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REVIEWS For Cassandra Vivian, Vivian Pelini Sansone, and Elizabeth Parigi Vivian,Valerie Martone and Robert L. Martone,Agnes Rossi, Lola Romanucci-Ross, Hermann W. Haller, Laura Anna Stortoni and Mary Prentice Lillie, and Paula DiPerna Cassandra
Vivian, Vivian Pelini Sansone, and Elizabeth Parigi Vivian. Immigrant’s Kitchen: Italian.
Monessen, PA: Trade Routes Enterprises, 1993. Pp. 307. One of the signs of
the growth of a culture is the literature that it creates out of the material
that once depended solely on word of mouth for survival. While it can be said
that Italian food has fared much better in America than has Italian/American
literature, the memory of how to prepare that food has often been co-opted by
professional gourmets. As the generations progress in America, one of the
problems we face is a dissolution of the memory of how to prepare the foods
that contributed to the creation of an Italian/American identity. A key
antidote to this appropriation and to the fading memory is the creation of
regional cookbooks by the children and grandchildren of the original
immigrants. This is what
Cassandra Vivian, Vivian Pelini Sansone, and Elizabeth Parigi Vivian have
done in Immigrants Kitchen: Italian.
Beyond providing a simple list of recipes from the Tuscan region, they have
combined personal narratives along with cultural history to create an
interesting context for their collection. This collection is as much
autobiography as it is cookbook, and as such it makes for a book that is as
much at home in a reading room as it would be in the kitchen. Besides
recounting family stories, the authors have included a brief introduction to
Tuscan cooking which explains how the Tuscans came to be called Toscani mangiafagioli and orients the
reader to the peculiarities of Tuscan gastronomy. Interesting additions
are the sections entitled “The Immigrant Year,” “Shopping all Italiana,” and
“Our Italian Kitchen.” The first is a shortened version of what Helen
Barolini did so well in Festa, this
survey of the months of the year and the food that would accompany individual
celebrations, provides a sense of the foods as integral parts of annual
rituals and holidays. “Shopping allitaliania” is an orientation to the tools
and ingredients used in preparing the recipes. “Our Italian Kitchen” presents
some key advice which comes from “Eighty years of good Tuscan cooking.” The heart of the book
is of course the recipes that are presented in an easy-to-follow manner and
organized according to appetizers, beverages, breads, desserts, fish and
game, meats, omelets, pasta, poultry, rice, salads, sauces, soups,
vegetables, with the grand finale being the Grand Mixed Fry. Included is a
short bibliography and an Italian and English index. The authors are to be
commended for not only providing a way of renewing a true sense of Tuscan
culture in the United States, but, for enabling the continuation of its
tradition into the future. Columbia
College, Chicago Valerie
Martone and Robert L. Martone, eds. and trans. Renaissance Comic Tales of Love,
Treachery, and Revenge. New York: Italica Press, 1994. Pp. 211. I have but one
quibble with this anthology and that is its title. This is a collection of
sixteen tales by masters of the Italian Renaissance, including Bandello,
Sermini, Grazzini, and Lorenzo de’ Medici. Since these Italian writers
launched a new genre which would influence prose writing beyond Italy and
beyond their century, why not give Italy credit for sowing the seeds of the
European novel and drama? Aside from this, I enjoyed the diversity of the
offerings and the excellent choice of representative authors. The editors remind us
it was Castiglione who singled out man from other animals as an animal
capable of laughing, and that a person who can provoke laughter is to be
praised. Popular collections of tales were significant for they appealed to
a newly literate mercantile class, provided pleasant entertainment to a
non-courtly audience, and became the repository of popular culture in the
language of the people. Freed from Latin, unshackled from previous goals of
providing a moral or logical lesson, Italian writers relished this “novella,”
for the form was truly a “new thing.” This genre examined man’s capacity for
duplicity, revenge and treachery, elevating the skills of the trickster to
new heights. The stories began as ways to prolong the time around the dinner
table, but their popularity extended beyond the bounds of Renaissance Italy. The best of these novelle are the seeds of great works,
for their plots and their characters were adapted (or ransacked, according
to one critic), by contemporary French and English writers, especially for
the sixteenth-century stage. “The influence of Renaissance Italian tales on
European literature was profound because here we discover the important roots
of narrative fiction, which was to become one of the most significant forms
of post-medieval literature” (xv). The anthology
contains a brief introduction to and a discussion of the new form and its
impact. There are brief biographies of the authors, a glossary, illustrations
from the original sources, and a selected bibliography of primary and
secondary readings in case your appetite is whetted for more. The stories are
amusing, entertaining, sometimes silly but always reflective of the human
condition. The titles alone, i.e. Salernitano’s “How Viola Tried to Satisfy
Her Three Lovers on the Same Night” pique our curiosity. The translations are
true to the original, reflecting the richness, bawdiness and colloquialisms
of the vulgar (in both senses of this word) language. Columbia
College Chicago Agnes
Rossi. Split Skirt.
