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REVIEWS For Alan Balboni, Roland R. Bianchi,David Del Principe, Manuela Gieri, Giose Rimanelli, Mario Maffi, Leo Pantaleo, and Giuseppe Previtali Alan
Balboni. Beyond the
Mafia: Italian Americans and the Development of Las Vegas. Reno: U of
Nevada P, 1996. Pp. ix–xix + 168. Beyond the Mafia: Italian Americans and the Development of
Las Vegas is a lucid
and detailed history of the many contributions of Italian Americans toward
the development of Las Vegas. Starting with the city’s humble beginnings as a
railroad stop, Alan Balboni traces the efforts of Italian-American public and
private workers, entrepreneurs, performers, and professionals, each of whom
played a part in the transformation of Las Vegas into a vacation capital of
the world. Although the Mafia certainly played a role, Balboni argues that,
“beyond the Mafia,” Italian Americans of numerous legitimate occupations were
well represented in Las Vegas. Balboni believes the city’s liberality, its
lack of ghettoization, and its abundance of social and economic
opportunities allowed Italian Americans of Las Vegas more chances for
legitimate success than their Eastern urban counterparts had. Hence, Balboni
depicts a significantly more positive Italian-American experience than the
kind presented in sociohistorical works such as Richard Gambino’s Blood of My Blood (1974), as well as
fictional works, such as Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete (1939) and Garibaldi LaPolla’s The Grand Gennaro (1935). Balboni
believes that the virtually unencumbered social, economic, and political
incorporation of Las Vegans of Italian descent into American society has
facilitated their assimilation. Balboni devotes the
book’s first three chapters to “the Early Years,” “the Rapid Growth Years,”
and “the Corporate Era” of Las Vegas. In the “Early Years,” Balboni depicts
Italian immigrants of nineteenth-century Nevada as industrious laborers with
ambitious plans for the future. During the years following Las Vegas’s establishment
in the early twentieth century, Italian Americans were already well
represented as ranchers, farmers, and businessmen. Once Nevada passed a law
legalizing gambling in 1931, Italian Americans were quick to capitalize on
this opportunity, starting businesses and building hotels. Balboni writes
that by the 1940s, “Italian Americans opened and operated restaurants,
taverns, liquor stores, butcher shops, grocery stores, barbershops, repair
shops, gas stations, and plumbing companies.” Although many Italian-American
entrepreneurs undeniably had objectionable backgrounds in organized crime,
Las Vegas’s tolerance for the out-of-the-ordinary often provided the second
chance required to succeed. Throughout the book, Balboni insists that in Las
Vegas the “entrepreneurial spirit” generally took precedence over both one’s
criminal record and one’s ethnicity, neither of which posed the problems they
did for immigrants in Eastern urban areas. Balboni’s chapter on
the “Rapid Growth Years” of Las Vegas details individual contributions of
Italian Americans as managers, contractors, businessmen, public officials,
owners and managers of race books, restaurateurs, waste disposal business
owners, bankers, real estate agents, professionals, public servants, as well
as mobsters. In the 1950s and 1960s, Italian Americans were as financially
successful as ever, and generally free to choose any occupation they wished.
Still, the myth of the Mafia, promoted by the local media, caused powerful
and affluent Italian Americans to undergo a considerable amount of political
and public scrutiny. Hence, Italian Americans tended not to own casinos and
were disproportionately represented in the “Black Book,” a list compiled by
gaming regulators to “[exclude] individuals of notorious reputation from any
business establishment that was involved in gambling.” In his chapter on
“the Corporate Era,” Balboni writes that when the state of Nevada passed a
law in the late 60s encouraging corporate involvement in the gaming
industry, the Mafia found shrewder ways to remain competitive. Italian
Americans held all the same jobs they did in the “Rapid Growth Years,” and
they were still at an ethnic disadvantage when it came to casino ownership.
