After all the noise of the village—from the street gossip to the festival processions—for me this is where Pomarico narrows to its essence: one kitchen table, one cousin, one conversation resumed year after year.

Our grandfathers were brothers. Mine left for America. His stayed behind.

For nearly forty years, we have sat at Giovanni’s table trading stories about lives lived on opposite sides of the Atlantic. In April 2026, I published a memoir, In the Land of the Midday Sun: An American Grandson’s Search for His Southern Italian Roots (Bordighera Press), about finding my place in this little town in Basilicata, where my grandfather was born.

When my grandfather left Pomarico in 1905, he could barely read or write, and he left behind no letters in which he spoke his heart. Giovanni met him when he returned after six decades away. He is now the last person alive who remembers my grandfather—my final living link to the man whose departure shaped my own return to Pomarico.

Over the years, my namesake cousin became the constant in a town I barely understood. With a farmer’s patience, he guided my efforts to learn Italian. He always spoke slowly to make sure I was following him. When I bluffed—indicating that I understood something I really didn’t—he would call me on it, pause, and begin again.

Like a father guiding a son, he has taught me the power of certain Italian words and how a man is expected to behave in a village this small.

*

Decades ago, Giovanni moved through Pomarico with a swagger. With little formal schooling, he was a carouser who organized daily card games at village bars and always called for the next round.

I still call him il Sindaco—the mayor—because for so long he played the charming outlaw. After long days working as a farmer and firefighter, he blew off steam drinking, gambling, and holding court.

No card game started until Giovanni arrived.

When he drank too much, he never went straight home. He knew his wife Laura would be waiting, so he drove out to the farm to sober up before facing her. (Laura is sitting next to him as he tells me this. Her eyebrows rise at the confession. She reaches out and grabs his cheek the way a mother scolds a wayward son.)

At eighty-eight, my cousin still reports to his fields each day at dawn. He gathers eggs and tends to whatever needs doing, still tied to the place that has sustained him through youth, fatherhood, and old age.

Giovanni has been slowed by three successive heart attacks that occurred in one day last year. He suffered one at the farm and, with the help of his grandson Gabriel, struggled home where he had a second in his kitchen. He suffered a third in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

The afternoon almost killed him.

Now Laura runs the show: She strictly manages his schedule, allowing him only so many hours on the farm—and rarely, if ever, alone.

Under her guidance, he quit drinking. He’d given up cigarettes long ago, but he won’t quit the card games he plays each afternoon with the same old cronies.

Within Giovanni a boyish spirit survives—one I recognize in myself. He’s white-haired, his face rough with beard stubble. His frame remains compact, his center of gravity low to the ground, as if always ready for work.

Little stops him. Not even three heart attacks.

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*

One morning Giovanni and Laura take me out to the farm to witness some changes there. Giovanni’s aunt Angela willed him this land decades ago, and now it is time to get ready to pass it on to the next generation—Giovanni and Laura’s daughter Antonia and her son Giuseppe.

He has worked hard to transform the house into something more modern, adding a bathroom, bedroom, and a new kitchen—creating a place no longer devoted entirely to labor.

For Giovanni, this house has provided a place of rest while he tilled the resistant soil to produce something out of nothing. Now he watches as much as he works.

Laura created a flower garden where he once grew tomatoes. “All of these flowers,” she says, “I planted them.”

She is a petite woman who wears a blue sweater pulled over her head like a shawl against the morning chill. She softens the place. We walk to the chicken coop, and she feeds the four cats who patrol the property.

The chickens look on with jealousy, but they were fed hours before. In the afternoon, the hens will deliver their eggs. Giovanni will make a special trip to collect them, though perhaps it is only an excuse to drive the shaded country road to his farm while it is still his.

He once told me that he didn’t need the God offered by the church. Gesturing to his fields, he said, “I have this.”

His daughter has made other changes to her father’s farm. She installed a solar panel over the chicken coop to run two security cameras that scan the farmhouse. Now she can keep watch over the farmyard at any time, using an app on her phone, even when she’s at work. If she sees that her father’s car has been there too long, she’ll call him or report to her mother.

