An Italian/American State of Mind by Anthony J.T amburri J.Tamburri
In launching i-Italy, we shall inevitably reconsider our own individual positions within the Italian/American community. Namely, what are the duties and/or responsibilities of someone involved in Italian Americana? Must we take on that Gramscian role of “organic intellectual,” or can we just go about our business as the individuals we are? How do we create an Italian/American State of Mind? This is one of the most important issues that impacts our community, deserving of greater attention as required by our individual and collective sense of amor proprio. We must, for sure, ponder the issue of the group versus the individual, especially that person similar to any famous Italian American who has the ability (read, cultural currency) to further the group’s cause. This is an age-old question that we need to tackle, since we can now readily say that we have – literally and metaphorically – arrived. Allow me to pose a series of questions in this regard. First, why is there no section in bookstores, especially in a city like New York, dedicated to Italian/American writing? Given the thousands of square feet a bookstore occupies, what impact could one bookshelf of Italian/American books have? Second, why is it that of the six or seven forthcoming books on a publisher’s home page, the one dedicated to Italian Americana does not appear? Third, why is it that a book dedicated to United States poetry, one that seems to present itself as historically analytical and prescriptive, does not include a chapter on any Italian American, not even John Ciardi? We need to be sure that our progeny is aware of our culture. They can access it in two ways: (1) Teachers and professors on all levels need to be trained to impart the information necessary for such cultural awareness. The strategy for its success is binate: (a) lessons on significant Italian Americans need to be integrated into the various K-12 curricula; (b) professors at the college level need to include Italian Americana in their various courses, especially in their graduate seminars. Now, with the creation of i-Italy, a virtual network connecting Italy and Italian America, the promulgation of such information becomes easier with each click of a button. (2) All of this leads to a second way of access — where “push comes to shove.” This is where cultural philanthropy comes into play; professorships in Italian Americana should be established; centers for Italian/American Studies should be formed. Both, clearly, can be done through endowments of approximately $2,000,000 and $1,000,000 respectively. Professorships and centers run the gamut for other United States ethnic groups, funded by individuals and/or their foundations. Very few individuals among the Italian/ American community have engaged in such cultural philanthropy; we can count the number on one hand. Ultimately, we need to take our culture more seriously. We simply cannot continue to engage in a series of reminiscences that lead primarily to nostalgic recall. Instead, we need to revisit our past, reclaim its pros and cons, and reconcile it with our present. We need to figure out where we came from, ask those unpopular questions of both ourselves and the dominant culture, and champion our many Italian/ American cultural brokers — artists and intellectuals — so that they can engage productively in an Italian/ American state of mind. Ultimately, all of this is dependent upon our recapturing our sense of amor proprio, combining it with our abilities — financial, performative, aesthetic, intellectual — in order to engender, document, maintain, and transmit our Italian/American culture; anything short of such activity is tantamount to failure. Dean, J.D.Calandra Italian American Institute Queens College (CUNY)
NEW MEDIA & ITALIAN AMERICA Introducing www.i-Italy.org di Patrizio Di Nicola
October 2nd 6:00 pm Graduate School of Journalism CUNY - 230 w 41 st New York NY
Le immagini di questo speciale: Scene di vita a Bensonhurst fotografate da Luca Fantini
Eusic. Quel progetto un po’ speciale In tutti i progetti vi è una piccola magia, una scintilla creativa che nasce dalla combinazione degli ingegni che vi partecipano. Ma se questa è la regola, bisogna dire che tutti noi, mentre pensavamo EUSIC, e ancor di più dopo, durante la sua realizzazione, avevamo una forte sensazione di avere tra le mani qualcosa di speciale, difficile da realizzare, e anche per questo molto interessante. Anzitutto EUSIC (acronimo che significa Empowerment of the US-ltaly Community) non è nato come un normale corso di formazione nel chiuso di una Facoltà universitaria. Finanziato dal Ministero del Lavoro e delle Politiche Sociali e dal Fondo Sociale Europeo nell’ambito del programma “Interventi per la formazione degli Italiani residenti in Paesi non appartenenti all’Unione Europea”, il progetto è stato presentato dal Dipartimento di Sociologia e Comunicazione dell’Università di Roma “La Sapienza” in collaborazione con partner italiani e americani con l’idea rinforzare le collettività italiane e la loro relazione con i sistemi produttivi locali, esteri