The Never Ending Present
What do you get for someone celebrating their second birthday in a lockdown?
What do you get for someone celebrating their second birthday in a lockdown?
The monolingual approach adopted for the political aim of making Italians speak with one voice has succeeded. But the campaign has been needlessly costly.
How Francis Ford Coppola's work of art ultimately did more harm than good to Italian Americans.
With the establishment of Florentine as the literary language of choice, all the other regional languages came to be regarded as dialects, creating a unique situation that Italians have struggled with to this day.
At some point, Italian Americans stopped being a monolith, particularly as a voting bloc. Then at another point, they started swinging ever more determinedly towards the right. And then, along came Donald Trump.
The rise of populism has brought with it a shift in traditional power structures, even those which were previously unseen.
As a Sicilian, I never regard people from Greece as outsiders. Indeed, they were an integral part of the history of Sicily almost from the beginning.
The memory of the presence of Muslims on the island remains and can be readily seen practically everywhere.
We absolutely need to think of amnesty for those economic costs that many millions of us will not recoup, but it needs to become more than a fiscal policy for the reconstruction of Italy. It must become our worldview.
What’s left of the Jewish permanence in Sicily? Not much remains to the untrained eye, but the integration of the Jews with the rest of the population left marks on Sicilian customs and traditions.