“He’s been there too long,” she’ll say. “It’s not healthy. It’s time for him to come home.”

Giovanni knows change must come, but he has resisted the advent of the cameras.

Most days, Giovanni doesn’t want to leave this place. He lingers before he turns the ignition on his compact car.

Because one day, he knows, when he leaves it will be for the last time.

*

It’s lunchtime, and Laura lays down plates containing spirals of pasta with tangy homemade sauce. There’s succulent lamb, plates of olives, and carrots covered in oil made from olives Giovanni grows on his farm.

Back home in America, I buy olive oil in dark green bottles stamped with Italian words and pastoral labels. Most of it tastes flat and anonymous, more commodity than craft.

Giovanni’s oil is something else entirely. It announces itself immediately—coating the tongue with the taste of the surrounding hills.

I try to describe to my cousin what I am experiencing, but words fail me. I point to a glass of red table wine—also produced here by hand. Like the wine, I tell him, the oil is meant to linger on the tongue, to be consumed slowly, savored.

Over a few hours, we talk in Italian. We laugh about the day he allowed me to try out his motorized tiller, which bucked from my hands like a headstrong colt before Giovanni stepped in and calmly regained control.

In those fields, he possessed a mastery no education could teach.

“You’re a professor of the fields,” I say.

*

At the kitchen table, we’re joined by Giovanni’s grandson Gabriel. He was there when Giovanni suffered his heart attack, and the experience has bonded the two.

Gabriel has just broken up with a girlfriend, yet he remains unfazed.

“Morto un papa,” he says, repeating an Italian phrase, “se ne fa un altro.”

When one pope dies, they make another.

Giovanni smiles. It’s the old smile of the drinker, the card-player, the hell-raiser. These are the moments I crave in Pomarico. This is why I return.

A few years ago, at my request, Giovanni showed me the mausoleum in the nearby graveyard where he will one day rest. Next to Laura’s. Their places are set. He is ready.

As I leave, I turn to my cousin.

“Don’t change,” I say, “ever.”

“Not until they take me to the cemetery,” he tells me.

He says it matter-of-factly, like a farmer discussing the weather.

For now, I am drawn back to Giovanni’s table.

John M. Glionna is a former Los Angeles Times staff writer who spent more than two decades covering the American West and served as the paper’s East Asia bureau chief. He is the author of Outback Nevada, No Friday Night Lights, Rebels and Outliers, and In the Land of the Midday Sun, a memoir about reconnecting with his family’s ancestral village of Pomarico in southern Italy. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Outside, and other publications.

“The Ambiguity of the Hypotheses,” the title of which invokes a quotation in Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, is part travel essay, part family and cultural history, part literary analysis, and part, frankly, philological obsession. The Pasticciaccio, that great influencer of the crime novel set in Rome in the winter of 1927, is a novel about Fascism and individual autonomy in response to it, and in the spirit of this great work I reentered the dark tangles and knots of a complex exploration of language, power, and cultural identity.

What initially drew me to The Coazze Notebook was a resonance with Taccuino di Caporetto, Gadda’s diary from World War I, when he was stationed at the front and later as a prisoner of war. Like Pirandello’s notebook, Gadda’s is interspersed with sketches, which suggest, to echo Sarti’s words, “his habit of thinking visually.” Both writers, modernists, were great experimenters who gave us new forms and reinvented language in response to characters and narrators who are, to quote Sarti again, “caught in the clutches of time and history” and find themselves “perpetually disenchanted with life.” Both had a dedication to, and preoccupation with, the spoken word: “This emphasis on spoken language became a hallmark of Pirandello’s art. . . . [I]ndeed, his tales abound in the vernacular, cropping up in interior monologues, rhetorical questions, exclamations and interjections, repetitions, and hesitations”—a description that could be applied, unaltered, to the thicket of Gadda’s Pasticciaccio. In the introduction, Sarti argues that Pirandello’s preoccupation with regional dialects “cannot be overstated” and that his attention to linguistic detail was “almost fanatical.” Idem, it might be said, for Gadda.