New York: Random House, 1994. Hardcover. Pp. 223.[1] In Agnes Rossi’s
fiction Italian/American ethnicity acquires a conspicuous role by virtue of
its absence. Rossi’s first book, Athletes
and Artists (Persea, 1987), shied away from any overt recognition of the
author’s ethnic background. The Quick:
A Novella and Stories (Norton, 1992) acknowledged the italianità of the protagonist of “The
Quick,” appropriately named Marie Russo, but carefully avoided traditional
Italian/American narratives. In that book, Italian/American ethnicity
appears more as an accident of life, one that both the characters and the
narrative willfully remove from their consciousness (see my review of The Quick, VIA 4.2 [1993]). Such a
problematic representation of ethnicity as absence differs from the complete
omission of Italian/American references in works by authors or directors of
Italian descent who relinquish all ties with the ethnic past (Frank Capra is
perhaps one of the most telling examples). Scattered references to
Italian/American ethnicity as well as the portrayal of marginal figures
express Rossi’s concern with fashioning new narratives that aptly articulate
the relationship among self-definition, gender, and ethnicity within the
postmodern debate on identity, authenticity, and authority. Split Skirt,
her first novel, deepens the author’s search for such narratives. It tells
the story of two married women, Rita, a street-smart twenty-seven year old,
and Mrs. Tyler, an upper-middle class woman in her fifties from suburbia, who
meet in a place one might think most unlikely to foster friendship, the
Bergen County Jail in New Jersey, in which the two women must spend three
days, Rita for drunk driving and possession of cocaine, and Mrs. Tyler for
one of her escapades as a seemingly incurable cleptomaniac. Beautifully
written and extremely readable, the novel relies on an artfully constructed
narrative structure. Abandoning the third- and first-person narrative perspectives
of her earlier works, Rossi creates a “split” narrative, a series of
alternating sections in which the two characters take turns telling their
stories, simultaneously playing the parts of author and audience. This
narrative disrupts the possibility of an exclusively “self”-centered
authorial power, while it also suggests that these characters link their own
self-authorization as storytellers to the validation they receive from each
other. Much like the
multivoiced narratives by such writers as Amy Tan, Alice Walker, Cristina
Garcia, and Toni Morrison, Rossi’s dialogic narrative rejects an exclusive
narratorial power in favor of a decentered narrative—one that establishes an
egalitarian narratorial situation, in which neither roles nor identities are
fixed. If the dual narrative perspective of Split Skirt enables both characters to tell their stories, and
thus embark upon a process of self-exploration and self-creation, such a
process also reveals the malleable and shifting qualities of the self. Indeed
the novel posits an intersubjectivity that frees the characters from
patriarchal paradigms. Extricating themselves from their dependence on
various relationships—with parents, husbands, boyfriends, children,
friends—and revisiting memories of their past, Rita and Mrs. Tyler forge an
interdependence, a relationship based on mutuality, in which neither woman
plays a static role. Though the childless Rita feels protective, almost maternal
towards the older Mrs. Tyler, the novel rejects the selflessness implicit in
the mother-daughter relationship sanctioned by the patriarchy, and relies
instead on female friendship, creating a sisterhood which never stifles the
other’s voice and always acknowledges her difference. The Other also appears
in Split Skirt as Luz, the Hispanic
teenage prostitute who speaks in her own first-person narrative section near
the end of the novel. Spoken and written in anOther language, this section
nevertheless acknowledges the connections among these women. Luz’s connection
to Rita and her role as a “sister,” anOther sister, empowers her to
participate in the narrative space Rita and Mrs. Tyler have been forging
together. Appropriately, Rossi dedicates the novel to her own “sisters.” Luz’s voice
represents a departure from the multivoiced narratives created by so-called
“ethnic” authors. Typically such narratives create a space which, in
privileging certain voices, also establishes an exclusionary ethnic space
(for example, Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck
Club, Toni Morrison’s Beloved,
Alice Walker’s The Color Purple).
