The Brooklyn Rail

When I was a child, Italy was the sound of my father speaking on the telephone, his tongue picking off rapid-fire melodies that were words and sentences, but nothing I could understand, transfixed as I was, spying on him with the door ajar. Papà was an American but born and raised in Milan. He had gone to a Catholic school, as I did at that time, but instead of reciting the Pledge of Allegiance after morning prayers, he saluted Il Duce. Until the Americans blew up his school. When my father was fourteen, Mussolini was arrested, and on April 29, 1945, my father and his friends scrambled to Piazzale Loreto where they stared in horrific excitement at Duce’s corpse hung upside-down beside his girlfriend and other fascists. For Papà, that was Italy: familial connections to a troubled childhood of hunger and war. For me, Italy was the melodious gibberish he spoke with amorphous members of my famiglia.

My father spoke English with a heavy accent, which I never consciously heard. It was the one trait that revealed his foreignness when childhood friends told me he spoke funny. My American-born mother never learned Italian, but I did in high school. It was only in those classes I realized for the first time that I was not the only first or second-generation Italian-American. We seemed to have naturally huddled together to study our ancestral tongue. Some had been raised on dialects, Neapolitan or Sicilian in particular, reflecting the history of most Italian immigrants who had come to America. But Papà rarely associated with these other Italians when I was growing up, and it was not until I was older that I understood Italy’s historical and socio-political differences, as well as its cultural biases. Among most Italian-Americans, he was a minority among minorities, an immigrant from the North. Yet, when he joined an Italian folk group and learned to dance the tarantella, his brother in Milan laughed and said he was no longer a real Italian, performing a dance from Naples.

Having only united (partially) in 1861, Italy as a country remains young and fragile, its recent history including having been on the “wrong” side during World War II. The waves of xenophobia percolating today in the country’s politics and civic discourse are symptomatic of its history, having been partitioned and colonized by other nations for centuries. Today, refugees and migrants from Eastern Europe and Africa seek out new lives within its borders. The Venice Biennale recognized this fraught history with its theme this year: Stranieri Ovunque (Foreigners Everywhere). The 2024 exhibition, curated by Adriano Pedrosa from Brazil, includes not only hundreds of contemporary artists but the largest gathering of deceased twentieth-century artists, whose lives and works cross physical and metaphorical boundaries, beyond nationalist identities. This proposition thus implies that Italy has always been a land of foreigners: colonizers and tourists, exiles and refugees.

Centuries ago, aristocrats went on Grand Tours to Italy, immersing themselves in the cradle of Western civilization, vis-à-vis Greco-Roman art and architecture and Renaissance paintings and sculptures. By the 1800s, the rising middle classes followed, and Italy was flooded with tourists seeking inexpensive vacations while absorbing some culture (some things never change). Yet, these tourists usually avoided the italiani, preferring instead fellow ex-patriates. Consider the Welsh-born sculptor John Gibson (1790–1866). He studied in Rome with the master of neoclassicism, Antonio Canova, and established a studio where he worked for almost fifty years. Situated near the Piazza del Popolo, the main entry point to the city, his studio attracted all the English-speaking tourists, who bought his statues of Venus and reliefs of Cupid and Psyche as souvenirs of Italy. By the 1840s Gibson’s sculptures were so identified with Rome that critics in London declared he was no longer British. Meanwhile, ignored were the italiani who worked in his studio, using chisels and mallets to carve these exquisite figures in marble. Only now from his extant ledgers do we know their names—Baini, Bonanni, Celzo, Polini, et al.—but nothing about their lives.

Italy is defined by its people, but who are they? Does this definition reside exclusively with generations of natives living within the boundaries of the boot? Or can this sense of identity be found in the lives of non-natives who have immersed themselves in its culture? Who was more Italian: Gibson or my Papà? And where do I fit into this as a first-generation Italian-American? I have visited the Sistine Chapel and walked the grounds of the Roman Forum. I have warmed myself in sunrises on the Ponte Vecchio overlooking the Arno in Florence, and I have sighed from the bridges of Venice at sunset as gondolas pass me by. Every trip has made me more aware of all the reasons why I love Italy. But the most memorable were with my father.

Milan looks so different now, cleaner and trendier than in the past, when my father and I would wander the war-torn streets of his childhood memories. I cannot help but wonder what he would think of Milan today, but he is gone now, more than a decade, and his passing has both connected and unmoored me to Italy in ways that I am still trying to understand. For me, one truth remains: Italy transcends place because of its people, no matter where they are born. Everyone who knows something of Italy discovers it remains with them forever. We are all stranieri italiani ovunque.