It was thematic concerns that initially drew my attention to Pound’s Silence: Is there an answer, a response, to the poet’s complicity in and glorification of Mussolini and Fascism? In this work of metafiction, Elkann portrays an acclaimed writer, Morli, who begins to imagine an interview with Pound in which he will pierce the silence of the poet’s later years: “What did he want Pound to say? To confess that he had hidden somewhere a new poem in which he said that things he had preached and believed were wrong? That Mussolini was not a hero but a man who had dragged his people into a disastrous war, making a shameful alliance with Hitler, and so on? Pound would have said that he was aware that he had chosen the losing side, but it was like gambling: the pleasure of playing to the bitter end and the paying the consequences to the full.” That Ezra Pound, Morli imagines, “would have confessed his fears.”

In order to bring about this imagined conversation with Pound, Morli must have conversations with others who knew Pound, and in order to do that Elkann’s imagined Morli invents a myriad of characters, some of whom are historical figures, some of whom are entirely fictional. Morli tries to imagine the conversations with one character, the anchorless Alfio, who is infatuated with Pound, with Pound’s persona, and with dictatorship. In doing so, he turns to Pirandello, with echoes of Six Characters in Search of an Author: “Very early on in life one dons a mask to face others, to face life. . . you put on, as Pirandello says, a mask or a series of masks. Alfio had tried on many different masks and in the end he oscillated between dandy and intellectual.”

As these two books—one centered on Pirandello and the other on Pound—have been brought, briefly, into dialogue with each other, it is here that another modernist who invited them might be brought into the conversation in the introduction to Gadda’s Pasticciaccio, the detective-philosopher Francesco Ingravallo sets forth one of his hypotheses about existence, arguing for multiplicity of perspectives and meanings, insisting that the cause of the “unforeseen catastrophe” is never one single event but, rather, “like a vortex, a point of cyclonic depression in the world’s consciousness towards which a multiplicity of perspectives have conspired.”

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Adria Bernardi the author of three novels, a collection of short stories and a collection of literary essays, an oral history, and eight translations from the Italian. She has received the Bakeless Prize for Fiction, the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, the Raiziss/DePalchi Translation Award, and the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Award. Her most recent book, “‘The Ambiguity of the Hypotheses’: four landmarks within the tangles, networks, and knots of Gadda’s Pasticciaccio”, is published by Bordighera Press.

The Calandra Institute studies Italian American life in many forms, particularly as an expression of cultural and ethnic memory—as a living archive of what our parents and grandparents experienced and how that experience has shaped our greater diaspora. Past generations waited years for US naturalization that often came on conditional and humiliating terms, and they built mutual-aid networks that authorities treated as vectors of foreign allegiance rather than expressions of communal care. The history of these naturalization difficulties is one lens I, as a researcher, use to examine contemporary migration narratives.

Two events here in New York City this spring brought these matters into clear focus. On March 24, The New School’s Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility hosted a book talk for Dr. Paolo Boccagni’s Undoing Nothing: Waiting for Asylum, Struggling for Relevance. A sociologist at the Università di Trento, Boccagni spent years with migrants and refugees in a temporary housing facility in Northern Italy, studying the lives of young men, mostly from West Africa, whose asylum cases had been on hold long enough that the word temporary seemed deceptive.

And on April 14, the NYU Center for European and Mediterranean Studies hosted a panel called “Rescue, Borders, and the Criminalization of Solidarity,” bringing together Dr. Isabella Trombetta, an expert on Central Mediterranean search and rescue; Karol Cichocki of the Podlaskie Humanitarian Rescue Service, an expert on the Poland-Belarus border; and Mónica Ruiz House of No More Deaths / No Más Muertes, an expert on the Sonoran Desert.

Together, the two events explored paths of migration—from open water to forest to desert—into a temporary shelter that can take years to become anything permanent.