While the text overtly recognizes Mrs. Tyler’s Irishness, it withholds Rita’s
Italianness, the only overt references to her ethnicity having not “survived
the final edit” of the novel. Yet Italian ethnicity emerges in the disturbing
portrayal of Judy Gennaro, Mrs. Tyler’s neighbor and friend. The relationship
between these two women plays a crucial role in Mrs. Tyler’s own search for
selfhood and provides her with an opportunity to experiment with female
friendship. If Rossi employs the dialogue between her two protagonists as
the means by which to establish a conversation between her own Irish and
Italian ethnicity, the inclusion of Luz signals an effort to enlarge the
ethnic/ authorial space and to create a narrative that emphasizes not
sameness and consensus, but difference and communication. Experimenting with
and expanding the genre of the multicultural novel, Split Skirt privileges each character’s otherness, both maintaining
and healing the “split.” Rossi constructs voices that, while originating from
different places, come together in a narrative that rejects unity and
resolution, opting instead for diversity and openness. Her narrators do not
remain trapped in narrative “cells”: by listening and responding to each
other, they transform the punitive and depersonalizing prison house into a
“home” in which they establish themselves as the powerful storytellers of a
shared narrative. The third-person narrative of the last section acts as a
removed camera-eye that records the two protagonists’ re-union outside the
county jail, and thus offers a resolution which may appear at first somewhat
contrived. Yet the artifice works astonishingly well in Rossi’s exploration of
the narrative voice. The seemingly omniscient narrative gaze does not come
across as an all-powerful, controlling device, but instead suggests
unlimited possibilities for the inventive storytelling of this gifted
author. Union
College In The Quick, a novella and short stories,
Agnes Rossi inserted only the lightest hints of the ethnicity of her characters.
Nevertheless, critics Mary Jo Bona and Edvige Giunta found much to say
regarding Rossi’s connection to a distinctive Italian/American literary
tradition. According to Bona, “Although a story of ethnicity is not Agnes
Rossi’s concern in this narrative, her sustained response to loss and death
in both the novella and short stories relate well to the Italian/American
literary tradition.” Bona found Rossi’s use of illness to be a way to
“explore the effects of internalizing feelings of cultural inferiority.”
Giunta found that Rossi’s publishing debut “captures the ambivalent role of
ethnicity.” “Uprooting oneself from one’s own ethnicity,” writes Giunta, “is
analogous to suppressing memory.” While the connections
to Italian/American culture are even more tenuous in her latest writing,
Rossi expands her exploration of cultural inferiority by examining its role
in determining one’s self identity. In Split
Skirt, her first novel, Rossi tells the story of an encounter between two
women who find themselves in jail for a weekend. Rita is in her late twenties
and trapped inside a failing marriage to a man she snatched while he was on
the rebound from a divorce. She had hopes that this marriage would
straighten her out. When it doesn’t, she finds herself nearly raped by a man
she flirts with in a bar after work, and is arrested for drunk driving and
cocaine possession. Her cellmate is Mrs. Tyler, an upper-class woman in her
early fifties who is sentenced to a weekend stint for her bad habit of
shoplifting. That she can afford anything she wants, makes no difference.
That her husband might even have the pull necessary to avoid jail, makes her
all the more willing to do time for her crime. These two opposites are
assigned to the same cell and in the course of three days create a friendship
by exchanging their life stories. Rossi has crafted a
marvelous tale of two women whose lives have been determined by men. Because
of their dependence on men for their identities, they have given up control
over their own destinies. Through this brief encounter, they learn who they
are by telling their stories to each other. In the process, they each grow
stronger than they’ve ever been. By confessing intimate details of their
lives, they gain control of their destinies. Split Skirt
strikes at the heart of what makes and breaks relationships precisely
because it never dwells on the ethnic specific issues that can lead a writer
into history and away from story. There is one interesting interlude of the
Italian/American experience through Mrs. Tyler’s neighbor, Judy Gennaro, who
becomes her best friend until Mrs. Tyler introduces her to shoplifting.
