Articles by: The editors

  • Facts & Stories

    "Cannoli vs. Couture." Italian American Activists Incensed by New York Post's Article and Photo


    February 20. New York Post's Susan Edelman writes about "Nolita boutiques fighting 'greasy' Feast of San Gennaro." The picure above illustrates the article, and here is its incipit:

     

    It's a clash of cannoli vs. couture.

    Supporters of Little Italy's famed Feast of San Gennaro -- set to celebrate its 85th year in September -- are fighting a newly passed Community Board 2 resolution urging the city to consider shrinking the boisterous, sausage-filled festival by three blocks -- including one that includes beloved St. Patrick's basilica.

    The recommended cutback -- blasphemous to Italian-Americans who revere the celebration -- stems from gripes by owners of snooty Nolita boutiques about the noise, crowds, cooking smoke -- and even customers attracted to the 11-day event.



    As soon as the rticle hit the web, a well-known local Italian American activist -- whose name we are not authorized to disclose -- sent the journalist the following letter:


    Susan:


    Your choice of pictures and slant in writing your article shows you are striving towards the new wave of journalist who spin stories in accordance to their own personal beliefs or for rating reasons.  The name "journalist" should be changed to a more lower standard.


    Your choice of using words (and the comparison photos) in the portrayal of Italians is offensive and meant to make us look like cartoon characters.  I will be reading your future articles only for purposes of seeing how you may slant other stories of other groups.  There were so many different positive things you could have stated but you felt very comfortable in your use of using all the "greasy & fried" words for the portrayal of Italian Americans.


    Your article is short of inflaming an unnecessary cultural battle against New York groups of people who are trying to find common ground.  I am widely circulating a copy of my email to you for further discussion of which I believe you and your article caused.


    If this is now what the NY Post has stooped to I believe it should be noted and made aware to all New Yorkers and beyond.


    [Signed letter]




    The contrast between the two images is too great to ignore, regardless of what side of the issue you might defend. Indeed, a picture is worth much more than the proverbial 1,000 words. Similarly, we can see that some words can in fact "hurt." Here at i-Italy.org we shall revisit both this specific issue as well as the more general issue of how Italians and Italian Americans are viewed in contemporary media, what opportunities they may or may not have, why the very few television programs that exist remain limited in development and growth, and why an Italian-language television program is so difficult to launch.


    In the meantime, we ask you to send us your comments below. We ask only that you identify yourself and be courteous in your indignation if that is what you are feeling. No name calling, please!
  • Facts & Stories

    Saving "Our Lady Of Loreto." Italian Americans and African Americans Join Forces in Protest

    This is the Facebook message posted today by Senator Diane Savino (D-Brooklyn):

    This is something we should all be interested in. Italian-Americans and African-Americans have joined in an effort to save this beautiful church. It can be the centerpiece of a new community that will serve the residents of brownsville. Please help. Call Bishop DiMarzio at the brooklyn diocese (Diane J. Savino)

    For more info see also:

    - The New York Time article of March 26, 2010  entitled "A Fight for a Church Is Evoking Introspection" by Paul Vitello.
    - The petition to      Save "Our Lady of Loreto" RC Church in Brooklyn.
    -     Video commentary by Jeffrey Dunston, African-American community activist.
    -     Video commentaries by Bill Russo, John Fratta, and Charles Piazza, Italian-American community activists.

    We urge the local population and the local leaders involved in the protest to stay in touch with the Editors of i-Italy.org for anything they may need (mail to: [email protected])

    * * *

    Below is the full text of Joey Skee's original article "Sacred Space, Real Estate, and the Enacted Environment " (i-Italy, January 19, 2009)

    A recent article in The New York Times prompts me to return to a post begun in September but never completed. When journalist Peter Duffy called in November asking about presepi in New York City, I suggested a story about Brooklyn’s Our Lady of Loreto Roman Catholic Church that former Italian-American residents of East New York were trying to save from destruction by the diocese itself. 

    I had attended a special mass there on September 13th at the invitation of activist Barbara Anne Lepak. Coincidentally, David Murphy invited me to attend mass the following day at the Santa Febronia Catholic Society’s chapel in Hoboken, New Jersey that is facing its own set of challenges to survive. The consecrated buildings’ respective histories and their associated communities’ responses illustrate how place, and in particular religious space, is remembered, imagined, and reconstituted (or not) in the twentieth-first century. 
     

    Barbara emailed me in the summer asking “How do we go about making a Catholic church in Brooklyn a landmark?” Her email continued:

    "There is a Catholic church in East New York, Brooklyn, named Our Lady of Loreto. The diocese of Brooklyn has decided to demolish it. This is heartbreaking to all of us who attended this church every Sunday and went to school there. The school building is all ready gone but the church building is so beautiful. It would be a pity to see it taken down." 
      