Boccagni: What Waiting Means

The Zolberg Institute brought Boccagni into conversation with Dr. Alexandra Délano Alonso, Professor of Politics and Global Studies at The New School and a scholar of migrant solidarity and diaspora politics. Boccagni has spent a great deal of his fieldwork on a seemingly simple question: “What does it mean to wait?” Waiting, in Boccagni’s framing, is a structure imposed from the outside that gradually impacts your sense of who you are and what your future holds over years of bureaucratic limbo, reshaping not just your daily routine and redefining your relationship to time itself.

His earlier scholarship traced the ways in which migrants construct belonging through domestic space and everyday ritual; Undoing Nothing pushes that project into its hardest terrain, asking what happens to those constructions when the conditions for them are systematically withheld. Italy is not incidental to this inquiry. Italy is both the setting and the subject, a country that absorbs a disproportionate share of people crossing the Central Mediterranean (which, under EU rules, means Italy handles the bulk of asylum claims as the first member state of arrival). But it has yet to really figure out what to do with the people when they get there.1

Interviews with West African men in their early twenties make up the core of Undoing Nothing. These men arrived in Northern Italy expecting a short-term arrangement while their asylum cases moved through the system. One of Boccagni’s respondents, Olusola, describes making it to Italy as “being born again,”2 a sentiment echoed by Woikat, who says, “thanks to Italy” as much as, “thanks to God” for surviving the crossing (55). These are the words of young men who were grateful to have made it, not yet knowing that getting there was the navigable part. In Italy they encountered a bureaucratic system with no clear timeline, no guaranteed outcome, and no real answer to the question of what comes next, leaving them suspended in a kind of administrative nowhereland. “Italy can only become home,” one man tells Boccagni, “if you are able to stay here without papers” (163).

Boccagni describes these men’s experiences as a kind of floating in liminal space, where they live simultaneously inside and outside the social world. They’re present in Europe without having access to it and still emotionally tethered to their countries of origin. The refugee facility offers what he calls “inclusion by marginalization,” an “experiential bubble of parallel normality” (51) in which basic survival is guaranteed and everything else is deferred. One man, Gorko, puts the cost plainly: “A man must live out of his work. You go to work, then go back home, eat, take some rest, and then you work. If you stay here, you sleep and eat all the time. That’s not good.”

For these men, work is not just about income; it is, Boccagni writes, “as much a necessity as a dignified and morally appropriate state of things” (57) bound up with autonomy, purpose, and a sense of forward motion that the facility has no way to provide. That absence is not incidental but structural, and Boccagni traces it through two overlapping dynamics that define life in the facility. The first is what he calls the inherent “feminization” (16) characteristic of displacement of large numbers of people, in which survival is guaranteed while entitlement is withheld, encoding passivity as the appropriate posture for people receiving care. The second is the infantilization that accumulates through the facility’s daily routines, which, as Boccagni notes, are “mundane almost to the point of invisibility” (91). Cleaning gets framed not as hygiene but as “a preliminary exercise in civic integration.” The staff manager, addressing residents about dirty kitchens, tells them: “I’m speaking to you as adult people, because you are,” then adds, “I know I’m strict, but I’m doing it for your own good, otherwise you’d be lazy, you know, right? I must be like a mommy” (126). Nobody sets out to be condescending, but that dynamic develops through exactly this kind of exchange, each small procedure adding to the next until the overall message is legible: These are people who need to be managed, taught basic things, reminded how to behave. National flags painted onto garbage bins as a nod to multiculturalism end up, as Boccagni notes, putting recognition on the object of waste (17). The irony seems lost on the facility administrators, the people making decisions about how to manage a population they are simultaneously trying to help and contain, and, in the end, care and control become difficult to distinguish.

All of this, Boccagni is careful to note, happens in a racialized context. He refuses to gloss over its specificity, and that insistence is what sets the book apart from much writing on forced migration. He writes that, “Blackness matters, as my West African interlocutors periodically remind me, in a register that intermingles pride (Black is who/what I am), teleology (Black is what God wanted me to be), antiracism (Black is what I am discriminated against for), and disenchantment (You, the white person, cannot fully understand how they treat us as Black)” (17).