But, by the 1980s women began to play a more prominent role in business and
public service. Also by this time, Italian Americans finally began to own
casinos in more significant numbers. Nevertheless, the media and the “Black
Book” persistently dogged Italian Americans about real and imagined mob ties. Balboni concludes
that the relationship between Italian Americans and Las Vegas was, and
continues to be, “mutually beneficial.” While Italian Americans helped build
and maintain “the substance and the myth of Las Vegas,” the city allowed
those with “an entrepreneurial spirit . . . financial success . . .[,]
power[,] and prestige.” Balboni ends the main body of the book with a thorough
report on the many Italian-American organizations of Las Vegas, such as “The
Club” and the Sons of Italy. Balboni believes that despite the persistence of
such groups, Italian-American ethnicity in Las Vegas is of a symbolic nature
and not manifested in everyday reality. “Italian Americans are now fading
into the twilight of ethnicity,” writes Balboni. Most contemporary Italian
Americans “have . . . acquired the language, dress, manners, and values of
American society, and the great majority no longer prefer their co-ethnics
as neighbors, friends, or even spouses.” Balboni believes that Las Vegas,
with its uncommon liberality and extraordinary opportunity, has accelerated
this already inevitable process. This is Balboni’s final verdict. Beyond the Mafia
is a meticulously detailed and undeniably useful book. In addition to
exhaustive research on, among many other topics, Las Vegas history,
Italian-American history, and the Mafia, Balboni’s interviews of some 150 Las
Vegans of Italian descent significantly strengthen his arguments and give the
reader a much appreciated sense of everyday life in the resort city. The
interviews, however, also allow for some weaknesses. Most likely due to
interviewees’ hesitancy to be recorded on audio tape, Balboni nearly always
paraphrases, even when a quote would be more appropriate. This detracts
slightly from the credibility of the book, particularly when important
generalizations, based on such paraphrases, are made. For example, Balboni
asserts that “[e]very Italian-American entertainer interviewed for this book
agreed that being an Italian-American probably helped one’s career.” But, not
a single quote is provided in support of this. Furthermore, considering the
statement’s phrasing, one wonders if the interviewees were each asked a
leading question to provoke this desired response. Balboni also
occasionally glorifies the Mafia in a manner that undercuts his attempt to
debunk its myth. In the second chapter, he writes that “[s]ome Italian
restaurants had the added charm of being reputed hangouts for organized crime
figures.” Later, he writes that the Mafia lent a certain charm to Las Vegas,
where “[t]he bored bookkeeper could think that her companions at the craps
table might include a famous entertainer, a high-rolling millionaire, or,
most exciting, a Mafioso.” Unfortunately, there is no documentation, and
certainly no quote, to verify that anybody felt this way. Most troublesome
about the book, however, is Balboni’s unquestioning acceptance of
contemporary Italian-American ethnic allegiance as a manifestation of
“symbolic ethnicity.” Popularized by Herbert Gans in his article “Symbolic
Ethnicity: The Failure of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in America” (1979), and
made specific to Italian Americans by Richard Alba in The Twilight of Ethnicity (1985), symbolic ethnicity refers to an
artificial maintenance of ethnic traditions in the face of advanced
assimilation. In both these works, the authors believe that, with social and
economic advancement, the ethnicity of most American groups of European
descent is yielding in favor of a generalized “European American” identity.
Symbolic ethnicity, though making use of the customs, music, food, and
beliefs of one’s culture of descent, is really a sophisticated form of
denial. As American assimilation advances, ethnicity simply disappears, and
there is no stopping it. Other theoreticians, Werner Sollors in particular,
believe that one’s ethnicity is an ongoing process perpetuated by the
interaction between one’s culture of descent and that which one consents to
introduce into or eliminate from one’s lifestyle. In light of this theory’s
evolutionary implications, it would seem that ethnicity does not disappear.
Rather, it changes. Richard
Gambino’s theory of “creative ethnicity,” as described in Blood of My Blood, is analogous to
this theory. Although Herbert Gans himself, in a 1995 epilogue to his
article, acknowledges the existence of this alternate theory, Balboni never
does. While this author is not arguing that Balboni should agree with
Sollors’s view of ethnicity, he does believe that a more serious
consideration of it at least might have altered Balboni’s conclusions
regarding Italian-American assimilation—a critical aspect of the book. Purdue University Roland
R. Bianchi. Tunes
from a Tuscan Guitar: The Life and Times of an Italian Immigrant. Santa
Barbara: Fithian P, 1994. This is a biography
interesting for its atypical portrayal of an Italian immigrant from Bientina,
a small town northeast of Pisa. No sweat shops, no crowded tenements, no
long-suffering wife with eight bambini
tugging at her skirts, no anti-Dago discrimination. In fact, if what Di
Leonardo (in The Varieties of Ethnic
Experience) maintains is true—namely, that the California story of immigration
is a forgotten one—then here is an attempt to reinstate it. Written in a tone
of obvious hero-worship, the author shows how his grandfather, Ottorino
Bianchi, triumphantly made his way as a crab fisherman in the San Francisco
of the early 1900s. Portrayed as ever-inventive and optimistic, he is a remarkable
man who lives the American Dream, leaving his children and grandchildren a
legacy of “love for the arts, music and family—and above all . . . the
importance of a sense of humor” (156). By the way, this is a
Nonno who is literate. He gets his job with the Crab Fishermen’s Protective
Association by virtue of his ability to read, write, and figure. He is a
speaker of French, having spent some time as an immigrant in Le Havre. Both
racconteur and minstrel—hence the title—he easily wins the respect of everyone
he meets. The book, in fact, is filled with acts of personal kindness by
non-Italians: a black porter who feeds him and sees him safely to San
Francisco; a white woman named McDonald who offers free railroad passage for
his wife and child when they most need it. Though Nonno sounds
too good to be true, he is not, for there is a strong chord of veracity in
Bianchi’s portrayal of his grandfather. The berry wine, graciously offered
to him by the black porter, is described as “a little too sweet for Nonno’s
taste” (33). Displeased with American shovels, he sends to Bientina for a
“hand-wrought iron spade” (134). He is able to put to use “la via del cinque,” an unfathomable
mathematical practice that the author himself only comes to understand when
his children learn about “sets” in school. Nonno even cheats his guileless
grandson at a game of “quick draw” and then chortles at his ability to “put
one over” on him. He sounds like the Italians I know. Bianchi’s portrait of
Elisa, Nonno’s wife, is also atypical and interesting. A strong woman, she
marries against her family’s wishes—“beneath her station,” they thought.