Judy was the “leader of the pack” of suburban women, who influenced both
fashion and behavior. Unlike the other wives, Judy defies her husband and is
not afraid to fight for her way. While Judy and her husband’s shouting
matches and fights cause neighbors to talk, Mrs. Tyler finds meaning in her
life as a woman through her friend. Mrs. Tyler’s husband makes her feel
“inept” and “frivolous”; Judy makes her feel “smart and capable.” The next
time Mrs. Tyler feels this way is years later when she meets Rita in jail. Rossi uses
alternating chapters to keep the story moving from one woman’s life to the
next. She reminds us that whom we choose to tell the truth to can make a big
difference in our lives. And sometimes, it’s easier to do so to those who are
entire strangers, those we know we won’t see again. But what happens when
those we thought would always be strangers, start becoming our best friends?
That’s the twist that Rossi uses to heighten the intensity of this encounter. Rossi, whose ethnic
background is Irish and Italian/American, focuses her narration less on her
characters’ ethnicity by exploring the effects that class and gender have on
shaping lives. Both Rita and Mrs. Tyler, while coming from different worlds,
create a third world to share by revealing the actions that lead each into
this prison. As the cell they inhabit becomes their home, the tales they
share enable them to create a new sense of sisterhood that both were denied
in their pasts. When Rita is beaten by a guard, Mrs. Tyler uses hundred
dollar bills she had sewn into her waistband to bribe her way into the
infirmary to comfort Rita. They learn to like each other because they listen
to each other. Each conversation takes them deeper into their pasts and
strengthens the bond between them. What Rossi does so well in this novel is
demonstrate the ability of storytelling to create new relationships and heal
old wounds. And Rossi’s skills as a storyteller make Split Skirt good reading for us all. Columbia
College, Chicago Lola
Romanucci-Ross. One
Hundred Towers: An Italian Odyssey of Cultural Survival. Bergin &
Garvey, 1991. Pp. 226. After years of
fieldwork in remote areas of the world, anthropologist Lola Romanucci-Ross,
in One Hundred Towers, returns to
her parents’ central Italian homeland of Ascoli Piceno, where an ostensible
encounter with the other quickly becomes a confrontation with her own
Ascolani identity. In this ethnography of the lives and people of Ascoli
Piceno, city of one hundred towers, and the surrounding hilltop villages of the
region, Romanucci-Ross explores the dynamic between culture and personality
by examining popular history, kinship, the lives of saints, the uses and
meanings of Piceno speech, folk medical practices, and the popular Quintana
festa, a modern medieval reenacment. The author’s early training and work
with Claude Levi-Strauss, Erich Fromm, and Margaret Mead significantly
informs the book’s central concerns—the influence of mythic thought on
behavior, personality development, childrearing techniques, and issues of
cultural persistence and change. With its main focus on the village of
Malva,[2] Romanucci-Ross’s mother’s birthplace, One Hundred Towers seeks, above all,
to understand the personal and cultural strategies of survival in a country
whose identity has been shaped by centuries of conquest and foreign rule. The first part of the
book begins with a look at the remembered past, people’s meaningful and
selective reading of history, in an attempt to understand how such
collectively negotiated frames of reference influence behavior in the
present. Romanucci-Ross discusses origin stories, celebrated Piceno folk
heros, and various historical epochs that include the Roman period, feudalism,
Spanish rule, and WWII. This odyssey of collective memory also reaches back
into Romanucci-Ross’s immigrant past and her hyphenated ethnic experience. In
her personal quest “for ethnic identity, for a culture, and a self” (12)
Romanucci-Ross remarks, “I am my informants” and describes her identity as
the product of her father’s vision of the “ideal Italian” combined with her
mother’s more cynical, village-based notions of culture, all filtered through
the lense of American society. Romanucci-Ross
devotes a great deal of attention to the kinship term ceppo, literally trunk, which she translates as stem family. This
patrilineal structure is a source of strife and intense debate in Malva and
deeply shapes familial expectations and behavior within the community. In her
analyses of the incorporation of newlyweds into the stem family,
Romanucci-Ross explores the subtle interpersonal power struggles between
mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. Her treatment of such issues provides
great insight into the ways people try to alter and even substantially change
collectively agreed upon rules in order to achieve specific goals. In such
instances one sees the unique, idiosyncratic working out of culture in
action. In this view, the individual is a historical actor with choices and
responses to inherited cultural conditions that, to use Marx's phrase, are
not of one’s own making, but which one inevitably reproduces, redefines, and
changes. One of the most
interesting chapters in this book represents the lives of Saints as
“personality types to be emulated” (98). Romanucci-Ross focuses on cherished
saints like Santa Rita, a popular Catholic martyr who is rewarded for
suffering at the hands of an abusive husband by being allowed to enter a