Most scholarship divides people into categories and moves on, but Boccagni doesn’t, and the difference matters: These men are not abstractions but individuals living inside the system, shaped by its demands and ground down by its delays. They are experiencing it as Black men in Italy, and that shapes everything from how staff interacts with them to how they make sense of their own situation. The book is better for taking that seriously, and in turn, so are its readers.

Three Borders, One Architecture

While Boccagni’s book documents what life looks like once people have made it inside the system, the NYU panel focused on the crossings themselves, on what people endure before they reach a facility like the one in Northern Italy.

The Center for European and Mediterranean Studies hosted three scholars and rescue workers with field testimony from three of the world’s most consequential migration crossings: Isabella Trombetta on Central Mediterranean search and rescue, Karol Cichocki on the Białowieża Forest along the Poland–Belarus border, and Mónica Ruiz House on the Sonoran Desert. Putting sea, forest, and desert in conversation was deliberate, revealing a recurring theme across all three, that what look like separate regional crises are the same set of policies playing out across different landscapes. Each participant’s testimony was driven by the same question of what it means to suspend the law at a border and what that, in turn, means for the people trying to cross it.

Trombetta’s scholarly work starts from a straightforward legal premise—once a rescue vessel reaches a boat in distress, international maritime and humanitarian laws obligate it to attach to that ship, regardless of where it is. In other words, the moment a state vessel shows up, that state is legally responsible for the people in the water. European states, it turns out, found a workaround, pulling their own vessels from the water entirely such that, as Trombetta writes, “by keeping their boats away, European countries keep their borders away.”3 No state ship means no state obligation, and the people in the water get reclassified, legally speaking, as someone else’s problem. Into that gap came NGO vessels, stepping in to do what state vessels no longer would. However, these same vessels found themselves charged with smuggling, aiding illegal immigration, or obstruction for the act of bringing people to safety. Trombetta noted at the April 14 panel that the criminalization of rescue did not begin with NGOs. Sicilian fishermen were prosecuted in the early 2000s for pulling people from the water, treated as having committed an offense simply by responding to people in distress, while those they had rescued were treated as problems to be managed rather than people with legal claims to protection. This practice allowed European states to deter further rescues and maintain a legal buffer.

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Such a precedent established that humanitarian response could be recast as criminal interference, and that the law could be deployed not to protect people in the water but to deter the people trying to help them. In a co-authored article with Seán Binder and Jaya Ramji-Nogales, Trombetta identifies the rhetorical move that has kept this logic so durable. Calling rescue an act of solidarity rather than a legal duty reframes it as a political choice, allowing states to treat the people who show up wearing life vests as activists rather than as people doing what the law has always required of them.4

Trombetta’s article “Maritime Borders in the Central Mediterranean” strengthens her remarks at the panel. Her scholarship highlights how the legal framework she described unfolds on the water with consequences that are anything but abstract. The piece documents an incident from the night of November 5-6, 2017, in which a rubber boat carrying around 150 people left Libya and sent an SOS signal of distress to the Italian Maritime Rescue Coordination Center, which relayed it to the Sea-Watch 3. Both the Sea-Watch 3 and the Libyan Coast Guard responded; the Libyan crew threw objects at the NGO rescuers and beat people on the boat to prevent them from crossing. Of the 150 aboard, 59 reached Italy and could apply for asylum, while the remaining 47 were taken to a detention center in Tripoli and held in overcrowded conditions for a month, with some later deported to their countries of origin and others sold to traffickers (134).

For those 47 people, the difference between protection and detention came down to whether the Sea-Watch crew or the Libyan Coast Guard physically reached them first. That arbitrariness is precisely what Trombetta has been documenting. In the Mediterranean, state boundaries serve as more than territorial markers: For some, they separate people who feel a responsibility to follow international law and people who do not (153).

