Vol. XXXVII No. 2 Summer 2019
Table of Contents
Letter from the Editor………………………………………………………………… v
Notes on Contributors………………………………………………………………. ix
Articles
Florence Scala: A Disowned Community Leader by Sandro Corso………………………………………………………………… 99
“Curious Victories”: The Famous Murder Case of Maria Barbella and Italian- American Women in the Press Between the 1890s and 1910s by Marina Cacioppo………………………………………………………….. 119
Poetry
Introduction by Maria Terrone……………………………………………………………… 141
“Leopardi’s Lament: On an Ancient Funeral Monument” Translated by Eamon Grennan………………………………………… 143
Featured Poet: Grace Cavalieri
Essay, “A Child of Two Cultures”…………………………………….. 147
“Oh My Father”………………………………………………………………. 150
“The End”……………………………………………………………………… 151
“May Day”…………………………………………………………………….. 152
Poetry
‘”Tis of Thee” by Dante Di Stefano………………………………………………………….. 154
“Marriage Bed” by Julia Lisella…………………………………………………………………. 155
“Preemptive Elegy” by Elton Glaser………………………………………………………………… 156
“Anniversary” by Joey Nicoletti……………………………………………………………….. 157
“Night Shift, Big Steel” by Jim Scutti……………………………………………………………………. 159
“Turning Up Moonstruck” by Janine Certo………………………………………………………………… 160
“Evening Comes to Long Island Sound” by Fred Muratori……………………………………………………………… 161
“Caddies, 1929” by Maryann Corbett………………………………………………………….. 162
“Pyromania” by Connie Post…………………………………………………………………. 163
“La Bailarina” by Gabriella Belfiglio………………………………………………………… 164
“Nihil Obstat” by Michelle Reale……………………………………………………………… 166
“December 31” by Simona Carini……………………………………………………………… 167
FIctIon and CreatIve Non-FIctIon
“Ladies Man” by Philip Cioffari……………………………………………………………… 171
“An Epistolary Friendship: Louise DeSalvo Through Her Letters” by Jonathan Freeman-Coppadge ……177
RevIews
Review Essay: A Phenomenology of the American Spirit
The Unreal McCoy by Virginiana Miller
Review Essay by Simone Marchesi…………………………………… 187
Review Essay: Pop Formalist: Ned Balbo and The Perseids 3 Nights of the Perseids by Ned Balbo
Review Essay by George Guida……………………………………….. 194
Let’s Wake Up, Italics!: Manifesto for a Glocal Future
by Piero Bassetti
Review by Ioana Raluca Larco………………………………………… 198
Facing toward the Dawn: The Italian Anarchists of New London
by Richard Lenzi
Review by Ferdinando Fasce…………………………………………… 200
At Home in the New World: Essays by Maria Terrone
Review by Ilaria Serra……………………………………………………. 201
Between Two Worlds: Sicily and America by Luisa LoCascio
Review by Maria Serena Marchesi……………………………………. 202
The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writing, Writers, and Life
by Richard Russo
Review by Marc C. Amodio……………………………………………. 203
Staged Narratives / Narrative Stages: Essays on Italian Prose Narrative and Theatre edited by Enrica Maria Ferrara and Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin
Review by Maria Galli Stampino……………………………………… 205
Out of Nothing: Poems of Art and Artists by James B. Nicola
Review by Cristina Giorcelli……………………………………………. 206
The Fireflies of Autumn and Other Tales of San Ginese
by Moreno Giovannoni
Review by Mariaconcetta Costantini…………………………………. 210
“I Heard You Paint Houses”: Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran and Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa by Charles Brandt
Review by George Birnbaum…………………………………………… 213
La Lirica I (Odi, Sonetti e Canzunetti) by Giovanni Meli
Review by Joseph Russo………………………………………………… 214
A Day in June by Marisa Labozzetta
Review by Roxanne Christofano Pilat……………………………….. 216
Letter from the Editor
Carla A. Simonini
Dear Readers:
I must begin this letter with a correction and an apology. As we prepared the last edition of Italian Americana we were straddling production between Youngstown State University and our new home at Loyola University Chicago. Somehow, we missed an error in our printing proof, which caused the journal to go out incorrectly labeled “Volume XXXVIII Number 1 Winter 2019.” Please note that this was an error, and the issue should have been labeled “Volume XXXVII Number 1 Winter 2019.” You will note that this current issue reflects a return to our proper sequence, “Volume XXXVII Number 2 Summer 2019.” We have alerted all of our subscribing libraries and apologize for any confusion this may have caused.