e italiani. Come si vede, un approccio assolutamente innovativo, in quanto la leva della formazione, indirizzata a 12 giovani italiani a New York, si innestava con l’evoluzione della comunità italiana negli USA. Al centro dei processi formativi di EUSIC vi è la comunicazione, intesa per gli studenti come avviamento alla professione del Content manager, sia esso un giornalista per la carta stampata, sia esso un manager di sistemi informativi online. Ma per la comunità degli italiani in America EUSIC voleva rappresentare un servizio nuovo, in grado di consolidare una comunità virtuale di carattere informativo dedicata alla collettività stessa, e fortemente ancorata sulle reti sociali che già esistono attorno alle testate italiane all’estero. In tal senso EUSIC doveva essere in grado di promuovere il confronto tra i diversi sistemi, italiano e americano, con l’obiettivo di diffondere negli USA una conoscenza più approfondita dell’Italia: l’informazione e la cultura, la storia, la lingua e il cinema, ma anche la moda, la gastronomia, il territorio e il turismo. Continua a pagina 2 1
The Editors: Ottorino Cappelli Fred Gardaphè Stefano Giannuzzi Letizia Airos Soria Anthony J. Tamburri Stefano Vaccara Robert Viscusi
Beyond
the “Basciument”
by Fred Gardaphè When Niccolo Machiavelli penned his masterpiece, The Prince, Italy was a land divided and besieged by many foreign forces. In his last chapter, “An Exhortation to free Italy from the Hands of the Barbarians,” he calls for new weapons and formations to be used in warding off intruders and to prepare for new leadership of Italy. In many ways, the current state of Italian/American culture is in similar straights. We need new tools and new alliances to bring a sense of unification to our culture. For many years, Italian/American culture has been preserved in our homes, and over the years, more likely than not, in the basement , or “basciument,” where nonno made wine, where nonna had a second kitchen, and where many of us now store our material legacies and memories. Now is the time to move beyond the basements of yesterday and out into the streets of today. The romance and tragedy of early 20th century immigration can no longer serve as models for identity. The key to creating a meaningful sense of Italian/American culture that means something to today’s youth is to first insure that they have access to histories, of their families and of their communities, then we must provide them with historical and contemporary models in the areas of arts, business, and education, that they can study, emulate and transcend. The future of Italian American culture very much depends on how we organize our communications right now. Now that we can no longer depend on the geography of Little Italys to sustain our sense of culture, we must look for other ways. This web-based, multimedia, open access portal provides us with the key for an ongoing development of Italian American culture. Too often books come out by writers who are not aware of what the others are doing and end up writing books that never reach their potential in terms of audience and cultural impact. Now i-Italy would change this, providing an open forum for communities of writers, artists and cultural advocates everywhere in the U.S., in Italy, and the world. Director, Italian American Studies Program, SUNY@Stony Brook
Dalla prima Se dovessimo individuare i pilastri di EUSIC ne dobbiamo citare almeno due: il valore delle risorse umane che si sono mobilitate attorno al progetto, e l’uso intensivo e creativo delle tecnologie dell’informazione e della comunicazione. Delle persone vi è ben poco da dire, se non che i 12 studenti hanno avuto la fortuna di confrontarsi con maestri di eccellenza. Nelle aule e nel sistema di formazione online si sono alternati docenti italiani ed americani provenienti dalle più prestigiose università; alla riflessione sul futuro dell’informazione hanno contribuito giornalisti, corrispondenti e direttori di testate; l’interazione tra comunicazione e business è stata al centro dei ragionamenti degli uomini d’azienda che si sono confrontati con i nostri studenti. Tutti hanno
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How Many Identities? by Stefano V accara Vaccara
When I arrived in the United States, my identity was relatively clear. It was the identity of an Italian who lived in America. For a few years, this identity, more or less, remained intact. Once in a while it would expand to European, and every now and then, it would revert to its “Sicilitudine,” but it wasn’t American. I can remember my shock in the summer of ’98, when I heard the then leader of the Italian opposition, Silvio Berlusconi, on live TV. He was angry about my interview with the magistrates in Milan, which had been published in America Oggi. He declared that he would sue that magistrate and that “American journalist.” Me, American? Oh, grazie! It seemed a compliment, at least in the field of journalism. Then, as time passed, something changed. After ten years as a permanent resident, the day came for me to be sworn in as an American citizen. From that moment on, at least on