Similarly, Cichocki and Ruiz House confirmed that the pattern extends well beyond the Mediterranean. Cichocki highlighted incidents at the Białowieża Forest corridor (where hypothermia kills people) in which border agents have dragged migrant survivors back across the wall, and where five humanitarian workers, known as the “Hajnówka Five” were charged with facilitating migrants’ illegal stay after helping a family cross the border in 2022. Years later, in September 2025, the five were tried and acquitted with no acknowledgment from the Polish state that the case should never have gone to trial. Ruiz House spoke about the Sonoran Desert, where volunteers face felony charges for leaving water on migrant trails, where more than 8,000 deaths have been documented since 1998, and where death maps align so consistently with known crossing routes that the relationship between enforcement strategy and mortality cannot reasonably be dismissed. The geography differs, but dangerous conditions are created or enabled, humanitarian responses are criminalized, and the individuals who respond are legally targeted.

Taken together, reports on the three terrains underscored how seemingly isolated humanitarian crises are in fact consistent political responses to migration, spanning continents and crossing jurisdictions.

In Discussion

For much of the twentieth century, Italian American migration was treated as sentimental heritage rather than something worth studying seriously, and the Calandra Institute was built in part to push back on that. The work Boccagni presented and the testimony each of the NYU panelists brought represent the kind of scholarship this institution exists to engage with.

Across all three passages the panelists covered; Trombetta, Cichocki, and Ruiz House traced the same logic through the ocean, the forest, and the desert. The legal reasoning that pulls state vessels from the water to avoid any responsibility, the criminalization of the fishermen and the NGO workers and the volunteers leaving water on a trail, take place in landscapes deliberately shaped to discourage crossing—all of it happens long before anyone reaches a processing center, and all of it serves the same purpose.

Boccagni’s ethnography illustrates the consequences of this system, documenting what life looks like once someone has made it through. He explores the reality of how years of waiting can reshape a person’s sense of what their life can be. Each stage of that process, from the crossing itself to the processing center to the years of administrative limbo, is structured to deter, delay, and contain, and placing the two aspects in conversation makes that continuity legible in a way that reading either alone does not. What Boccagni documents inside the facility and what the panelists document at the border constitute consecutive stages of the same process. They demonstrate a logic of deferral and managed exclusion running from the moment someone attempts to cross to the years they spend waiting to find out whether that crossing will ever be recognized.

The scholarship on display at both events was serious, grounded, and timely, and together the two sources traced something hard to look away from once you see it. Boccagni’s book documents a system that grinds people down through years of administrative indifference, while Trombetta, Cichocki, and Ruiz House describe the borders that feed into it, borders that are still very much active and still being negotiated through the bodies of people trying to cross them. The questions they are all asking will not go away anytime soon, and neither will the urgency surrounding them.

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Nicole Kruse is the Research Programs Coordinator at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, where she works to expand access to the Institute’s archival and research collections. Find upcoming events and publications at calandra.cuny.edu.

Further Reading

• Boccagni, Paolo. 2025. Undoing Nothing: Waiting for Asylum, Struggling for Relevance, University of California Press.

• Binder, Seán, Jaya Ramji-Nogales, and Isabella Trombetta. 2025. “The Ambivalence of Solidarity and the Language of Law,” AJIL Unbound 119.

• No More Deaths / No Más Muertes: nomoredeaths.org.

• Podlaskie Humanitarian Rescue Service: podlaskiepogotowiehumanitarne.pl.

• Trombetta, Isabella. 2023. “Maritime Borders in the Central Mediterranean: Search and Rescue and Access to Asylum,” Anales de Derecho 40.

Read an excerpt of the preface by Donna Chirico, the senior editor of the book, below. The book is available for purchase now.

The story of Italian American educators in the United States is deeply tied to the broader narrative of Italian emigration, assimilation, and acculturation. Prior to Italian unification in 1861, immigration to the United States from Italy was sparse. Following unification, Italians began arriving in large numbers through the early part of the twentieth century, when immigration laws and World War I halted this movement of people. Initially these immigrants faced significant discrimination and socioeconomic challenges. Many came from rural, impoverished areas of Southern Italy with limited formal education, and their children were often subjected to prejudice in American schools. Early Italian American students were discouraged or prohibited from speaking their native language, and their cultural heritage was, and still is, often marginalized within the curriculum.