Forced at first to endure their hostility after Nonno has left Italy, she
ultimately takes her fate into her own hands and finds the passage money to
rejoin her surprised husband in San Francisco. Later, she forbids her son to
accept a scholarship to Annapolis, forcing him instead to work as a bilingual
banker for A. P. Giannini’s famous California Bank of America. (The author,
by the way, a retired vice-president for the same bank, clearly follows in
his father’s footsteps.) Bianchi can write
vividly, too. His crowd scenes work well. We are appalled at the overstuffed
conditions in steerage on the Bretagna when Nonno and the Battaglia family
find a dead man. The riotous Christmas Eve “year of the mice” almost plays as
a vaudeville burlesque. The reappearance of Chung Wo at the crowded wake
reminds us of Nonno’s popularity. There are some
problems in the book. Bianchi slips too easily into an anti-southern bias of
which, unfortunately, some Toscani are capable. As an author, he does not
distance himself from Nonno’s prejudice. For example, told that “Sicilians do
not trust each other!” Nonno muses: “. . . Farina wasn’t kidding on his last
point. The consequences of any misconduct would be cement shoes, even then a
strong motivator for straight play when doing business with Sicilians” (110).
This despite the fact that Nonno finds anti-black and anti-native American
prejudice “his biggest ideological disappointment with America” (36). Nonno is also wary of
the Chinese. Faced with reporting a killing that he has viewed first-hand,
“Nonno wasn’t about to interfere with some kind of Chinese justice he
couldn’t understand” (114) So he never mentions the name of Chung Wo and is
rewarded with unfailingly regular payments from the latter’s Chinese crab
market. In addition, the
Italian used throughout is strangely incorrect. “Scuza” instead of “scusi”;
“ochi” spelled with one “c”; “bocci ball” instead of “bocce”; “scoccoli” for “zoccoli”;
etc. This is particularly puzzling since Bianchi credits six people with
“technical, grammatical and historical assistance” and he makes no mention
of dialectal variation. All
in all, however, I enjoyed the book, for Nonno usually makes a good role
model of the early Toscano immigrant to California. I recommend that Tunes from a Tuscan Guitar be added to
the growing body of literature that recounts the increasingly varied Italian
experience in the United States. University of
Illinois at Chicago David Del Principe. Rebellion,
Death and Aesthetics in Italy. The Demons of Scapigliatura. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson P,
1996. Pp.179. In this thoughtful
text, David Del Principe rescues the Scapigliatura
movement from critical neglect, pulling it out from the shadow of Romanticism
and establishing its avant-garde credentials. Using gender-based and
psychoanalytic criticism, Del Principe examines sexual identity, linguistic
motifs, and Gothic overtones in works by these authors, a loosely-connected
group of artists working primarily in Milan and Turin in the 1860s and 1870s.
The text and its ample footnotes contextualize the movement both politically
and socially, as well as within the Italian and European literary canons. Del Principe opens
with a brief description of the movement and the name itself, which was
chosen by its leading theoretician, Cletto Arrighi. While the etymological
basis of “scapigliatura” signifies
untidy hair, a deeper meaning was soon attached, that of “existential
disheveledness or rebellion” (23). In Arrighi’s manifesto-prologue to his
novel La Scapigliatura e il 6 Febbraio,
he calls for young intellectuals to fight bourgeoisie values in both art and
politics. Unfortunately, as Del Principe points out, these artists battled
against the very conventions held dear by critics, dooming their texts to
censure or obscurity. Much of this work is
dedicated to a many-layered analysis of the 1869 novel Fosca by Igino Ugo Tarchetti, the most renowned member of the
movement. Del Principe traces the reconstruction of traditional gender roles
in this provocative novel, as Giorgio, the hero, is ultimately weakened and
feminized by the witch-like Fosca, whose debilitating illness acts as “a
metaphor for diversity” (47). The two female characters in Fosca represent not only two aspects
of Giorgio’s character, but embody the dichotomy of Order and Disorder found
in many scapigliati texts. The
topos of long, unbound hair, a sign of rebellion and sexual energy, is examined
in light of the Medusa myth and Freud’s theory of castration, as well as in
