<\/a>Letter from the Editor<\/h2>\nCarla A. Simonini<\/h3>\n
Dear Readers:<\/p>\n
As I sit to write this letter, I am amazed that we are about to bring the Winter 2021 issue to press, not only on time but featuring fine selections in all of our editorial categories. This was no small task given how much the COVID restrictions in effect on the campus of Loyola University Chicago have continued to present challenges to the journal\u2019s operations. I am, therefore, very proud to present our readers with an exceptional array of scholarly articles, an exquisite selection of original poems, a wide range of book reviews, and most notably two nonfiction works from our own editor for fiction and creative nonfiction, Christine Palamidessi (Moore). In this issue, we are celebrating the publication of Christine\u2019s latest book, Bridge of Love: a story of young love, immigration, family, hope <\/em>(2020), which commemorates the 100-year anniversary of her grandparents\u2019 courtship and eventual immigration to the United States. Christine has also recently donated her grandparents\u2019 letters and other materials to the John Heinz History Center\u2019s Italian American Collection in Pittsburgh, and she and her husband have established an endowment for Italian Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Collectively, these gestures represent an act of love born from the desire to honor and preserve Italian-American history on a very personal level. We invite our readers to draw inspiration from the ways that Christine has chosen to celebrate her Italian ancestry, both in her creative life and her philanthropic actions.<\/p>\nThis issue features a trio of scholarly articles, two of which explore Italian-American literature and the other examining the influence of a sixteenth century Italian philosopher and writer, Niccol\u00f2 Machiavelli, on contemporary American and Italian-American cinema, Broadway, television, and video gaming. The latter article, written by Anthony Santaro, skillfully and somewhat unexpectedly connects Chazz Palminteri and Robert DeNiro\u2019s A Bronx Tale <\/em>with the Netflix series House of Cards <\/em>and the video game Assassins Creed<\/em>. The articles focusing on literature approach writers whose works were published on opposite ends of the twentieth century. Leonardo Buonomo\u2019s work features Antonio Arrighi\u2019s autobiography The Story of Antonio, the Galley-Slave <\/em>(1911), perhaps the earliest Italian immigrant work to be published in English in the US. Nanyi Zhou\u2019s article, meanwhile, focuses on Frank Lentricchia\u2019s novel The Music of the Inferno<\/em>, published in 1999. While Buonomo argues that Arrighi\u2019s work represents a carefully constructed portrayal of his Italian self for the purpose of garnering the respect and acceptance of his assumed Anglo-American reader, Zhou analyzes the narrative strategies through which Lentricchia exposes how the ethnic pride expressed by later generation Italian Americans, especially those who have achieved a high level of social integration and economic success, can be vapid, self-serving, and potentially dangerous.<\/p>\nQuestions of identity and the quest for the Italian ethnic self imbue the two selections by Christine Palamidessi (Moore), \u201cThe Melodeon\u201d and \u201cThe Man We Would Have Called Nonno.\u201d The man whose love letters Christine has donated to the Heinz Museum died before she ever got a chance to meet him, and while the young Christine is reminded by the rest of the family that Joe Frediani, her grandmother\u2019s second husband, is not her \u201creal\u201d grandfather, she can\u2019t help but be swept up by the strains of the Italian polkas he plays on the Melodeon. She remembers him as the ancestor that brought the family together, despite their not being bound by blood. In her second story she reconstructs her \u201creal\u201d grandfather\u2019s story and illustrates how she is the inheritor of a legacy born of hard and dangerous work, shaped by the relationship between hunger and foodways, and forged through the ability to persevere in the face of the unexpected exigencies of life.<\/p>\n
This issue\u2019s featured poet, Donna Masini, meanwhile, explores her own relationship to her Italian-American identity through the metaphor of a lasagna, the distinct layers of flavors of which blend together into one delicious bite. While she notes that she writes less about <\/em>her Catholic, working class, and Italian-American roots, she recognizes how they continue to inform her work. It is her soffritto<\/em>, she writes, \u201cmy simmering base . . . and I am never out of the heat of it.\u201d The poetry section includes three original poems by Donna Masini, and twelve other poems from nine different Italian-American poets. Due to the exceptionally high quality of the poems we received in this publication cycle, editor Maria Terrone elected to include more than one selection from some of our selected poets.<\/p>\nFinally, our Book Review section once again features a wide variety of works, including history, literary criticism, film studies, cultural analysis, poetry collections, and a review of Christine Palamidessi (Moore)\u2019s aforementioned family saga Bridge of Love<\/em>. Editor John Paul Russo has included books written in English as well as Italian and has drawn upon an international group of scholars and writers to contribute to the section.<\/p>\nIn conclusion, my heartfelt thanks goes out to all the section editors for their continuing hard work and dedication: Maria Terrone, Christine Palamidessi (Moore), and John Paul Russo. Special thanks goes also to our editorial assistant extraordinaire Tom Slagle, without whose constant attention to and support for all the journal\u2019s administrative needs, layout, and final proofing we would never have been able to bring the current issue to press.<\/p>\n
Sincerely,<\/p>\n
Carla A. Simonini Editor-in-chief<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Table of Contents Letter from the Editor………………………………………………………………… v Notes on Contributors………………………………………………………………. ix Articles From Drummer Boy to Missionary: Culture, Religion, and Identity in Antonio Andrea Arrighi\u2019s The Story of Antonio, the Galley-Slave (1911) Leonardo Buonomo…………………………………………………………… 1 Modern Machiavelli Anthony Santaro…………………………………………………………….. 19 Embodying Italian-American Ethnicity in Frank Lentricchia\u2019s The Music of the Inferno Nanyi Zhou……………………………………………………………………. 29 … <\/p>\n
+ Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archived-journals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/italianamericana\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/italianamericana\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/italianamericana\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/italianamericana\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/italianamericana\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1638"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/italianamericana\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1638\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/italianamericana\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/italianamericana\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/italianamericana\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}