convent to serve God, despite her unvirginal status. The moral lesson that
the women of Piceno draw from Santa Rita’s life highlights pious acceptance
of one’s fate, the virtues of forgiveness, and the belief that one will
eventually triumph over hardship through divine intervention. The lives of
saints or dissenters, like Cecco Ascolani who was burned at the stake for his
beliefs, also offer meaningful and purposive metaphors for thinking about
human experience. These metaphors, she maintains, provide ways of meditating
upon life that ultimately impel us toward future action. This study also
examines the uses and meaning of Piceno speech, conversational styles, and
people’s manipulation of dialect in different situations to convey what
Romanucci-Ross refers to as an “emotional tone.” The notion that “dialects
are eroticized, highly charged with affection, emotion and involvement”
(127) is an experience to which I can relate as a speaker of the Abruzzese
dialect. The discussion of folk cures and practices and the significance of
body metaphors in women’s medical life histories are remarkably interesting
and provocative. The illness narratives, compelling accounts of how women
combine affective states with bodily experiences, alone are worth reading, Throughout the book
Romanucci-Ross moves from descriptions of individual situations and events to
broader questions of cultural practices and attitudes in Piceno society.
While the descriptions of individual behavior, on the one hand, and the cultural
ideas or ethos, on the other hand, certainly contribute to our understanding
of the different elements of Piceno identity and life, it is not always clear
how these parts relate to each other or why she chooses the level of analyses
that she does. For example, why does the author discuss the “the elderly” as
a generic category as opposed to describing specific elderly people, as she
does in the section on children, or as situated groups? Why is the comparaggio practice represented as a
collective set of ideas when married life is depicted in short vignettes
about specific couples? Her broad cultural generalizations are the product of
nearly two decades of fieldwork and offer a powerful understanding of Piceno
culture; however, I was often mystified by her abrupt and unexplained shift
from the abstract cultural systems to concretly lived experience. In the last chapters
Romanucci-Ross examines various life cycle rituals: birth, communion, death,
harvest celebrations, and the Quintana festa.
The period of carnevale, Fat
Tuesday, is discussed in terms of transgression and role inversion. The
issues of childhood socialization and Piceno identity are further explored
in Romanucci-Ross’s analyses of idiomatic sayings and sermon inscriptions on
doorways. Romanucci-Ross believes these cultural artifacts shed light on what
Piceno culture deems desirable behavior. These expressive forms are believed
to be the pedagogical tools through which one learns the mechanisms for
social survival—the tight management of self which is required to “affect
proper, disinvoltura, that highly
prized stance of interest tempered by emotional detachment” (189). These
skills, she argues, are a matter of personal and cultural survival, especially
in light of the region’s history of political domination. One Hundred Towers
is the work of a probing mind, an original thinker whose scholarship
skillfully unravels the grammar of Piceno culture by looking to the fuzzier,
more ambiguous areas social life. Wonderfully suggestive, this ethnography
finds complex bundles of meaning in the most unexpected places of social
interaction and is filled with rich and nuanced insight. This book is a
welcomed contribution to the discourse on European anthropology and will
benefit folklorists, historians, and Italianists as well as nonscholarly
audiences who are interested in Italy. Indiana
University Hermann
W. Haller. Una
lingua perduta e ritrovata: l’italiano degli italo-americani. Firenze: La
Nuova Italia, 1993. Pp. 200. Negli ultimi decenni si
è verificato un incremento d’interesse nel campo dello studio
dell’italo-americano. Hermann W. Haller, professore ordinario di italiano al
Queens College ed al Graduate Center della CUNY, in questo suo libro, ci
presenta una breve storia contemporanea della lingua italiana d’oltremare. Dato il suo stile
molto conciso e chiaro, l’uso raro di termini troppo tecnici e l’eliminazione
della tradizionale retorica presente in molti testi di questo genere, il
libro si presta alla lettura di chiunque sia interessato a questo campo di
ricerca. Haller riesce molto efficacemente a trasmettere quelli che, secondo
me, sono i due messaggi principali della sua opera. Il primo è che la
conoscenza di una lingua, come per esempio l’italiano, richiede uno studio
accurato delle forme che essa assume al di là dei confini della propria
nazione; il secondo è che queste varie forme parlate, una volta fuori dai
confini del paese d’origine, tendono a semplificarsi. Esse perdono alcune
caratteristiche che ai parlanti emigrati non servono al fine della
comunicazione immediata, ma che vengono conservate in patria data una
situazione sociale più stabile. Haller osserva che la
lingua italiana d’oltremare manifesta di avere una duplice identità, e cioè,
quella di “lingua di cultura,” considerata senza dubbio una varietà
prestigiosa, e quella di “lingua etnica,” marchiata negativamente, a volte
perfino dai suoi stessi parlanti. Haller cerca di affrontare questo conflitto
attraverso lo studio della condizione sociale e linguistica degli emigrati.