     

     
    A (online) Catholic directory of churches published in 1914 states the church was established in 1896 as the diocese’s fourth Italian “national” parish and the structure was completed in 1908 by the architectural firm of Armezzani, Federici (could this be sculptor Gaetano Federici?) and Sons of Paterson, New Jersey. In 1914, there were 8,000 parishioners. The church is not listed in the current AIA Guide to New York City (2000).

    I wasn’t able to find more than passing mention of the Italians of East New York in the standard reference literature. (The Times did have a moving article on the subject in December 2004.) Urban planner Walter Thabit documents How East New York Became a Ghetto, noting that two riots in 1966 involving Italian-American, Puerto Rican, and African-American youth drove the remaining white families from the area. The web sites created to save the church contains photographs and personal accounts of the church and the lost community of Italian East New York, constituting a haunting topography of displacement. Approximately thirty people drove from beyond the old neighborhood to attend September mass in honor of Barbara’s late father.

    The Times article revealed what the Brooklyn diocese had been denying to former parishioners/activists, that the church is to be demolished to build eighty-eight units of low income housing in eleven four-story buildings. 
     

     
     

    In Hoboken, I encountered a somewhat different situation. Sicilian immigrants incorporated a lay volunteer association, the Societá di Mutuo Soccorso Santa Febronia Patti e Circondario, in 1922 to honor the third century martyr St. Febronia and the Madonna of Tindari, constructing a freestanding chapel at 557 Fifth Street. The society sponsored processions for the two scared patronesses but the aging and dwindling membership find the task beyond its means.
     

    While poor black and Puerto Rican families moved into East New York after World War II, it was white, middle-class young people, i.e., “yuppies,” who changed the demographics of Hoboken beginning in the 1970s in a casebook study of gentrification. The rush for real estate and profits in the “Mile Square City” on the Hudson River was not without its own displacement and destruction (see Nora Jacobson’s 1993 documentary Delivered Vacant). The “housing wars” also impacted local expressions of public piety as newcomers faced off with Italian-American residents about what the former considered the nuisance of noisy, smelly feste like that for the Madonna Dei Martiri. 
     
    The chapel had clearly seen better days when I first visited in 2001 to speak on the Black Madonna. The September 2008 mass revealed that the chapel had been spruced up and repaired. Michael Murphy – who’s Sicilian is impeccable – informed me that new, younger people are joining as active members.  People are meeting weekly for rosary prayers.
     
    It doesn’t take two days of hallowed reflection to understand the obvious distinctions between these two religious spaces in East New York – a poor, neglected neighborhood of color far from Manhattan skyscrapers – and Hoboken, a predominately white, well-to-do small city. 
     
    The most glaring difference is that Our Lady of Loreto is private property, owned by one of the largest and richest corporate entities in the world (and across time). The building is real estate controlled by the Roman Catholic Church, despite the decades of parishioner volunteer labor and monetary donations that sustained the building and the parish. 
     

     
     
    Catholics are abandoning their parents’ religion and young men are not feeling the clerical calling in sufficient numbers. The land and its assets can be sold for low income housing, for condominiums, or to pay legal fees and settlements claims of sexual abuse cases. Catholic parishioners are occupying churches across the country in the belief that the buildings are theirs, that they are the church. In extremely rare cases they are able to changes when enough money is raided or political pressure is exerted, as with St. Brigid’s Church and St. Aloysius Church in Manhattan.
     

    The Catholic chapel in Hoboken, on the other hand, is owned by a lay organization not the diocese of Newark. During the great wave of Italian immigration, similar chapels caused great consternation for Father Dominic Marzetti, pastor of Hoboken’s St. Francis Church, who wrote Bishop Winand Michael Wigger on August 9, 1898 expressing his concern about the “contagious fever of building private chapels” among the city’s Italian immigrants (Silvano Tomasi, Piety and Power: The Role of Italian Parishes in the New York Metropolitan Area. 1975). These alternative places of worship were beyond clerical oversight. 
     

    It can be urgued that the Brooklyn church is aesthetically more significant that the modest Jersey chapel, a criteria landmark commissions have traditionally depended on.  But our understanding of architecture and landscape is not predicated solely on physical structures but how we use and interact with them.  Writing about our sense of place, scholar Edward S. Casey noted, "places not only are, they happen."  We enact our enviroment. According to Duffy’s article, fewer than twenty people attend weekly mass at Our Lady of Loreto. I will leave it to others to explain why local Catholics – Latinos, Haitian Americans, and others – are not compelled to frequent the church. Whatever the reason, the site’s increasing disuse has transformed it into a dead place, a spent memorial to an Italian-American past. In Hoboken, the private chapel is both sacred space and social club, a place where people gather to pray and socialize in communion on their own terms. 
     