the works of Poe, Baudelaire, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The vampire myth, a
staple of Gothic literature, also shows up in Fosca, underlining the intercontextuality between the Scapigliati and Gothic authors. Del
Principe looks at the vampire figure in Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Poe, and
Capuana as well as Tarchetti, examining its Christian iconography and erotic
undertones. Tarchetti also used the vampire myth to explore two
corresponding themes: immortality and doubleness. Del Principe closes
his text by rejecting conventional periodization of literary movements,
which positions Scapigliatura as
the last hurrah of Romanticism. Instead, he illustrates the movement’s
avant-garde tendencies, claiming the “decadent elements in Scapigliatura are less evidence of
romantic decay than of the creative vitality of modernism” (110). Camillo
Boito’s novel “Un corpo” and Tarchetti’s stories “Uno spirito in un lampone”
and “Lorenzo Alviati” reveal an avant-garde aesthetics through their
self-reflected artistic sensibility. This valuable book includes two
appendices: a reproduction of Arrighi’s prologue-manifesto, and a
bibliography of Tarchetti’s works. Purdue University Manuela
Gieri. Contemporary
Italian Filmmaking: Strategies of Subversion. Pirandello, Fellini, Scola and
the Directors of the New Generation. Toronto: Toronto UP, 1995. Pp. 301.[1] Mapping the condition
of Italian cinema over the decades, Manuela Gieri’s books presents a highly
innovative rereading of the historiography of Italian cinema. After
establishing the importance of Luigi Pirandello’s theoretical ideas in
relationship with cinema, Gieri’s volume traces a quite interesting itinerary
in which she introduces the term hypergenre
to argue the merging of genres within the spectrum of Italian cinema where
she sees the recurrence of a “countertradition” (85–88). This trend expresses
itself in the blurring of boundaries among the various genres and the
undermining of the author as the only reliable source of the filmic
discourse. She argues that this mode stems from the ontological questions
embedded in Pirandello’s works and from the countertradition they propose.
Gieri advances the rather striking possibility that this Pirandellian mode
has not exhausted itself but has been present and active throughout a great
part of the twentieth century in the cinematographies of such directors as
Federico Fellini and Ettore Scola, and still continues today in the cinema
that we have come to define as the New Italian Cinema. This fascinating
theory sheds light on several controversial questions connected with the
“cinema d’autore” label (84.) Considering Fellini, Antonioni, Bertolucci,
and Scola as authors separate from the rest of the other filmmakers is, for
Gieri, not only incorrect, but a rather uncomplicated explanation which
avoids the more complex task of
investigation that would prove, as her book does, that there is a connecting
set of styles linking many directors together in the representations of their
films. Gieri considers the social, political, historical, and economic
representations of these films and the contamination of borrowed forms of
spectacle like the theater, variety shows, musicals, and the circus with its
commedia dell’arte component that
give them shape. These characteristics consolidated into a national cinema
of disguised carnivalistic and “humoristic” qualities—where Gieri sees Pirandello’s
theory on humor (umorismo) having
striking similarities with what Mikhail Bakhtin defined as “carnivalistic”[2] (167). Among all the directors, she sees
Fellini as the one who played the bigger role in the development of this
cinematic discourse. The Pirandello-Fellini connection is thoroughly
documented by Gieri in a series of insightful explanations such as the
definition of Fellini’s typical protagonist as umorista (71–72). The author divides
the book into six chapters preceded by an introduction where Pirandello’s
encounter with the Seventh Art is discussed. The first chapter reads as a
convincing plea for a reconsideration of Pirandello, whose works and
controversial relationship with cinema are almost unknown outside Italy.
Chapter One centers on Pirandello’s love-hate relationship with cinema over a
time-span of thirty years. In Chapter Two, Gieri investigates Pirandello’s
encounter with the theory of cinema tracing a clear outline of Pirandello’s
developing interest in cinema and its diversity from the world of the
theater. Chapter Three examines the connecting affinities that bring
Pirandello closer to Fellini and to his conception of the art of filmmaking.