my passport, I was American. Did I feel American? I certainly loved this country, but in terms of ethnic identity, what was I in America? I gained some clarity through my children. One day, on the way home from school, my son turned to me, “Papà, I’m an Italian American, right?” “Of course, Louis, you’re an Italian American.” My daughter Siena was Italian American as well, in spite of her name, or should I say, given her name. It had to be. They were born in New York to an Italian American mother from Boston. I was Italian. How incredible! Would I be different from them? In the fabric of their identity, do they feel something different from what I feel? Is this the way it is? Isn’t it possible for an Italian who lives in America to be considered, or to feel at the same time, Italian American? Can’t an Italian American in the United States feel, at some point in time, just Italian? This is i-Italy, which will be a forum for debate about everything. I hope that it will also become an instrument for confronting the identity/ies of Italian America. Since there is not one Italian identity, but rather a mosaic of regional identities, why should crossing the ocean change this? Whether in a 19th-century steamship or in a 21st -century jet, isn’t it possible that this truth of multiplicity endure on this side of the ocean as well? Executive Editor Oggi7
Quel progetto un po’ speciale portato le loro esperienze, i loro insegnamenti, componendo un programma didattico di eccezionale valore, e per questo irripetibile. Un discorso a parte vale, invece, per le tecnologie. L’uso che ne è stato fatto nell’ambito del progetto è stato particolarmente incisivo. Anzitutto sono stati creati ben tre aree online: un sito web di progetto, inteso a comunicare i fondamentali di EUSIC, che ha avuto un ruolo importante specialmente come canale informativo nella fase iniziale, quando la ricerca degli studenti e la loro selezione costituiva il centro dei nostri pensieri. Subito dopo è venuto il Learning Management System, un sito pensato specificamente per erogare la formazione a distanza. Infine, ultimo nato, il sito di Community, il vero cuore pulsante di progetto, uno spazio online che
cresce tramite contenuti scritti, immagini, audio, video, prodotti dagli studenti, ma anche provenienti da famose risorse di rete, quali YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, ecc. E’ questo sito, in fin dei conti, il vero lascito del progetto alla comunità degli italiani in America: uno spazio interattivo e flessibile, destinato a crescere tramite contenuti specifici ed universalistici, professionali od hobbistici, ma comunque dedicati all’italianità in America. Università di Roma “Sapienza” Direttore Progetto Eusic GLI STUDENTI EUSIC Patrizia Barroero, Luigi Boccia, Luca Bolognini, Alberto Caruana, Robert Cavanna, Ilaria Costa, Raffaella Del Vecchio, Donato Di Bartolomeo, Silvia Forni, Natasha Lardera, Monica Mascia London, Benedetta Piantella Simeonidis, Gianluca Taraborelli
c/o J.D. Calandra Italian American Insitute Qeens College, CUNY 25w 43rd Street 17th Floor New York, N.Y. 10036 Telephone: (212) 642-2094 Fax: (212) 642-2030 Email: editors@i-Italy.org
Making Italians All Over Again
by Robert Viscusi
Citizen Journalism
by Letizia Airos Soria perceptions: e.g., Americans as ignorant
Since 1991 the godfather of the world wide web Tim Berners-Lee has been telling everybody that his creature is much more a social rather than a technical invention: it was intended from the very beginning as a tool to enable people to collaborate in the creation and exchange of information. Some 15 years later, it should not come as a surprise that the one field most affected by this momentous change is journalism. The phenomenon of “citizen journalism” is now ubiquitous, displacing old-style media thanks to an endless network of blogs and audioand video-sharing websites. What we are trying to do with i-Italy is to convert the social potential of the web into a powerful communication and collaboration tool for Italian Americans, Italians who live in the U.S., and Americans who have an interest in Italy. Our challenge is to connect worlds that rarely meet, and hardly know each other. Lack of knowledge and superficial interaction is at the origin of so many stereotypical
ici rà. osa il mi
cowboys without history, Italians as paesani immigrants with mafia connections. If there were ever a way to put an end to these foolishly distorted images the old media keep disseminating about Italy, America, and Italian America, it is through i-Italy. A group of innovative journalists and public intellectuals are willing to embark upon this path together. But we can only succeed if we are able to trasmit the challenge to our readers, making them an active and important part of our enhanced editorial staff. To this end, i-Italy will give everyone the opportunity to collect, tell, discuss, and spread information about their life, culture, and heritage. A journalist in the 21st century must be able to gather with humility the input from the net’s grassroots contributors. As for myself, I offer not only my professional experience as a writer, but also my personal experience as an Italian who has been living in this country – and among its Italians - for many years and loves it. Editor Oggi7- Managing Editor AmericaOggi.info