Il suo è quindi uno studio primariamente a sfondo sociologico, durante il
quale egli esamina le varie prospettive sociali degli italo-americani,
mettendone in evidenze l’influenza sulla lingua parlata di quest’ultimi. I
vari dati che vengono analizzati ed ullustrati sono basati sulle comunità
italo-americane che risiedono nell’area metropolitana di New York,
statisticamente area di maggiore concentrazione del suddetto gruppo. Il libro
è diviso in due parti: la prima dedicata alla varietà parlata, e la seconda
invece a quella scritta. Haller esamina una larga gamma di temi. Il primo
capitolo tratta della formazione della “lingua franca” italo-americana e ne
esamina le caratteristiche fonologiche, morfosintattiche, e lessicali delle
diverse varietà parlate nelle comunità dell’area metropolitana di New York.
Il secondo capitolo tratta della distribuzione di queste varietà, e cioè dell’uso
diverso che ne fanno in base all’ambiente in cui ci si trova: famiglia,
scuola, lavoro, contesti affettivi, ecc. Il terzo capitolo, invece, è
dedicato all’atteggiamento linguistico della popolazione italo-americana nei
confronti del dialetto, dell’italiano dialettale o dell’inglese. Nel capitolo
quarto viene discussa la tendenza ad impiegare sempre meno l’italiano nel
settore dei mass-media, e soprattutto nell radio e nella stampa, mentre il
quinto capitolo è dedicato ad un’analisi del Progresso Italo-Americano verso la fine degli anni settanta.
Infine, il sesto ed ultimo capitolo tratta il problema degli italianismi
contemporanei, che a differenza del passato, oggi sono nella maggior parte
dei casi ristretti al settore gastronomico. Della lettura di
questo lavoro halleriano non appare comunque chiaro ciò che l’autore
considera la lingua parlata dagli italo-americani. Egli, infatti, usa termini
come “pidgin,” “lingua franca,” e “varietà mista” quasi sinonimamente,
rendendo difficile lo stabilire di una definizione. Sarebbe stato molto più
efficace se avesse stabilito sin dall’inizio una definizione, e poi continuato
ad usare quel termine, così da evitare confusione agli occhi del lettore. Complessivamente, Una lingua perduta e ritrovata merita
di essere aggiunto alla lista di autorevoli studi in questo campo di ricerca.