With Chapter Four Gieri develops the discourse of Chapter Three even further
to define the presence of a countertradition within Italian cinema. In the
following chapter Gieri includes in this countertradition area Ettore Scola,
another important director who, together with Fellini, will be recognized as
a father figure by the younger generation of filmmakers. Her analysis of
Scola’s films in light of Pirandellian forms of subversion is quite
sophisticated and discusses his indebtedness to Pirandello and Fellini with
his personal treatment of the protagonist as umorista, the choice of setting, actors, and internal citations. In Chapter Six her
argument raises many interesting questions for a rereading and understanding
of the new Italian cinema, especially the cinema of the new generation of
filmmakers linked to Pirandello through Fellini and Scola. The chapter
contains an indispensable map for the many paths the new Italian directors
seem to have taken and it presents an intelligent overview of the most recent
developments in the Italian film industry. It also brings consistency to
Gieri’s study and gives convincing proof of the existence of a Pirandellian
influence spanning over the decades. Reflecting on the inner connection
between the films of the new generation of filmmakers and those of the
previous decades, the chapter, as its title promises, tries to answer a
rather controversial questions: is the new Italian cinema facing a moment of
restoration or of subversion of the past and the present that derived from
it? In answering this controversial question Gieri perceptively addresses
the old question of the neorealist legacy and the subsequent tradition of the
comedy “Italian style.” Her discussion
examines a great variety of films and places them in a convincing dialogical
relationship—even films that can first appear unrelated and ‘extraneous’ to
one another. With the analysis of films such as Giuseppe Tornatore’s Nuovo cinema paradiso (Cinema Paradiso, 1989) that try to
recover the past of Italian cinematic tradition from its early days in a
nostalgic, citational, and commemorative vein—it is the nostalgic vein of
postmodernism that Jameson sees negatively—Gieri singles out the qualities
and features that exemplify the continuation of a countertradition where
comedy and melodrama freely contaminate each other in an acritical reclaim of
the past.[3] On the contrary, a very critical
retrieval of the past appears in Nanni Moretti’s films which maintain the
same contamination freely expressed by the bombo character (from his Ecce
Bombo [Ecce Bombo, 1978]
227–28), a transfilmic relation of the umorista,
an individual that uses the humoristic mode of discourse to transgress any
given order of things. Placed in ‘Pirandellian perspective,’ Moretti’s
controversial cinematography encourages a cinema of resistance where a blend
of comedy and political drama works progressively toward the construction of
its own regime of signification. In addressing other films such as Gabriele
Salvatores’s Turnè (Turnè, 1990) that, unlike Tornatore’s
early tendency to work within the nostalgia frame, prefers to use parody,
Gieri continues her insightful reading that sees, in contemporary films,
Pirandellian flares, references to Scola and to Fellini and to their filmic
modes. The overall
organization of Gieri’s book is clear and conveys a persuasive demonstration
of the impact of Pirandello’s works and theoretical ideas on Italian cinema.
An unmatched achievement in its new insightful look at the presence of a
Pirandellian mode in Italian cinema, this judicious study will have a lasting
effect in reconsidering Italian cinema and its place in the bigger frame of
moving images. In this context the cross-referential and filmic tribute to
the past, the conscious blurring of the boundaries between genes have
created a space where a new relationship with the past has been achieved. The
new directors have learned to cope with the(ir) obsession with the past and
its memory—an obsession that has always been a concern of Italian culture in
general. By helping to remember whom we were, this study facilitates the
understanding of who we are. I recently saw
Salvatores’s Nirvana when it was
released in Italy in January 1997. The film sets the Pirandellian author
character relationship in a cyberspace of a mnemonic future. Akin to Ridley
Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and
Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days
(1995), this unique film in Italian cinema exemplifies Gieri’s intuition
that a Pirandellian mode does exist and continues in the world of represented
images today. Kent State University Giose
Rimanelli, ed. Luigi Bonaffini, trans. Alien Cantica: An American Journey
(1964-1993). Studies in Southern
Italian and Italian/American Culture. Vol. 7. New York: Peter Lang,
1995. The author of this
poetry collection is Professor Emeritus in Italian and Comparative Literature
at SUNY Albany, a musicologist, and a painter. The original manuscript was
at first called simply Alien, a
self-reflective title mirroring Rimanelli’s emotional state. The poems caught
the attention of Anthony Burgess, who was familiar with Rimanelli’s novels
and his classical and medieval translations. Rimanelli rewrote the
collection and added cantica to
the title, which is, in his words, “epic-sounding” and also reflects his
preoccupation with classical poetry. The American journey
is the odyssey of Sonny Boy or Bambolino, as he is called in the Italian
poems, the Everyman of this pilgrimage. It is through this voice that
Rimanelli’s alter ego expresses itself. His is the voice of discovery in
this poetic narrative, this “uncertain scrapbook” as he refers to it in poem
VII. What does Bambolino experience on his travels? He begins life in “crude
Molise” poem II, then takes us to Arizona, where he breakfasts on huevos rancheros with his lover. We
travel with him through Al Capone’s Chicago, glimpse Paris, Texas, Turin,
Detroit, Alicante, Barcelona; we rest with him in a hotel in New Haven,
Connecticut. We overhear snatches of a conversation about love between him
and a woman on her fifth martini in a Roman hotel. In the marshes of “rorid
Florida” he discloses his restlessnes in poem XX: “I’m not unhappy in America
nor sullen / nor testy, but I cannot sleep.” And it is this sense
of questing that overcomes the reader who straggles behind, dragged along
like a small child as Rimanelli pursues his headlong search, holding the
reader captive with his relentless, pulsating rhythms. The anthology
includes an Author’s note, and a preface by Alberto Granese on the “exile’s
talisman and the poetry of Alien Cantica.”
Granese compares Rimanelli’s poetry as an artifact that protects and
exorcises the poet from the pain of everyday life. Granese does a superb job
of dissecting and analyzing the meters, the structures, and the themes of the
cantica to prepare the reader for
the roller-coaster ride of emotions. An Afterword by Anthony Burgess contains
thoughts on the wordplay “in this courageous volume, which brings an infusion
of new blood from the old world” (148). Considering the difficulty and
sophistication of this wordplay, not all of it in Italian, and the
code-switching involved, the English translations are remarkably faithful.
