“The Song I Sing and the Book I Read”: Becoming Italian American In “My Father’s Music” (Our Roots Are Deep with Passion: Creative Nonfiction Collects New Essays by Italian-American Writers, Other Press, 2006), I examined the history of my adoptive father Carmine’s favorite songs and performers, plus the reasons why, prior to my teen years, …
The Country Inside Me I have a terrible confession to make: I have never been to Italy. The land of my paternal grandmother and grandfather, the language my own father was fluent in yet never taught me or my siblings, has existed for me as a dream and a longing unfulfilled. Every time someone mentions …
How I Learned What It Means To Be Italian My parents were immigrants from the province of Salerno, Cilento, in southern Italy. They came from two different small villages at the top of a mountain, San Mauro and Galdo. My father arrived in Paterson, NJ when he was sixteen and went back to Italy to …
The Beloved Ghosts of Compiano Italy, sweet Italy, and the ghosts the very thought of it evokes. They came from Compiano, in the region of Parma, my grandfather and my grandmother, nonno e nonna, back some 120 years ago. First Giuseppe—Joe—age 25, in 1896, then Giulia, with their one-year-old son, Primo, the following year. They …
Reflections on Immigration, Identity, and Poetry I’m thinking about immigrants and immigration right now, as every day it seems one of the presidential candidates is calling for building a huge wall, deporting illegals, raising our quotas, etc. etc. And yet, indigenous Americans aside, didn’t we all come from somewhere else? And wasn’t it a huge …
Beginnings I was weaned on stories. My grandmother would repeat tales of her childhood in Italy, of her prophetic sister who died there during the Spanish Flu epidemic, of their crossing in the winter of 1919 on the ship that almost sank in the middle of the Atlantic, of her early years in New York …