductive,
static notion of Italian-American culture and identity (i.e. Italian Americans
as mostly undereducated, working class butchers and brick-layers). The book
would have been strengthened by some socio-historic, anthropological writ-
ing to help students understand the complexity of race, thereby contextual-
izing, for example, the fact that Sicily was largely Greek-speaking until the
eighth century AD, or the two-hundred plus year occupation by Muslims in
the medieval period. Though the book is not an Italian or Italian-American
“history” teaching text, historic process is central to any understanding of the
Italian language or Italian-American literature and/or culture.
There are some really nice essays in this book: Peter Covino offers an
outstanding, brief, historic analysis of innovation in Italian Americana poetry.
John Paul Russo’s work on Religion in Don DeLillo’s White Noise and
Underworld is a model of sharp, focused analysis and clear writing; the essay
seamlessly intersects with the thematic focus—teaching—of the book. Louise
DeSalvo allows the reader to observe her writing classes at Hunter College
and witness, almost first-hand, the challenges and richness of reading and
writing “memoir” with non-traditional students.
Teaching Italian American Literature, Film and Popular Culture contains
an excellent “Resources” section titled “A Review of Anthologies for
Teaching Italian American Studies,” compiled and annotated by RoseAnna
Mueller and Dora Labate. This generous, inclusive text will find wide reader-
ship among professors, professionals, and students interested in learning and
teaching on the topics of Italian American Literature, Film and Popular
Culture.
MICHAEL J. LaROSA
Rhodes College
The Abyss of Human Illusion by Gilbert Sorrentino. Minneapolis: Coffee

House Press, 2009. 151pp.
Sorrentino’s last novel was completed just weeks before he passed away
in May 2006. After his death Christopher Sorrentino, his son, edited the
manuscript using his father’s handwritten notes. At times the younger
Sorrentino selectively excised portions of his father’s text, but in both form
and theme, the published version provides a fitting conclusion to an illustri-
ous career.
The Abyss of Human Illusion contains 50 chapters ranging in length from
one to five pages, with the duration of chapters generally increasing as the
book progresses. Each story features its own character(s) and its own narra-
tive, but a thematic interest in the myths to which individuals subscribe to
make sense of their daily lives links the individual episodes. These “human
illusions” bolster younger characters, giving them a sense of purpose and
optimism. Older characters tend to be cynical. They are surrounded by televi-
sion sets and disconnected from other human beings; their friends have died;
their partners have left them or passed away. They see life as “a series of
mistakes, bad choices, various stupidities, accidents, and unbelievable coin-
cidences” (15). Many are disillusioned because the payoff that they believed
would greet them later in life never arrived.
And yet, at times, Sorrentino emphasizes the value, even necessity, of
illusions. One chapter focuses on an ageing writer whose cynicism threatens
to halt his career. Despite being “bored with his work, bored with himself”
(109), he continues to write partly because it gives him a voice and partly
because he aspires to the PEN/Faulkner Award (in his later years he is more
skeptical of its importance and his ability to win it). Nonetheless, the “illu-
sion” of the award encourages the writer to keep working.
As in most of Sorrentino’s work, the presence of Italian-American char-
acters is limited. However, the book’s second to last chapter tells the story of
Reviews 125
Guy Bonney, born Gaetano Bonifacio, an Italian American who marries a

blond-haired, blue-eyed Polish American. Guy’s wife and in-laws become
increasingly disdainful of his ethnic background (his ever-so-slight accent,
his Italian family). When Guy attains a degree of material wealth during the
Great Depression, his in-laws whisper that he must be mob-connected. By
the end of the story, Guy is americanizing his speech so as not to annoy his
wife and her family. “Milano” may become MY-LANNO, but Guy’s ethnic
past becomes a marker that he cannot shed despite his best efforts to assimi-
late. Through his success he challenges the illusion of ethnic inferiority to
which many adhere and to which Guy himself is susceptible while demon-
strating that assimilated characters’ own insecurities about their achieve-
ments (or lack thereof) drive their prejudice against Italians and by implica-
tion against other “others.”
Recalling his earlier work in some ways, Sorrentino demonstrates in this
final novel that he was always rethinking and reevaluating his ideas, particu-
larly when it came to the representation of Italian ethnicity.
JONATHAN J. CAVALLERO
University of Arkansas
Scripting Identity. Writing Cultural Experience by Theresa Carilli. Lanham:

University Press of America, 2008. 87pp.
Recently the discipline of Performative Studies has turned away from Oral
Interpretation and, perhaps longing for wider acceptance and recognition in
the field of Communication, has focused on performative ways of being.
Within this context the combination of autobiography and ethnography has
produced a methodology that allows researchers to study a culture and
embody that culture in performance. This focus has encouraged the process-
ing of body epistemology as a reflective discourse, and now scholars rely so
heavily on autoethnographies (as records of the performance of being) that
autoethnographies have become the paradigm for Performative Studies.
Carilli proposes a new and personal look at the question of agency, shar-
ing her critical reflections on her own work as well as her experience in the
classroom. In the first chapter, “Performative Writing and the Primary
Narrative,” she reviews her evolution as a performative writer. Through
various journeys from personal to primary narratives she offers examples of
her creative work. In the second chapter, “Scripting Identity Using the
Primary Narrative,” her creative work as a performative writer is connected
with her practice in the classroom, as she trains students how to script and
write their own cultural identities. She discusses several means of accessing
the primary narrative, selecting the best genre to complement it, performing
the script and assessing how the script has affected the scriptwriter.
Chapters three through eight are scripts written by Carilli’s students, each
one employing a different genre and trying to capture identity in a way that
complements the culture under study. Each narrative is briefly introduced by
Carilli, who gives some details about her students’ lives, their writing pro-
cess, and the performance of each script. In chapter three Adrienne
Viramontes delves into her own ethnicity through her writings, while in
chapter four Dave Fanno deals with his family’s struggle to fit into American
culture, and in chapter five Jennifer Bianchi explores the nuances of single
motherhood. Chapter six describes excerpts of a video documentary by Erin
Okamoto Protsman that chronicles Japanese internment during WWII, while
in chapter seven Ami Kleminski ponders what it means to work as a female
in a predominantly male trade such as the steel industry. The last script, by
William Boggs, concerns the author’s conflict with his father. Finally, in
“Afterword: Identity and Human Communication,” Carilli concludes her
excellent book by underlining the importance of identity in communication,
and stressing that understanding others is the key to understanding ourselves.
FULVIO ORSITTO
California State University, Chico
A New Language, a New World: Italian Immigrants in the United States,

1890—1945 by Nancy C. Carnevale. Urbana and Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 2009. 243 pp.
In her introduction Nancy Carnevale states her purpose of avoiding “the

totalizing narrative of assimilation.” A New Language, a New World does
indeed manage to do this, providing the reader with a thoroughly researched
and clearly presented vision of the linguistic and cultural complexities that
are integral to any consideration of Italian immigration and emigration. But
the book is also successful in charting processes of assimilation (sometimes
coercive, sometimes pursued by immigrants themselves) through consider-
ation of many language-related issues, processes that led to the creation of
Italian-Americans in what were difficult and turbulent years.
The book is divided into two parts, the first of which consists of two
chapters that help set the context. Chapter 1 provides a discussion on Italian
languages on both sides of the Atlantic, and if that plural is in any way dis-
turbing just consider for a moment the fact that today, over a century later,
there still are Italians for whom Italian is a second language to their regional
dialect. Chapter 2 deals with the way in which the United States opted for the
English language as a means of national cohesion. The second part of the
book is where we find the bulk of Carnevale’s detailed research into Italian
immigrants’ use of Italian, regional dialects, and English during their assim-
ilation. Chapter 3 carries a fascinating discussion on translation from the
point of view of both the receiving culture and the immigrants themselves.
The material here ranges from the experience of Ellis Island to what remains
the highest profile Italian-American historical event of the twentieth centu-
ry—the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti. The figure of the official translator for
the trial, Giuseppe Rossi (a.k.a. Joseph Ross), provides particular food for
thought with his dubious behavior. Chapter 4 presents us with the career of
Reviews 127
stage, and later radio comedian Eduardo Migliaccio, in arte Farfariello,

