LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF

IL PROGRESSO ITALO-AMERICANO

To the Editor:

I was shown an article you wrote on October 23, 1958, about Columbia University’s Casa Italiana where I served as director from 1930 to 1940. I know well its history and I am one of the few who has the courage to talk about it without fears. Your article is like a corbello [basket] full of a variety of inaccuracies and outright fabrications, which, according to the Italian dictionary, can be also defined as a bunch of corbellerie [howlers]. Allow me please to provide some examples. If you so wish, I could follow up with more, or, as the old saying goes, I could “tackle on to the foodstuff shipment.”

You stated, for instance, that the Società Dante Alighieri[1] was housed in its quarters during the Fascist period and that the Casa degenerated into a propaganda agency. Now, the Dante Alighieri was never housed in Casa Italiana; it never even had an office on its premises, nor I believe it ever held a meeting of its board in those rooms. At most, it organized lectures, concerts and dances the same way as many other associations did, not only Italian and American, but, for instance, even Irish. In one occasion, during the colonial war in Ethiopia,[2] the Dante Alighieri had the gall to organize a lecture supporting the war, with an audience of about forty people. I personally threw them out and they never set foot in the Casa again. You should know these things because in those days the Dante Alighieri was directed by Dr. Italo Falbo[3] who is currently managing editor of the newspaper you are working for, which is also the same publication you were also working for at that time. Moreover, in those very days the Dante Alighieri Society’s headquarters was in Dr. Falbo’s office, that it to say, right where your newspaper is. The Dante Alighieri had no official status as an association: it had no by-laws and no registered fee-paying members. It was basically Dr. Falbo’s private business. What you wrote is even more bizarre since at that time the Progresso Italo-Americano openly supported the Ethiopia campaign and was a source of the kind of propaganda for which you blame Casa Italiana!

You also stated that at the beginning of World War II Italians were excluded from Casa Italiana (“The Casa was closed to Italians.”) I can assure you that this is not true. I could give you a long list of witnesses to back me up. Casa Italiana remained open to everyone, Italians and non-Italians, and even to black people. And how could Casa Italiana sort out Italians from Americans or people of other nationalities? After all, thank god, Italians aren’t black or yellow. Were Italians required to hang a bell around their necks, like lepers in the Middle Ages? Or, maybe, should have they worn a yellow ribbon like Jews in Rome? Where did you see the edict that shut Italians out of the Casa? In case you were tempted to change the terminology stating that you meant to say “Italian Americans,” not “Italians,” that would be even worse. All Italian Americans always found open doors at Casa Italiana.

You also state that Casa Italiana “has finally reopened its doors” just because it has recently hosted the musical company of a friend of yours that performed La Wally.[4] Again, I can assure you that those doors were always open, except during the university-scheduled academic vacations. Since it looks like you wrote a couple of articles full of inaccuracies, I beg you to look up an Italian dictionary and choose an adjective that fits your work. You have also neglected to mention the main goal of Casa Italiana. First of all, the Casa was not “donated to Columbia University to host people looking for an oasis of peace, to nourish the spirit with the most beautiful things and elevate the soul toward the mystery of art, poetry and music,” as you wrote. I have no idea where you found those swooning, cutesy words. Its goal is much more serious and, most of all, very clearly defined. Casa Italiana was donated to Columbia University by a number of donors in order to make available to the university a venue where the language, literature and history of Italy could be taught in a supporting environment. It was not created for singers, dancers and people in search of an oasis of peace. Rather, it was created for students who wanted to study, and, as a matter of fact, hundreds of students have gone through those halls. Some of them now teach Italian in American universities and colleges. Hundreds of dissertations on literature and philosophy have been drafted in those rooms. Here the Repertorio bibliografico della storia e della critica della letteratura italiana[5] was born, a work that is owned by the most important libraries in the world, and that you, I bet, so busy contemplating the “mystery of art,” never looked up even once.

In the Italian magazine Il Borghese, Vol. 7, n. 47, I showed how Il Progresso Italo-Americano is written in an Italian language that is often ridiculous and false. I also exposed its poor quality: it’s full of typos, layout mistakes, history and geography blunders. It’s a slapdash job. Not long ago, I read the announcement of a banquet sponsored by an Italian American society in honor of an Italian general who “having enlisted as a private in 1915”[6] later became “commander of the Third and Fourth Army Corps.” Apparently none of the editors realized that this was simply impossible. In reality the poor sap was a modest colonel who, as is customary, on the day of his retirement was promoted to the rank of general, but who never had the intention to steal the job from the duke of Aosta.[7]

This is the kind of disinformation you perpetrate against your readers in the belief that they must be much more ignorant than they really are. In the meantime you serve to the public swoony speeches like the one on Casa Italiana about whose past and present you know very little. On top of that, the little you know is all wrong. I am not going to lower myself by asking that my letter be published in your paper as would be my right. I really don’t care about what you write and I can live happily without a correction.

Devotedly yours,

New York, November 12, 1956