  • Facts & Stories

    Memoria al Futuro


    This special issue of i-Italy, available also in print, is dedicated to Remebrance Day, and it is our contribution to the many initiatives the Italian and Italian/American communities promote in New York to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz. 

     
    We are addressing this particular issue for a variety of reasons.
     
    Read the online issue
    Download the print issue in pdf format

    First of all, as Italians we feel the civic duty to preserve the memory of the Holocaust, to which Italy sadly contributed by passing the Racial Laws in 1938 and fighting the war from the wrong side of history. Several contributors to this magazine underline this aspect of celebrating Remembrance Day from an Italian point of view. And it is particularly important to highlight, as the Consul General of Italy in New York Francesco Talò says in his opening comment, that “Italy does not forget.”

     
    Second, as Italian Americans we are concerned with a topic that seems to have been largely buried in our memory: the historical and contemporary experience of Italian Jews in the United States and of Italian/American Jews. These are “minorities within a minority,” as pointed out in our interview with Anthony Tamburri; and historically they experienced a peculiar clash or overlap of identities—religious, political, and cultural.
     
    Third, as non-Jews we intend to dedicate this special issue of i-Italy to an uncompromising critique of racism, past and present. We are aware that, in our societies, on both sides of the Ocean, anti-Semitism is not dead—neither are other forms of racial intolerance, xenophobia, and ethnic violence. Though most of them only pale in comparison to the Holocaust, they are a heinous offense to our civilization. One can only quote Amos Luzzatto in this regard, when he writes in his article that we should realize that “we are all, in fact, minorities.”
     
    Last but not least, as Americans we cannot overlook the coincidence between the celebration of this year’s Remembrance Day and the inauguration of the first African/American president of the United States. These pages, and the online multimedia section you will find on our website, are also a tribute to a major symbolic achievement in the struggle against racism in the world.
     
     
     
     
    i-Italy.org is managed by the Italian/American Digital Project, Inc., a not-for-profit organization based in New York City. This print issue of our magazine was made possible by the contribution of the Scuola d’Italia “Guglielmo Marconi” and the Italian Cultural Institute of New York.
     
     
     
    We would not be where we are, however, were it not for the generous contributors of our previous print issues, and we extend a heart-warm thanks also to Justice Dominic Massaro, Alitalia, the Italian Government Tourist Board of New York (ENIT,) the Regione Sardegna, and the Provincia di Ancona.

     

     
  • Facts & Stories

    Talking Italy


    These days Italy is celebrating the 60th anniversary of its Constitution. We at i-Italy have decided to offer our contribution with this special print issue dedicated to Italy’s culture and language.

    For an online editorial and social network such as i-Italy, going to print is a special occasion. It is – if the parallel does not sound too impertinent – similar to the emigrant who returns to visit the old country. The smell of paper, the beautiful perfection of printed fonts – these things you cannot find in the online world. The Republic’s National Holiday seemed the ideal occasion for such a return.

    This special issue contributes to a collective effort to promote the study of Italian language in the U.S., a primary means to reinforce the cultural and political identity of that vast nation we call Italian America. For a nation without a language is lost forever, unable to engage in what Robert Viscusi defines “authoritative discourse.”

     

    In this issue: Stefano Albertini, Maria Bartiromo, Ottorino Cappelli, Giovanni Castellaneta, Margaret I. Cuomo, Matilda Raffa Cuomo, A. Kenneth Ciongoli, Anna Luisa Depau, Josephine Gattuso Hendin, Fred Gardaphe, Katherine La Guardia, Silvana Mangione, Andrea Mantineo, Dominic Massaro, Dacia Maraini, Mariuccia Zerilli Marimò, Eleonora Mazzucchi, Renato Miracco, Aniello Musella, Daniel Nigro, Berardo Paradiso, Rodrigo Praino, Letizia Airos Soria, Alexander Stille, Riccardo Strano, Aileen Riotto Sirey, Louis Tallarini, Joseph Sciame, Francesco Maria Talò, Anthony J. Tamburri, Robert Viscusi.
    Read our special Issue online

    With this in mind, we have gathered a most authoritative group of contributors: the highest representatives of Italy’s institutions in the U.S., top exponents of the Italian American community, prestigious academics, journalists, and writers. To each of them i-Italy asked the same questions: Why Italian? How can we motivate American citizens – be they of Italian origin or not – to learn Italian? And, why should we? We hope our special issue will stimulate curiosity and debate.

    The language/identity issue is strongly felt – not only in the institutional and intellectual spheres but among the public at large. In these past few weeks, we also proposed a discussion forum to our community members entitled “Studying Italian: Why and Why Not”. The response was amazing, as dozens of people began to debate, recount stories, offer their experiences and judgments (www.i-Italy.us).