With the poet on his way to salvation we catch our breath as he redirects our
vision toward moments of grace: XI Whenever love
arrives and stretches out it’s a sweet unremembering
afternoon sailing adrift. Whenever love
arrives and stretches out it’s like finding
the pious road again shining ahead. Columbia College Chicago Mario
Maffi. Gateway to the
Promised Land: Ethnic Cultures in New York’s Lower East Side. New York: New York UP, 1995. For this review I
will forego my “thousand words” and direct the reader to page 156 of the
book, in which a tri-lingual poster announcing the funeral procession for the
Triangle Fire Victims appears. The announcement in English, Hebrew, and
Italian urges fellow workers to join in rendering a last, sad tribute for the
victims of this industrial accident. Another poster on page 171 announces a
“Monster Massmeeting” for the Shoe and Sandel [sic] workers, also in three
languages. These posters, along with the many other illustrations in this
book, such as drawings, woodcuts, photos, and maps, help guide the reader
through the cultural history of the Lower East Side. This part of New
York, as Maffi demonstrates, has always been a transitional one, and one that
personifies what cultural diversity is
better than any of the metaphors we try to apply to the phenomenon today,
such as melting pot, patchwork quilt, salad, or mosaic. For it was in this
part of the city that immigrant groups from all parts of the world
established roots in the ethnic neighborhoods that eventually blossomed into
Chinatown and Little Italy, now tourist attractions for visitors to New York
City. It was also the place to which Eastern European Jews escaped at the
turn of the century. Fifty years later, it became home to Puerto Ricans. In
the 60s radical young whites saw it as a bastion from which to rebel against
the bourgeois urban lifestyle. Maffi fell in love
with the Lower East Side in 1975, and as he puts it, continued an intense
relationship with the neighborhood over ten years, and produced this book,
“not a history of the Lower East Side as such, but an analysis, in terms of
multiethnic and cross-cultural experiences, of two key periods: the years between
1880 and 1930, and the last three decades” (7). The work explains the crucial
role neighborhoods, and immigrant communities as living organisms, can play
in the process of “Americanization.” An interesting aside: Maffi, an Italian
scholar who teaches American Literature in Milan, first wrote his book in
English, then translated it into Italian. It was published by Feltrinelli,
in Milan, in 1992. The current US English edition, published three years
later, includes many updates. So this book, like the neighborhood it
describes, is a “work in progress,” for the Lower East Side is a laboratory
whose human experiment continues. How much have things changed? Today’s
tri-lingual message, in the form of a mural on the corner of Madison and Pike
Streets, exhorts its inhabitants: Chi Lai / Arriba / Rise Up! Columbia College Chicago Leo
Pantaleo. Il
mistero Rodolfo Valentino. Milano: Idea Books, 1995. To celebrate the one
hundred years of the cinema (1895–1995), Leo Pantaleo has organized an
exhibition on Rudolph Valentino sponsored by the province of Taranto and has
also written a biographical and autobiographical novel by the title Il Mistero Rodolfo Valentino,
published by Idea Books of Milan (1995). A centennial celebration of the
cinema could not have found a better encomium with the publication of this
book that makes “the most loved and praised actor of all times” live again. Pantaleo is an actor,
play-writer, costume-designer, and researcher. With his first novel he has
also shown his ability as a novelist. In the book, Valentino is in the
hospital and remembers, but in his remembrance Pantaleo his talking about
himself. The identification between Pantaleo and Valentino is subtle, sometimes
non-existent, Valentino has become a pretext for the writer to express
himself in all his human and artistic aspects. To make Valentino, and the
most important moments of his life, live again, Pantaleo retraces his own
fundamental stages of artistic growth and creativity, by identifying himself
with a man of culture and theatrical world of other times. Pantaleo has a deep
affection and attraction, there is an elective affinity with the actor,
therefore to speak out about himself as an artist, but most of all as a man,
becomes easier when the writer can hide behind the mask of Valentino.
Pantaleo is from Castellaneta, just like Valentino, and with the actor he
shares, besides the same home town, an inclination to simplicity, more than
to greatness, the latter dictated most of the time by the theatrical world.
Pantaleo becomes a new Faust who wants to reconquer his soul, his gesture of
simplicity and spontaneity, both lost in the wave of success and popularity,
but also in the process of growth. While remembering, Valentino goes back to
the mythical world of his youth, to his teacher, the Mediterranean Sea, who
has introduced him to life (23). To Norman who rebukes
his friend Valentino for not paying sufficient attention to him, Valentino
replies: “Not to pay any attention? But I depend entirely upon you! With you
I have redeemed myself! Because of my weakness I made my mother cry, I
shamed my brothers, I prostituted myself, I lied to flatter my vanity. I do
not have culture to express my thoughts and my ability. . . .
I am my own worst enemy” (35). An eidetic experience
allows Valentino to perceive his own self through his mind, which is moving
away from his body. The mind sees, observes, remembers his past life on which
Pantaleo now sets up his very life. Pantaleo glides his own metaphysical
flight of an artist that captures earthly remembrances. The identification
of Pantaleo with Valentino occurs while Valentino is remembering. Memories
have a mourning beginning, “the light of memories light up in me” (11).