When the Risorgimento finally succeeded in joining the many parts of Italy into a single nation, Massimo D’Azeglio remarked, “We have made Italy, now we must make Italians.” People concerned about the new country knew what he meant. Subjects of the new kingdom often could not understand one another’s way of speaking. They ate different foods, wore different clothes. They feared each other ’s differences. The new Queen, going from Turin to Naples for the first time, was surprised to find that Neapolitans were people, as she said to her husband, “just like us.” During their history as subjects of a single king and, later, as citizens of a single republic, Italians have often exhibited a degree of doubt about who really counted as one of them. We know of many efforts to overcome this doubt. The national language has been a political project since the 1870s. In the 1890s, the prime minister Francesco Crispi conducted a doomed program of “wars and empire” as a way of getting the inhabitants of Italy’s intensely local localities to see themselves as members of a collective enterprise. In the 1920s and 30s, Fascism conducted many energetic campaigns in almost every avenue of daily social reproduction in its effort to mould Italians into a single political culture. This was uphill work. After the 50s, television made it easy. Today, even in the poorest and most remote villages, local languages and customs have long since begun to acquire the paradoxical luster belonging to spectacles produced for the delight of tourists. For several decades now, young people have been learning the national language and its prefabricated culture from many sources: children’s programs, evening newscasts, annual song competitions at San Remo. Now, however, even national Italian culture is beginning to seem provincial and outmoded. The European Union, new patterns of migration, and the Internet are rocking Italy’s world. Many forces have suddenly conspired to propose the question again: who is an Italian now? i-Italy is a site where anyone may present an answer to this question. Who will want to? There are people who think of themselves as Italians in Perth, Bogota, Vancouver, Irkutsk, Queens. What music do they like? What languages do they speak? What will their videos show us? What do they want to tell us? Is it a time to make Italians all over again? Writer. Executive Director, Ethyl R. Wolfe Institute, Brooklyn College, CUNY
ti” oli Un do o il enha e”. he on lla do tro le
ti” oli Un
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It Takes a Network by O t t o r i n o C a p p e l l i The Italian/American presence on the Internet may seem, at first, desolante. Try and type “Italian American” (with or without the infamous hyphen) in your google search bar. A few institutional websites will come up first, some of them well designed but rarely updated, which present, however, only one-way information and no room for user interaction. Then you’ll find a host of amateurish pages striving to rally Italian Americans around a big tricolored flag and a sound file that, all of a sudden, launches the Italian national anthem at full volume. Lastly, come those ecommerce sites that want to sell you Italian food, clothes, and merchandise; plus some attempting to make money by helping you find “Beautiful Italian Singles.” Yes, there are a few online newspapers that offer freeaccess discussion forums, but they’re mainly in Italian – www.americaoggi.info stands out among them. True, there are a few news services (Ansa.it, for example) that have some sort of English-language version – but they’re mainly about Italy, and you’ll peruse them for hours in search of an entry about Italian America. And yes, in the past decade a sequel of self-defined “web portals” about Italy mushroomed – but they proven to be commercial failures: raised money, couldn’t define their audience, failed to find or retain users, and ended up in a handful of broken links. Well, you might surmise that this gloomy picture reflects a fact of life: fifteen million Italian Americans (U.S. Census Bureau data) – most of whom are on the net like everybody else in this country – don’t have an “identity” of their own: a sense of, or need for, “community,” some sort of social capital to be spent in telling their stories on line, meeting each other and exchanging ideas and opinions, while also engaging in discussions and other forms of interaction. Italian Americans are a success story of ethnic assimilation and disintegration after all – they are Americans; they don’t have much to say to or exchange with each other as a group. You might think so, indeed. But you’d be plain wrong! Just go and search MySpace.com – the famous website that millions of people use to build their own personal pages and make friends. You’ll find 58,200 entries for “Italian American” (7,440 of which are hyphenated), 110,000 for “little italy”, 519,000 for “sopranos,” and so on. Now try something