Vol. XXXIX No. 2 Summer 2021

Table of Contents

Letter from the Editor………………………………………………………………… v

Notes on Contributors………………………………………………………………. ix

Articles

Notes on the Narrative Function of Laughter in Sweet Hope

Cristina Di Maio…………………………………………………………… 113

Robert Ferro’s and Felice Picano’s Italian Journeys through the Eyes of Max and Felice

Luca Lanzilotta…………………………………………………………….. 127

Reminiscences of Two Artists

Carol Bonomo Albright………………………………………………….. 143

Tribute to Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Lawrence Ferlinghetti Wins the John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry

Michael Palma…………………………………………………………….. 149

Featured Poet: Janine Puntureri Certo

Essay: “A Poetics of Home and Hearth”………………………………… 153

“Walking Tour of the Sacred Heart Cemetery, Pine Township, PA”……………………………………………………….. 155

“Prayer for Essential Workers”……………………………………………. 156

“The Fact of a Room”……………………………………………………….. 157

Poetry

“Death Valley Super Bloom” by Benjamin Gucciardi………………………………………………………. 158

“Brink of Spring” by Elton Glaser………………………………………………………………… 159

“Limone” by Luisa M. Giulianetti………………………………………………………. 160

“Ma’s Lemon Rind” by Lily Prigioniero……………………………………………………………. 161

“WCW” by Elton Glaser………………………………………………………………… 162

“Tonight: Unarmed & Blooming” by Gina Ferrara……………………………………………………………….. 163

“Gouache: November” by Marc Alan Di Martino……………………………………………………. 164

“Golden Dust Repairs the Cracked Vessel” by Gail Thomas………………………………………………………………… 165

“Torie in Twilight” by Susan Sanders……………………………………………………………… 166

“Echoes of Casandrino: a la Vicina di Napole” by Robert Chianese…………………………………………………………… 167

“Barter” by Lydia Distefano Thiel…………………………………………………….. 169

“Quiet Oceans” by Joan Mazza.…………………………………………………………………….. 170

Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction

Piera Sonnino, writer despite herself

by Marina Sanfilippo, translated by Toti O’Brien…………………. 173

Visitor’s Day at the Brooklyn Navy Yard

Thomas Maschio…………………………………………………………… 179

The Internet and the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire

Paolo Paciucci…………………………………………………………….. 189

Reviews

Review Essay: Critical Conversations: Knowledgeable, Kind

Studying with Miss Bishop: Memoirs from a Young Writer’s Life by Dana Gioia Review by Carol Bonomo Albright…………………………………………………………… 199

Review Essay: Assessing the Artistic Response to Post-WWII Migration New Italian Migrations to the United States, Vol. 2: Art and Culture since1945 edited by Laura E. Ruberto and Joseph Sciorra

Review by Ferdinando Fasce…………………………………………… 203

The Italians of Alabama by Russell Mario Magnaghi

Review by Jeannie Whayne…………………………………………….. 207

The Silence by Don DeLillo

Review by Daniela Daniele…………………………………………….. 208

From These Broken Streets by Roland Merullo

Review by Nick DePascal……………………………………………….. 211

Fires of Heaven: Poems of Faith and Sense by James B. Nicola

Review by Michael Mirolla…………………………………………….. 212

Arrivederci New York by Eugene Christy

Review by Marisa Labozzetta………………………………………….. 214

What Trees Know by Emilio DeGrazia

Review by David Cappella……………………………………………… 216

Basilicata Secrets: a Culinary Journal by Anita Aloisio

Review by Cristina Favretto……………………………………………. 218

Tony Lazzeri: Yankees Legend and Baseball Pioneer by Lawrence Baldassaro

Review by Richard Bonanno……………………………………………………………………… 220

The Imprisoned Traveler: Joseph Forsyth and Napoleon’s Italy by Keith Crook

Review by John Paul Russo………………………………………………………………….. 222

Letter from the Editor

Carla A. Simonini

Dear Readers,

It is with great pleasure that we bring you the Summer 2021 issue of Italian Americana! Once again our editorial staff has confronted the difficulties of working remotely and without access to the majority of our administrative support services to produce the collection of scholarly articles, essays, poetry, creative pieces, and book reviews that follow. As I searched for a common theme or motif that connected the various works appearing in this issue, I realized that they represent the mission of Italian Americana in their very diversity. Southern Italy, from which so many Americans of Italian descent trace their lineage, is well represented, but so is the North. Through the image of a lemon our writers evoke the quenching, icy-sweet flavor of granita, in Sicily and Calabria, alongside of the horror and destruction of World War II, tracing a path of suffering and deprivation from Naples to Genoa, through the death camps of Auschwitz and even into the bowels of torpedoed ships docked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard for repair. Our writers similarly traverse from past to present, moving from reflections on how the COVID pandemic has touched our contemporary society to contemplations of a time when, in poet Robert Chianese’s words, “Nonna held the carcass of old ways.”