We are very pleased to bring you the properly numbered Summer 2019 issue, which features some changes reflective of our desire to continually broaden the ways in which we fulfill our mission to explore the Italian experience in the New World. Our first article, “Florence Scala: A Disowned Community Organizer,” was submitted to us by Sandro Corso, the Education Office Director at the Italian Consulate General in Chicago. In his present position, Dr. Corso is responsible for promoting and supporting Italian language programs in Chicago-area schools, and his background and training are in literature and sociolinguistics. He in fact holds a PhD in Comparative Literature, and previously was a professor of Italian literature (for more information, see our “Notes on Contributors” section). His article on Florence Scala, however, is not a literary analysis but rather a biographical portrait of a Chicago-born woman whose life story challenges conventional notions of the role of woman in Italian-American culture. Corso learned about Florence Scala after assuming his consular position, and his meticulously researched article about her life presents a contemporary Italian homage to the legacy of an Italian American of an earlier generation. It also offers a unique perspective on the history of Taylor Street, Chicago’s “Little Italy,” thus providing a fitting tribute to Italian Americana’s new home.
Our second article is an examination of sensationalized murder cases involving Italian-American women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Marina Cacioppo, a scholar from the Università degli Studi di Palermo, Sicily, has conducted extensive research utilizing primary sources, newspaper articles in particular, to analyze how after being cast by the press as protagonists in high-profile murder trials certain Italian-American women effectively became “transnational subjects,” tossed between the conflicting cultural forces of traditional Southern Italian culture, American democratic ideals, and the emerging feminist movement.
In our poetry section, editor Maria Terrone brings you another new feature—poetry in translation. We are very honored to be premiering Eamon Grennan’s translation of Giacomo Leopardi’s early nineteenth century poetic work “Sopra un basso rilievo antico sepolcrale, dove una giovane morta è rappresentata in atto di partire, accomiatandosi dai suoi,” which Grennan has translated as “Leopardi’s Lament: On an Ancient Funeral Monument.” You may wonder why we have chosen to feature an Irish- born poet’s translation of one of Italy’s most renowned literary figures in a journal dedicated to the Italian-American experience, to which I would respond that we are here again working to broaden the ways in which we seek to fulfill our mission. Grennan is a highly acclaimed poet and essayist, and he also won the PEN Award for poetry in translation for Selected Poems of Giacomo Leopardi (Princeton University Press 1997). But in addition to citing his stellar literary credentials, we welcome him to the pages of Italian Americana as an Italophile and a transnationalist. Born in Dublin, Grennan spent a year in Rome before enrolling in a doctoral program at Harvard, and he completed his award-winning Italian translations during his long tenure as a professor of English at Vassar College. Certainly his personal story, too, is part of an evolving definition of the Italian-American experience. Even more compelling, though, is his choice of poet.
Not only is Giacomo Leopardi considered to be one of the greatest poets of the nineteenth century, in Italy and abroad, he is also one of the literary figures associated with the tradition of a lirica civile (“civil poetry”), in which Italian literary greats, such as Dante and Petrarch, evoke through their verses a sense of Italianness that transcends geo-political borders. Historians and social scientists who study the Italian-American experience, many of whose scholarly works have been published in Italian Americana, often focus on regionalism and the late date of Italian unification (1861) as reasons why the immigrants generally lacked a sense of Italian identity. Leopardi’s poetry offers an alternative perspective—i.e. that it is through their diversity, and not in spite of it, that the people of the boot-shaped peninsula have always held a sense of themselves as “Italians.” Italy, more so than any other modern nation, effectively willed itself into being through its literature; for centuries Italy’s writers and poets, Leopardi included, passionately proclaimed an Italy that did not exist in any material form. One could argue that the largely illiterate laborers who formed the bulk of Italian immigration to the US would not have been reading poetry, but what Leopardi and other writers did was to capture in their verse a distinctly Italian spirit that even the most common of the peasant class would have felt. We are very pleased to be able to share that spirit with the original immigrants’ English-speaking descendants, in the form of Eamon Grennan’s very moving translation.