Il lettore, dunque, dovrebbe considerare questo libro non come testo di
lettura di ricerca empirica, bensì come una valutazione umanitaria e
comprensiva della società italo-americana. SUNY at
Stony Brook Gaspara Stampa. Selected Poems. Edited
and Translated by Laura Anna Stortoni and Mary Prentice Lillie. New York:
Italica Press, l994. Pp. 237. How is it that
Gaspara Stampa, considered by Europeans “the greatest woman poet of the
Italian Renaissance . . . the greatest Italian woman poet ever,” is
largely unknown in the United States? The question evokes
issues of ethnic history, gender, and culture. Is Gaspara Stampa unknown in
the United States because—inspite of the glories of the Italian Renaissance
and the cultural and political significance of contemporary Italy—departments
of Italian are often at the bottom of academic hierarchies of languages and
literatures? Is this superb woman poet unappreciated because Italian Studies
and Renaissance Studies remain masculinist in faculty and curriculum? Is
Gaspara Stampa, who anticipated many themes of contemporary feminism,
unincluded in syllabi of Women’s Studies courses because of Anglo-centeredness? These are all
questions to contemplate. At this point we can thank Laura Anna Stortoni and
Mary Prentice Lillie for this excellent translation and study of Gaspara
Stampa’s poetry, an edition that enables the reader to go beyond the primary
question that has concerned masculinist literary critics, “was she a
courtesan?” Gaspara Stampa
reversed the gender pattern of troubadour and Petrarchan love: she yearned after her beloved. If,
states Laura Stortoni, “it is true that in every love there is a lover and a
beloved, and that the lover is more important than the beloved, Stampa
certainly took the leading role in her relationship with Collaltino di
Collalto, and he remained no more than the object of her passion, whose
existence was to provide the emotion and inspiration for her muse.” Gaspara’s rhetorical
flights into her unworthiness before her object of love reminds me, as she
has others, of Santa Teresa before her object of love (Jesus, in the case of
Teresa), but the poet’s realism keeps obtruding. Upwardly aspiring out of the
middle class, she speaks of the . . .
great love Granted to me, and
such a splendid lord So I could walk as
equal to that lady. Lauding Collaltino
extravagantly, ascribing to him perfection, style, judgment, beauty, grace, and
eloquence—yet realism, that deepened in the course of a relationship in which
she burned for him and he did not burn for her, keeps coming in. The moon,
said Gaspara, had made “his heart colder than my warm desire.” Evoking the
aryan invaders who raped and pillaged the harmonious civilization of the
goddess, she describes Collaltino as the very figure of warlike glory, blond,
tall, and “cruel.” Gaspara’s poetry is
timeless: I burnt, I wept, I
sang—burn, weep and sing, And I shall weep,
burn, sing forever more (Until Death, Time,
or Fortune wash away My talent, eyes,
heart, style, my fire and tears). The timelessness, as
in all great poetry, has ancient echoes. Gaspara half remembers the
prechristian nurturant/destructive goddess and associates her only with
death: . . . I
call her who makes the world turn pale And with her scythe
fulfills the final sentence, Ancient and
contemporary, Stampa recalls 2500 years of women’s history, “. . .
I was abused by you so harshly. . . .” The poet survived the
abuse and transmuted the ore—dashing heated meters of Petrarchan love into
the cold water of mordant, and poignant, realism to create burnished poetry. O Count, fountain
of valor—and deception. I accuse Love, and
equally acuse Him whom I love. Transmuting the pain
of her lover’s indifference into advice for “Young ladies, you who still enjoy your freedom,” she urged them to recognize love as a . . .
burning feeling, vain desire For empty shadows,
self-imposed deception, Setting your own
well-being in disregard; Seeking, despite
yourself, until exhaustion, That which you
never find, or if you find it, Once had, it brings
regrets and evil days. *** The beauty of the
Italian language gleams from this dual language edition of selected poems of
Gaspara Stampa, Io son da
l’aspettar omai si’ stanca, si’ vinta dal dolor
e dal disio, per la si’ poca
fede e molto oblio di chi del suo
tornar, lassa, mi manca, . . . while
the English translation keeps the melody and the integrity of the Italian
text. A Renaissance painting,
Antonio Pollaiolo’s Portrait of a Young
Lady, on the cover leads the reader into Laura Anna Stortoni’s scholarly
introduction and into Gaspara Stampa’s poetry. Notes, bibliography, and a
first-line index enhance our appreciation of the great woman poet here
presented to the English-speaking world for the first time by Laura Anna
Stortoni and Mary Prentice Lillie. Berkeley,
California Paula
DiPerna. The Discoveries
of Mrs. Christopher Columbus: His Wife’s Version. New York: Permanent
Press, 1994. Pp. 287. During the past few
years we have seen a variety of works about Christopher Columbus. As the “patron
saint” of immigrants in the United States and the one person honored and upheld