Our articles include two scholarly treatments of lesser-known writers and works that merit the critical attention that Cristina Di Maio and Luca Lanzilotta afford them. Di Maio’s article focuses on the role that laughter plays in revealing how race, ethnicity, and class inflect the relationships between the La Scala family, illegally indentured Italian agricultural workers, the Hall family, African-American sharecroppers, and their respective plantation overlords, members of the white Hall family, in Mary Bucci Bush’s novel Sweet Hope (2011). The novel offers a rare look at Italian immigration to the American South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where Italians often toiled side-by-side with former slaves. Luca Lanzilotta, meanwhile, examines the autobiographical elements of select novels by Robert Ferro and Felice Picano, both founding members of “The Violet Quill,” a literary club established in the early 1980s to provide its members, all gay men, with support and friendship as they pursued their literary ambitions. Many of the members of The Violet Quill spent extended time in Italy, but Lanzilotta posits that for Ferro and Picano, both Italian Americans, the sojourn in Italy more profoundly affected their emerging identities and the trajectory of their literary careers, with the protagonists of their novels at times acting as stand-ins for their own life experiences. Finally, Italian Americana’s long-time editor, Carol Bonomo Albright, brings us a personal piece in which she reminiscences about her encounters with two ground-breaking Italian-American artists—painter Ralph Fasanella and writer Helen Barolini. She ends her article with an exhortation for us all to remember and celebrate the past geniuses of Italian America, and I would add to that the journal’s commitment to seek out and promote the innovators of Italian America into the future.

To honor the memory of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, our Poetry Editor Maria Terrone has chosen to open the poetry section with a reprint of an article praising Ferlinghetti and his oeuvre by our former poetry editor, Michael Palma. This tribute to Ferlinghetti is followed by an essay and three original poems by this issue’s Featured Poet Janine Puntureri Certo. Her engaging essay exudes the sights, sounds, colors, and smells of the Italian- American table and garden, and while attesting that she is loath to reduce culture to food, she recognizes that food and drink, family narratives, and spirituality are themes that connect her to her Italian-American roots and inform her creative process. The poems featured look back and forth, from visiting her grandparents’ grave to lauding the essential workers that have sustained life during the pandemic. The other poems selected evoke beauty, grace, longing, and a quest for the spiritual, together creating a lyric narrative as much a pleasure to read as to hear spoken aloud.

Our Fiction and Creative Nonfiction section in this issue features a trio of works that vary greatly in style and tone, all skillfully curated by our Fiction Editor Christine Palamidessi. The section opens with Toti O’Brien’s very artful translation of a tribute to Piera Sonnino by Marina Sanfilippo, who calls Sonnino a “writer despite herself.” An Italian Jew and Holocaust survivor, Sonnino wrote about her family history, the imposition of the racial laws, and the subsequent deaths of all her family members at Auschwitz. But she never thought to publish her account, and its availability to us today is almost accidental. O’Brien’s translation will leave one wanting to know more.

The next creative work, a piece of memoir, relates a family history that is in part contemporaneous in time and related in suffering to Sonnino’s. Thomas Maschio’s father, Michael, worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II to repair ships that had been damaged in battle, and watched his daughter die a slow and painful death, knowing he was unable to save her. So as not to leave all to despair, the section ends with some light- hearted relief from Paolo Paciucci. Even the title of his work of short fiction, “The Internet and the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire,” should provoke a smile, one likely to break into laughter as his “mockumentary” provides us with a primer on Roman history as imagined through today’s social media.

Finally, our Book Review section, edited by John Paul Russo, features two extended review essays, the first by former editor Carol Bonomo Albright who provides a detailed examination of Dana Gioia’s most recent book, Studying with Miss Bishop: Memoirs from a Young Writer’s Life (2021). Readers of Italian Americana will recognize Gioia as our poetry editor from 1994 to 2003, when he left to accept President George W. Bush’s appointment to serve as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (from 2003 to 2009). Albright offers a glowing review of how this memoir, in the form of a series of essays, elucidates how encounters with other writers influenced Gioia’s art and led him on the path to becoming one of America’s most acclaimed contemporary poets.

The second review essay, by Ferdinando Fasce, provides an in-depth look at the articles contained in New Italian Migrations to the United States, Vol. 2: Art and Culture since 1945 (2017) edited by Laura E. Ruberto and Joseph Sciorra. This important scholarly collection offers new direction in the field of Italian American Studies by emphasizing the history of Italian immigration from the mid-1970s through the 2010s, and beyond, tackling among other themes the generational and socio-cultural divide between what has traditionally been termed “Italian American” and the “brain drain” emigrants who often eschew the term. The volume features contributions by Sciorra and Ruberto themselves, as well as John Allan Cicala, Simone Cinotto, Teresa Fiore, Incoronata (Nadia) Inserra, and Anthony Julian Tamburri.

The remainder of the Book Review section covers a wide array of genres and forms, including novels, poetry, Italian immigration history, Italian travel and regional cuisine, and even baseball, with a review of Lawrence Baldassaro’s meticulously researched biography of Tony Lazzeri, whom Baldassaro deems a “Yankee Legend and Baseball Pioneer.” The work of Italian immigration history, The Italians of Alabama (2018) by Russell Mario Magnaghi, reviewed by Jeannie Whayne, offers a good historical reference to the period portrayed in the novel Sweet Hope, the subject of DiMaio’s scholarly essay. All in all, our readers are likely to be inspired to purchase and read many of the books we have chosen to review.

My heartfelt gratitude goes out to all our section editors—Maria Terrone, Christine Palamidessi and John Paul Russo—as well as our amazing editorial assistant par excellence, Thomas Slagle, without whose keen skills in layout and copyediting and constant attention to detail the Summer 2021 issue of Italian Americana would not have been possible!