whose particular brand of comedy relied constantly on word play between
English, Italian, and dialect, Neapolitan in particular. Chapters 5 and 6 deal
respectively with the years between the World Wars and the understandably
difficult period for all things Italian between 1940 and 1945. Again in these
chapters Carnevale is adept at going beyond historical narrative and analysis
by illustrating her arguments with engaging biographical sketches of leading
figures—the educationalist Leonard Covello and the trumpeter and singer
Louis Prima come to mind.
A brief epilogue offers some considerations on the contemporary debate
on immigration in the United States, a debate that confirms language
(Spanish in particular) as being still of crucial importance.
IAIN HALLIDAY
Università di Catania
BRIEFLY NOTED
Sicily through Symbolism and Myth: Gates to Heaven and the Underworld
by Paolo Fiorentino. Mineola, NY: Legas, 2006. 124pp.
This slim volume, the thirteenth in Legas’s Sicilian Studies Series, brings
together a wealth of information on Sicilian mythology and symbology from
the archaic period through Rome and down to the Byzantine Empire. In a
narrative style that is limpid and inviting, Paolo Fiorentino shows how many
of the Greek and Roman myths adapted themselves to the specific qualities
of the island, while other myths grew up on native soil. He investigates the
origins and history of the island’s famous icon, the Triskeles, three legs bent
at the knees, standing for Sicily’s triangular shape (“Trinacria,” as the Greeks
called it). It has numerous, possible ancestors; Fiorentino elaborates on the
image of Baal, the Phoenician god of time, where “the legs in running posi-
tion symbolize the racing of time and the cycles of nature.” Spartan soldiers,
he notes, carried shields painted with the Greek lambda resembling a leg; but
when they migrated to Syracuse, they painted three legs, “perhaps either to
symbolize the three coasts of Sicily, or to allude to an image of multiplied
power and force.” Or, as Gaetano Cipolla notes in the foreword, “to symbol-
ize their newly acquired Sicilian identity.”
Among the many myths examined are Scylla and Charybdis, the jutting
rock formation and the whirlpool, on either side of the straits of Messina.
Today one crosses the few miles by ferry in less than half an hour, and it is
easy to forget how dangerous winds and treacherous currents could give
these two “monsters” a legendary and epigrammatic status. Fiorentino
reminds us of their enduring presence in art and culture.
JOHN PAUL RUSSO

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ITALIAN AMERICANA, a cultural and historical review devoted to the

Editor and Review Editor Poetry Editor: Michael Palma

Founded by Ernest S. Falbo and Richard Gambino

An international peer-review journal, ITALIAN AMERICANA is published semi-

63 Grandma’s House (story) by Mary Bucci Bush

108 Sacco, Vanzetti, Parmenter, and Berardelli: 90 years of Confusion,

No License to Serve: Prohibition,

On 27 February 1907, two of the 19th–20th century’s leading

Galleani the Intransigent

Among his admirers and detractors alike, Galleani was regarded as

At Genoa, it was undoubtedly Galleani who…was

The use of domicilio coatto, along with that of “ammonizione”

The prisoners on Pantelleria proposed to the prison-

tarian deviation, and against the illusion of protest

The prisoners went on to publish the sole issue of a newspaper they

[B]eing forced to live, like many of us, for ten or

Ilia, to Africa. Nevertheless, the period of confinement on Pantelleria

Emma Goldman, Tireless Agitator

trinal differences. By age twenty-five, Goldman was touring the coun-

On the contrary, [the suffragists] insist always that it

The Stonecarvers of Barre

Italians from the provinces of Lombardy, Piedmont, and Tuscany.

[T]he anarchist movement had developed a unique

reducing well-nourished, muscular men to bony shadows. Eventually

Prohibition and the Widows’ Dilemma

Vermont was under the blessings of Prohibition….In

under the protection of the police, to whom part of

and sentencing her to five months in the Vermont House of

Democracy Thrust upon Them

In his discourse he set forth that they wanted to upset

Cronaca Sovversiva also covered the dual address at the Opera

7. Ugo Fedeli, Luigi Galleani. Quarant’anni di lotte rivoluzionarie, 1891–1931 (Cesena:

ai moti del ’94 (Pisa: Biblioteca Franco Serantini, 1994), p. 85.

Derived Aliens: Derivative

I wonder if you’d know what was behind what hap-

born in California, is an Italian subject, cannot vote

Numerous other women in California and elsewhere appeared to

lost her citizenship by reason of the fact that she mar-

What burned me up was this: I came here at age ten,

Rose Scudero’s family fit in this same category: her father an

He explained that women who have married aliens

Though it is not clear what rights someone “deemed generally as a

American citizens via derivative citizenship?

would automatically become an American citizen—via derivative

Italian-American Urban Hyphens

On the thirtieth anniversary of John Badham’s Saturday Night

The reference to the Brooklyn Bridge in Dmytryk’s film and in

low and high-angle shots emphasizes the unstable condition of a

full value to Jaroslav, an older Slavic immigrant added in the film

edly switches from dark to light in a series of Dutch angles. Tony’s

environment if he believes in and capitalizes on his artistic talent

Stephanie, as William P. Kelly has convincingly argued, “fulfills

duality of Italian Americanness” (D’Acierno xxxiii). By widening the

Belmonte, Thomas. “The Contradictions of Italian American Identity. An Anthropologist’s Per-

Featured Poet Robert Viscusi:

We may imagine Ellis Island as a former Babel where char-

Three Poems from Ellis Island

looking at things draws upon all your resources of memory and of

spinning atomic resonances increase in richness producing life

together italians are discovering new ways of dividing the sunlight

Samuel Menashe Reads at the Harvard Club

the kind of name you always called yourself

—Marc Alan Di Martino