In our poetry section we are very pleased to bring you our featured poet, Grace Cavalieri, who in her professional life has pursued a multi- faceted career as a poet, playwright, and radio broadcaster. Her opening essay delves further into the characteristic diversity of Italian-American identity. Descendant of a northern Italian Jewish family, and with an immigrant grandfather that arrived in the US wielding a doctorate, rather than a pick and shovel, Cavalieri presents a contrasting yet no less valid Italian immigrant narrative. And yet still, she recalls her ex-seminarian maternal grandfather brandishing an apron while preparing Italian specialties for a rather rough and tumble American clientele in Trenton, NJ. “Tomato Pies, 25 Cents,” the first poem she shares with us, is offered in his memory. Cavalieri has also forged connections to her Italian heritage through literature, by working with Italian translators and engaging in multilingual poetry events supported by the Italian Embassy in Washington, DC. She has most recently been honored as the tenth poet laureate of Maryland.
In our Fiction and Essay section we have another departure from our typical protocol. We normally require that all of our creative writers be of Italian descent and ask that they reference their heritage in the biographical information that accompanies their submissions. This is in keeping with the original founders’ desire to provide a dedicated forum in which the works of Italian-American writers could be reviewed without any ethnic bias, which was not the case back in the early 1970s.1 Our current issue breaks from this long-standing tradition with our inclusion of a personal essay by Jonathan Freeman-Coppadge, “An Epistolary Friendship: Louise DeSalvo through Her Letters.” As our readers likely know, Louise DeSalvo was a prize-wining Virginia Wolf scholar and memoirist, with much of her work focusing on Italian-American themes. Her memoir Vertigo (Penguin, 1997) is one of the most widely taught Italian-American books, and numerous other Italian-American writers cite her as having influenced their own careers. But it is the theme of another one of DeSalvo’s popular books, Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives (Beacon Press, 2000) that gives rise to an unlikely friendship nurtured between Freeman-Coppadge and DeSalvo across the years, largely through written correspondence. DeSalvo passed away last October, succumbing to her long-term battle with cancer. Freeman-Coppadge’s essay is an eloquent tribute to both her literary and personal legacy, and it connects to the poetry of Leopardi in its exploration of how a sense of identity can be shaped through the process of writing.
Christine Palamidessi Moore, our Editor for Fiction and Creative Nonfiction, skillfully pairs Freeman-Coppadge’s essay with a work of short fiction, “Ladies Man” by Philip Cioffari. The story is a vignette, following two young men out for a night on the town in the Bronx of the 1950s. The voice is distinctly male, the story-telling terse and deceptively simple, and yet the frame it provides to Freeman-Coppadge’s essay is the protagonist’s unexpected connection to a woman as impetus for self-reflection. It is through a non-conventional relationship with a woman that both Freeman-Coppadge and Cioffari’s protagonist embark on the journey towards understanding themselves.
Last but certainly not least, our Book Review Editor, John Paul Russo, once again has curated a diversified collection of books representing different genres and subject matter. Of particular note is Ilaria Serra’s review of Maria Terrone’s debut essay collection, At Home in the New World (Bordighera Press, 2018). Without giving away too much, Serra characterizes Maria’s work as “a little Italian American gem,” and I, for one, could not agree more.
As always, my heartfelt thanks goes out to the entire Italian Americana staff, especially our section editors Maria Terrone, Christine Palamidessi Moore and John Paul Russo, and our exceedingly diligent and competent editorial assistant, Thomas Slagle.