Memories revisited through the eyes of the mind like those of a spectator who
watches on stage his own shadow surrounded by a funeral whiteness “. . . you
could have put a layer of tanned make-up. You are pale as a ghost” (11). June
is speaking to Valentino, “I laughed but my jaws were contracted” (12). Fame is lived as
solitude, self-destruction of a person driving his coach towards hell. A
bitter identification of an unsatisfied person who does not want to convey a
false image of his own self due to fame and publicity, which hide the true
dimension of the man, his life as action, life is poetry, it is words through
which he expresses his vision of the world, but mainly of himself: “I search
for beauty . . . have I found it? I search . . . something . . . always. . .
. Is it possible that life is only but a search?” (13). So art, the process
of creating works that can express him is never the final target, they are
only moments of confrontation and obstacles to overcome in order to continue
the search, the path along which sometimes we loose our own simplicity,
spontaneity of the gesture, of the real and profound self. Death, but also
illness, allows a recovery of the soul (“Now I understand I want to die only
to recover my own soul,” 14), Rudy speaks here but Pantaleo is also expressing
his thoughts just like Faust to whom the wager with Mephistopheles has
unveiled all the fallacy of an attempt to see the devil as a possible ally in
the conquest of knowledge. Knowledge instead is an endless becoming, is
action, is motion that continues also when Faust is accepted triumphantly in
the chorus of Angels. “We (Norman and
Valentino) do not see the truth. For success, for fame there is a price to
pay. We live in a strange era in which men are barren, create wondrous
machines, organize the universe, make big money, but are without soul. And I,
how can I live without a soul? . . . Success would drag famine, pestilence,
war and death that I have inherited from Julis Desnoyers, the main character
of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,”
Valentino says (13–14). Pantaleo’s book is
full of images that appear as autobiographical elements embedded in a strong
vitality and poetic vein. Through them Pantaleo creates an imagistic rhythm
in his novel. The images take Valentino-Leo back to their youth years, to
their love for the place, to the sunsets, to the color of the pugliese sea,
through them the two men establish a sensuous communion with places and
people. Here memories acquire a voluptuous taste: warm, soft, primitive,
genuine, that can lead a careful reader to some lines and images of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, to
prosastic poetry. Given the freedom we can reorganize some of Pantaleo’s
prose as follows: Osservo i
pescatori: ammiravo le barche con i nomi scritti
a caratteri tremolanti. I silenziosi uomini
piegati sulle reti smagliate. Mi interessavano i
più giovani, che con il dorso
nudo, sudati, sémbrano bústi
d’ébano scólpiti. (40) A hieratic movement
of the last line carves the image and fixes it in mind. The novel has many
beautiful stylistic solutions, the images originated by memories are not
vague but become bodily. Even odors acquire consistency. Valentino as a child
used to listen to stories of an old man who had a great ability of narrating: . . . he could
create around him a magic atmosphere. . . . In this game he helped himself
with strong fragrances, intense perfumes mixed with fire. He threw in the
brazier sugar to stress the sweetness of a passage and cloves, in the flames,
meant sadness. And with a pungent smoke of chestnut shells death was
arriving. (22) Of this character, by
using the technique of movie close-ups, the little boy recalls the old man as
Silver Eye. This is a poetic element that leads the child to a complete
identification with the old man: the fear, the drama of the little one (23)
finds relief in a liberatory outburst of laughter to the point that even his
small eyes become silver. The novel continues
with flash-backs that overlap with the present life of the actor, narrated
in a pressing rhythm, and to the past life in a slower, nostalgic rhythm,
delay used to better taste old emotions. The reading involves the reader who
does not distinguish anymore between Pantaleo the author and his artistic expression
of Valentino. Pantaleo’s book is
interesting because it deals with educated Italian people abroad at the
beginning of this century. Valentino himself is in touch with a world of
Italian gentlemen of the old kind. The reading of the novel should also be
seen as a rediscovery of exported Italian life and culture, aspects obscured
by modern publicity that has emphasized only mass immigration out of
necessity of living. Pantaleo speaks of
Valentino whom he observes as a detached spectator just like James Joyce when
he says that the author watches his work from the distance and in the
meantime he files his nails. We find this expression in the novel when
Valentino talks about his antagonist, who, to show his indifference “would
clean his nails with a sharpener during my most important rehearsal scenes”
(71). But we can very easily state that Pantaleo is a stern critic and
observer of himself, who in Valentino scrutinizes his own doing and in the
meantime he files his nails. Loyola University Chicago Rome Center Giuseppe
Previtali. Doctor
Beppo. Privately printed, non-commercial edition, 1994. These are the memoirs
of an octogenarian, Italian doctor who recounts the Italian-American
experience of his life in America. Dr. Giuseppe Previtali (1879–1970) wrote
his memoirs in English during the last twenty years of his life. His
Italian-flavored prose was turned into flowing, idiomatic English by his
wife, Rose Morrow. Weakened by his advanced age of 90 years, Giuseppe asked