by Italian Americans as a symbol of discovery and ingenuity, the furor over
Columbus, his life, his exploits, and his dealings with native peoples have
severed many relationships between Italian Americans. Some cannot abandon
Columbus and all he has come to stand for in their eyes. Others cannot forget
or forgive the damage, death, and annihilation that the landing of the
Europeans meant to native peoples. DiPerna presents a
unique glimpse of Columbus in her new novel, one written from his wife’s
point of view. When reading this kind of novel, we as readers must abandon
what we know to consider other avenues of adventure. This includes rethinking
history. Can we believe that Dona Felipa Moniz e Perestrello in that
tumultuous fifteenth century could have actually smuggled Cristoforo Columbo
into her room at a convent school in Portugal? Can we believe that she
actually helped Columbo devise the plan that they called “The Enterprise.” Or
that Felipa, if on the ship, went ashore in the new land dubbed by her
husband as the Indies and felt one with the gentle native women? DiPerna gives us Dona
Felipa, the daughter of a noted navigator, a woman bound to be herself, who
defies the life of the convent where she hides pens and paper in her room, so
that she may write the words that fill her head and heart. She chronicles
her life and marriage, ultimately planning and sailing on the now renown trip
to the New World. She is strong-willed and violently loyal to her country,
her mother, her deceased father, and the “Admiral” as she calls Columbo. When Dona Felipa
meets Columbo at mass, her heart is lost to him, “Sunday after Sunday he came
to see me at my convent school, filling the afternoons with flowers and
splendid tales of where he had been. . . . I knew he could
never deny what we had done against all convention, and despite what I had
been told all my life since childhood would be a sin.” The Admiral can think
of nothing but embarking on a voyage to find Japan believing there is a
western route. He and Dona Felipa agree to find ways to gain the support of
the king of Portugal. Dona Felipa’s relatives have a strong relationship
with the king and eventually introduce Columbo and Dona Felipa to the court
at a lavish party. After months of raised and dashed hope, Columbo secures
the support of the Spanish monarchy. For us, the rest is history, if we
follow the story we learned in school. DiPerna weaves a
story of love and betrayal, hope and despair, beauty and horror. Readers
need time to be drawn into this novel, and DiPerna draws us in, little by
little, first with glimpses into Dona Felipa’s life and her dreams very
unlike most young women of her time. Then with her liaison with the Admiral,
their joint planning of the venture, her marriage, her passion for the
voyage, and ultimate infatuation with the people and the landscape the New
World presents. Glimpses at a woman’s
world in those days allow us into a very convincing life. DiPerna’s sense of
place and sensuousness of experience drew me into the story. I overcame my
inclination to read fast and to skip over details because DiPerna writes them
so well. The lushness of the “found” lands, the aromas and visions aboard ship
were neither too sparse nor too lengthy: I spotted the woman
who had embraced me so suddenly on the beach. She had slit one of the yellow
melons with a stone, and seeing me, passed me an arc of it trickling with
juice. It was exquisite, sweet and sugar, melting on my tongue. The center
nest of the fruit was packed with shining black seeds, with the woman very
gracefully let drop from her mouth into her hand and then tossed over her
shoulder. Dona Felipa’s gradual
realization of her situation, her husband’s true nature, and her love of
writing propel her into a sequence of events that satisfy the reader’s hopes
for this courageous woman. I would have asked only that DiPerna give us a
little more of that omniscient observation, so that we might have observed
Felipa through other’s eyes. Her own accounts of her life, while satisfying,
present a rather one-sided and myopic vision of a complex woman. Felipa’s
attraction to the unknown and her openness to experiences as adventures
provide a heroine that we can all relate to—a woman of passion, with a
multi-faceted knowledge of the world and people. If Mrs. Cristoforo
Columbo were truly aboard the Santa Maria, Italian-American women might have
viewed her as the role model of exploration and adventure. Instead, we are
stuck with her husband, and an image of a tarnished conqueror who cared
little for the people he came upon in the New World, only for the fame and
credit he would receive for the “discovery.” Syracuse
University |
[1]Editor’s Note: This novel was reviewed by a male and a female reader. We are publishing both reviews.
[2]In her anaylsis of life in the Piceno area, Romanucci-Ross alternates between a small urban neighborhood in Ascoli and the surrounding hilltop villages, thereby blurring the boundary between urban and rural. As in many cases in Italy, the city and country are closely connected rather than opposed, a feature of Italian society that has been missed by other authors.