    We offer this special issue in English in order to reach all those Americans who either have some Italian ancestry or love all things Italian – but have no command of the language. This is also why i-Italy.org, our online editorial network, is mainly in English with an Italian-language section.

    According to the U.S. Census Bureau, over 15 million American citizens reported Italian as their first ancestry in 2000, yet only one million were able to speak Italian. Furthermore, the 2005 American Community Survey found that Italian was spoken by only 800,000 people, two-thirds of whom over 65 years of age. Among younger Americans (age 5-17,) only 55,000 speak Italian. Clearly, the ability to speak Italian is decreasing rapidly in the U.S. due to generational turnover and the modest diffusion of Italian among the youth.



    All this tells us that something must be done to revive the study of Italian among the youth, before it is too late. i-Italy is trying to contribute to such an effort. This special issue is one step, and it is interesting to note that several of our contributors are the living products of the problematic, linguistic history of Italian America. Fiorello LaGuardia’s granddaughter Katherine, and Joseph Sciame, a former President of the Order Sons of Italy in America, tell us they didn’t have the opportunity to study Italian when they were younger; Justice Dominic Massaro was raised in a period when “speaking Italian would have been like speaking the language of the enemy.” Aileen Riotto Sirey, Chairwoman of the National Organization of Italian American Women, has felt “handicapped” her whole life, not speaking Italian. And Daniel Nigro, FDNY Chief of Operations on 9/11, points to the heart of the matter: without the language, Italian Americans confront a heritage they “are so proud of, but sometimes don’t fully understand.”



    Another step is the community discussion about “Studying Italian” that we just launched on our social network. It is gratifying to see how many points of contacts there are between the authoritative comments included in this special issue and the thoughts and opinions expressed by i-Italy’s ordinary users. Just go to www.i-Italy.us and search under “Discussions and Viewpoints”. You will find a long thread about the Italian-language issue, with dozens of posts. Second, third, and fourth generation Italian Americans, from all walks of life and from all over the U.S., are sharing their experiences with Italian language: their wish to know the language to better connect with their heritage; their frustration at the obstacles they encounter; their proposals to improve the situation.



    But there is much more that i-Italy can do. We are planning a series of multimedia presentations where excerpts from classics of Italian fiction and non fiction will be read by professional speakers, with pictures and animations in the background. The original text and the English translation will also be provided as learning assistance tools. The first of these presentations is being prepared as we write, and will be dedicated to Italy’s National Holiday; it will introduce the first 12 articles of Italy’s Constitution, its “Fundamental Principles.”



    Through our daily activity, we shall assure that as many articles as possible be translated into Italian – both to make ourselves ever more accessible to Italians in Italy, and to offer our American readers yet another tool to practice their language skills. We shall also extend this bilingual approach to our WebTV and WebRadio experiments, which we are launching alongside our Magazine. We are also making every effort to facilitate the creation of a bilingual, cross-cultural social network in our community website, involving people who live on both sides of the ocean.



    The results of our first months of existence are encouraging: with almost 140,000 page-views, and over 23,000 “absolute unique visitors” (a 500 per cent increase in six months,) i-Italy is growing daily. Our regular contributors now include not only 40 or so professional journalists, academics, and public intellectuals, but also about 500 active members of our social network, who air their opinions, exchange views, and engage in lively discussions. To date, they have activated 74 forums and 27 discussion groups, and they have shared 247 videos, 269 audio files and 1844 photos. It is a lively, rapidly growing community, and this is the very richness of i-Italy.


    To be ever more successful, i-Italy now needs two things.

     

    First, we need human resources, people – especially young people – who are willing to work with us on a voluntary basis to make i-Italy a success: young journalists, writers, photographers, and video-makers; and we need of course, translators and editors to help us keep our promise of an Italian American bi-lingualism. We are being helped greatly by the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute of Queens College/ CUNY, which is providing us with office space and has just circulated a call for internships at i-Italy among CUNY students. Internship are also forthcoming from NYU, thanks to the support of Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò. We are getting proposals for “online internships” from throughout the U.S., from Seattle to Florida!


    The second thing i-Italy needs is financial support – so that all these energies that we are mobilizing may form a reasonable expectation to be somehow rewarded after a period of voluntary work. To this end, we have created a not-for-profit corporation, Italian/American Digital Project, Inc., and we have applied for tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, so we’ll be eligible to receive tax-deductible contributions. We therefore end this note with an appeal to all prospective sponsors, donors, and advertisers who can help i-Italy live and grow. We like to believe that we need them at least as much as they need us!

     

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    Print Edition

    Letizia AIros Soria, Managing Editor

    Eleonra Mazzucchi, Assistant Editor

    Daria Masullo & Giulia Prestia, Translation

    Fulvio Minichini, Photographs