similar with that rising star in the social networking firmament on the web: Facebook.com. You’ll find several hundreds discussion groups with an “Italian American” label, some with a few hundreds members and a few with several thousands members. And what about YouTube.com – the video-sharing site everyone is talking about? Over 100,000 videos are tagged “Italian” or “Italian American”, almost as many have “Italy” in their keywords, and countless more tell you about personal and family stories, describe trips, report events, and voice people’s opinions and feelings about every angle of Italian and Italian American lifestyle. And I’m not going to talk about blogs: browse for yourself with a good blog-searching utility such as technorati.com. To make a long story short: Italian Americans are out on the web, they do try to relate to each other on the basis of shared feelings of “community”, they do express their views through the entire array of multimedia tools the web offers them, and they are eager to find – and provide! – information about all aspects of their life. What is missing - and is badly needed - is a network connecting them. That’s exactly what i-Italy is going to be. Yes, we’ve got a magazine for you to read, and op-eds, and special reports, and a webTV to watch. And we are assembling an editorial board made of authoritative journalists, commentators, and pubic intellectuals. But make no mistake: the web is not just about information, not even about communication – all the web is about is conversation. It’s your stories that matter, your opinions, your comments – and your will to share them among yourselves and with usIt takes a network to build a community. Now we’ve got the network: let’s build our community together. Universitá di Napoli “L’Orientale” i-Italy Project Coordinator
i-Italy Launches The 1st Annual Italian/American Citizen Journalist - Digital Witness Contest Publish your reportages, articles, columns and stories, including personal and family stories (written text, images, video and audio files are admissible). The theme of the contest is “Italy and Italian America” Fifteen winners will get: · First Prize: two tickets from any USA Alitalia Gateway to any destination in Italy · Second Prize: one iPhone (4Gb) · Third Prizes: one $100 pre-paid iTunes music card for each of three winners All winners will be get free access to the limited-number, by-invitation-only “Blogosphere” of www.i-italy.org and will be offered a permanent role as Citizen Journalists / Digital Witnesses in our editorial network. 1. 2.
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The 1st Annual Italian/American Citizen Journalist - Digital Witness Contest is intended to select, from among i-italy users, the fifteen best original contributions about “Italy and Italian America.” Participation to the contest is open to all legal residents in the U.S. who will open a free account in our free-for-all “Community” space (www.i-italy.us) and post their own contribution there. All entries must be in English language and be coherent with the theme of the contest, which is “Italy and Italian America”. All kinds of reportages, articles, columns and stories, including personal and family stories, are admissible regardless of the media employed (written text, images, video and audio files). Entries such as text, images, and audio files must be posted on i-Italy’s “Community” space. Videos must be posted on YouTube (www.youtube.com) or other video-sharing websites and then embedded. Videos uploaded on www.i-italy.us will be deleted and disqualified. Neither an entry fee nor purchases of any products are required to enter the contest. You may submit as many entries as you wish, the odds of winning increase with the number of entries posted. Provided a reasonable number of qualified entries are received, there will be 15 winners of this contest: One First Prize winner, One Second Prize winner, Three Third Prize winners and 10 Fourth Prize winners. Each of the winners will get free access to the limitednumber, by-invitation-only “Blogosphere” of www.i-italy.org and will be offered a permanent role as Citizen Journalists / Digital Witnesses in our editorial network. In addition, the prizes that will be awarded, are as follows: One First Prize winner, two free Alitalia tickets to Italy for two persons traveling together (The tickets are valid from from anywhere in the USA via an Alitalia Gateway [JFK, EWR, MIA, BOS, and ORD] to any Alitalia destination Italy for one year. The tickets are non-transferable and cannot be endorsed to any other airline or exchanged for a cash refund. Government imposed taxes and fees of up to $300 are not included); One Second Prize winner, one free iPhone (4Gb); Three Third Prize winners, one free $100 pre-paid iTunes music card each; Ten Fourth Prize winners, one unlimited-time, free account as Citizen Journalists / Digital Witnesses in our “Blogosphere” (www.iitaly.org).
The complete rules of the contest are available on www.i-Italy.org and www.i-Italy.us
October 3, 2007 - Alitalia Celebrates 50 Years of Service Between Rome and New York and 60 Years in Flight 4