{"id":3819,"date":"2014-11-03T16:50:57","date_gmt":"2014-11-03T15:50:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rickzullo.com\/?p=3819"},"modified":"2016-03-17T03:52:41","modified_gmt":"2016-03-17T02:52:41","slug":"italian-american-immigrant-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/italian-american-immigrant-stories\/","title":{"rendered":"A review of “My Two Italies,” by Joseph Luzzi"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>I recently read the thoughtful memoir by Joseph Luzzi entitled, \u201cMy Two Italies<\/a>,\u201d (Farrar, Straus and Giroux<\/em>, 2014).\u00a0 At its core, it\u2019s the tale of an Italian family who crossed the ocean to start a new life in the United States, and how that journey was experienced by different generations. \u00a0But there are several features of this book\u2014and its author\u2014that set it apart from most Italian American immigrant stories.<\/p>\n First of all, the events take place about fifty years after The Great Immigration (which is when my own great-grandparents arrived from Calabria). \u00a0The 1910\u2019s marked the peak\u00a0of Italian immigration to the United States, when over two million Italians arrived during\u00a0that decade, with a total of 5.3 million between 1880 and 1920.<\/p>\n Mr. Luzzi\u2019s family\u2014parents and older siblings\u2014arrived in 1956, also from Calabria. (Worth noting that during those fifty or so years, the U.S. had changed quite a bit, as did the North of Italy.\u00a0 Calabria, however, did not.)\u00a0 \u00a0As for the author, he was born 11 years later in 1967 as an American citizen.\u00a0 So while he learned English as his primary language, played baseball, and dressed in American-style clothes, his parents remained Italian in their ways, allowing the young Luzzi to understand something of his parent\u2019s country before he ever traveled there himself.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Secondly, when he did finally make it to Italy for the first time, it was the Italy of Michelangelo, Galileo, Dante, and all of the other players in the Renaissance city of Florence. \u00a0Although he was geographically much closer to his parent\u2019s Calabria at that moment, culturally he was just as distant as he had been back in Rhode Island.\u00a0 The metaphor of two Italies could hardly be more apparent.<\/p>\n The title of the book is borrowed from a Shelley quote which says, in part, \u201cThere are two Italies [\u2026] The one is the most sublime and lovely contemplation that can be conceived by the imagination of man; the other is the most degraded, disgusting, and odious.\u201d \u00a0For anyone who has spent an extended period of time in that \u201cParadise of exiles,\u201d you know how accurate the statement really is.\u00a0 Italy is rife with contradictions and paradoxes\u2014which, in my opinion, is a big part of its appeal to the rest of the world.<\/p>\n What really gains my admiration about his tale is that the author takes a pragmatic look at both of these Italies, without being overly critical or swaying too deeply into sentimentality.\u00a0 For those of you who crave lyrical accounts of rolling Tuscan Hills, or the sunlight reflecting off the Venetian Lagoon, perhaps this isn\u2019t the book for you.\u00a0 But for anybody who is hungry for an in-depth, honest discussion of this complex country, you cannot do better than \u201cMy Two Italies<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n