his son Giovanni to add the pages describing Rose’s American background. The
memoirs have been printed privately by Dr. Previtali’s grandson, Kenneth. Dr. Previtali began
and ended his life in the countryside near Bergamo, Italy. The Italy/America
theme begins with an account, rich in traditions and folklore, of his
childhood in Pontida, a country village in North Italy, and follows him
through his school days at the liceo
[high school] in the City of Bergamo and at the universities of Genoa and
Turin. After earning his
medical degree at the University of Turin, Beppo migrates to the United
States in 1905 with little or no money and no English. Following a short stay
among the Italian laborers, who work in the coal mines of Pittston,
Pennsylvania, he settles in Manhattan, where he practices among the Italian
immigrants in Harlem. There, he devotes himself to the loving care of the
sick children of humble fellow Italians. The mingling of Italy
and America takes a romantic twist when, on his first return trip to Italy,
he falls in love with an American beauty, his future, wife, Rose Robinson
Morrow, who is sojourning near Florence. Their marriage is a love story that
accompanies the Americanization of Dr. Beppo and the Italianization of
Rose. Dr. Beppo’s success
as a baby doctor leads to his appointment as Chief of Pediatrics at the
renowned Bellevue Medical Center of New York University. In all this he is
encouraged by his high-spirited, American wife. Four themes dominate
the memoirs: The Italian immigrants in Pittston, Pennsylvania and in
Manhattan; Dr. Beppo’s medical world; his American-Italian love story; and an
unusual metaphysical subcurrent, which serves as the book’s opening and
closing chord. The immigrant theme
is particularly interesting because it gives us a picture of the cultural
shock experienced by a professional Italian on his arrival in America.
Consider, for example, Dr. Beppo’s indignant reply to a fellow Italian doctor
in Pittston who tells him not to speak Italian in public for fear of being
taken for Italians by people overhearing them. He protests, “My first day in
New York I was advised not to bow from the waist; only Germans do that. When
I arrived at the railway station in Pittston and kissed you on both cheeks,
you were afraid of being mistaken for French. I can pass over your qualms
about being taken for another nationality. But Italians! Aren’t we Italians?” His friend continues
to admonish him, “True, true. . . . But what you call your
good manners . . . well . . . in Pittston they are funny.
In fact, these rough people resist your fancy manners. They are engaged in
something more important than looking pretty. Do not be like those conceited
asses who come from Europe with an air of superiority . . . men
full of culture and refinement who turn out to be colossal failures in
America because they refuse to adjust. Look rather to those immigrants who
have come to the United States with nothing but their two hands to work.” Dr. Beppo’s practice
takes him into the homes and lives of the Italian immigrants of New York’s
poor Italian settlements where he realizes the need for the specialized care
of sick children. His concern for children leads to the establishment of
pediatrics as a separate branch of medicine from general practice. In this
connection the description of Bellevue Hospital in the early days is an
important document. We see more
Italy/America interaction when Dr. Beppo goes to Italy at the end of World
War I to find out what has happened to the shipments of dried milk that the
American Committee for Free Milk and Relief for Italy had sent there to save
the children dying of malnutrition. He finds the milk in a cellar, locked
away by prejudice, “powdered bones!” Beppo succeeds in distributing the
powdered milk to hospitals throughout Italy, thus saving hundreds of
thousands of babies’ lives (this according to the Italian Minister of
Health). A significant meeting
of Italy/America is the story of Monte Albano, a run-down, old villa in the
country near Pontida. Rose restores the villa with typical American
entrepreneurial spirit and makes the farmland productive. She improves the
lot of the down-trodden sharecroppers, thus winning the farmers’ grateful
devotion. Monte Albano is the
scene of many engaging encounters. One, for instance, centers upon Rose’s
conversations with Monsignor Angelo Roncalli, the soon-to-be Pope John XXIII.
She, a Protestant, and he, a Roman Catholic prelate, have a meeting of the
minds about a future ecumenical movement of Christian denominations. Monte Albano survived
World War II intact, thanks to the protection of her loyal farmers. It is
there, in that serene, bucolic setting that Rose expired with a “heavenly
smile” on her face. She is followed a few years later by Beppo, “a physician
with vision.” Before his demise, the King of Italy honored him with a knighthood
for his contribution to medicine. Doctor Beppo
is a mine of good material for a courageous film maker looking to celebrate
happiness and the satisfaction found in dedication to honest work in this
warm and human success story of an Italian doctor in America. Santa Rosa, California |
[1]I also reviewed this book for Screen 38.2 (1997): 110–13. The review for VIA was done after having seen Gabriele Salvatore’s Nirvana—a film of one of the directors of the new generation that unequivocally strengthens Gieri’s theory.
[2]Pirandello, On Humor, trans. and ed. Antonio Illiano and Daniel P. Testa (Chapel Hill: U of Carolina P, 1974). Trans. of L’umorismo, 1908. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1985).
[3]See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981).
[4]This is an edited version of a review written by Alfred Alberico.