Despite these obstacles, education quickly became a crucial tool for upward mobility for Italian Americans. While the first generations prioritized economic survival through manual labor and entrepreneurship, their children and grandchildren increasingly entered the educational system not only as students but eventually as teachers, administrators, and scholars. By the mid-twentieth century, a growing number of Italian Americans had attained college degrees and entered the teaching profession, particularly in urban centers with large Italian American populations such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Italians have founded universities, served as college presidents, and held leadership positions within the educational sphere at local, state, and national levels.

Italian American educators have played an important role in shaping American education, both by advocating for equitable access and by preserving cultural identity. In the 1960s and 1970s, during a period of ethnic revival and civil rights activism, Italian American teachers and academics began to assert their heritage more openly. They created curricula in Italian and Italian American studies, formed organizations to support Italian American educators, and contributed to the overall development of ethnic studies programs. Today, Italian American educators are found across all levels of the educational system, from preschool through postsecondary education. They have made significant contributions not only in the classroom but also in educational leadership, curriculum development, and cultural scholarship. Their legacy is one of resilience, transformation, and commitment to both American ideals and simultaneously to the preservation of Italian heritage.

Donna Chirico is the Senior Editor of Educating America and the Contributions of Italian Americans and a Professor of Psychology at York College, CUNY. She is also Resident Faculty at the Calandra Institute, where, among other projects, she assists in conducting sociodemographic research, including work on the monthly data snapshots of Italian American communities across the country.

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The theme of this exhibit is a call to home and discovery along the edge: the revealing of artistic transformation of memory, identity, and reclaimed atelier practice and craft. This is a place of the enigmatic and the liminal, shaped by the enduring memory of women’s handcrafted traditions, ritual, voices, and labor. We encounter the ghostly traces of land and Italia as drawings and sculpture, paintings as aqueous portals, imaginary topographies constructed of textiles, graphite and pastel, the geometric discipline of abstraction, gestural poetics, illustration, anthropogenic environmental change, memories of the botanical and natural world, and studies of the human figure and psyche. We also see the work of teaching artists who continue the enduring tradition of foundational studio practice, a system of artistic training that took shape in sixteenth-century Italy and continues to shape artistic production in America.

Fili di Memoria (Threads of Memory)

In this show, inherited textiles and craft traditions of the diaspora intersect with the poetry of memory. Kristie Valentine’s Sfilato Sirocco is an ode to family land and Sicilian wheat fields where “the golden light of the summer moves across rolling hills.” The title refers to “delicate pulled-thread embroidery and the warm southern wind, bringing together memory, landscape, and the handmade regional embroidery traditions passed down through the women in my family.” Within archways that echo the historic town of Mussomeli, Valentine has silkscreened her bisnonna’s floral stitching.

Maya Tricamo Pinz’s San Guglielmo also tells a story of memory and handicraft. An image made of carved linoleum, layered by embroidered silhouettes of the Tricamo family, depicts the ship that carried the artist’s family to America. The embroidery thread once belonged to Tricamo Pinz’s grandmother, Maria Grazia Lumetta, who worked as a seamstress from the age of thirteen. A ghostly cyanotype printed on fabric portrays the artist’s family butcher shop in America. Absence and presence fluctuate in this work, reimagining the lives of those carried across oceans.

The idea of echoed memory and labor also features in Luci Callipari-Marcuzzo’s Invisible (Tower), assembled from lace curtains and in turn symbolizing “the cumulative weight of invisible feminine labor.” Constructed of cut spherical forms threaded onto a knitting needle upon the wooden base, the work suggests the contrast between material fragility and strength. The red color signifies the unseen lives of Calabrian diasporic women and “evokes strength built from fragility.”

Alessandra Pozzuoli’s A Threshold is a Sacred Thing, displayed as a floor plinth installation, explores the material language of Italian Canadian women across generations, centering on women’s labor as caretakers and as the keepers of cultural knowledge within rituals of devotion, family, and loss. Through a performance that acts as ritual, Pozzuoli engages in the process of sweeping talcum powder from each sheet of the exposed cyanotype with a bundle of rosemary, then beating any powder left clinging to the textiles with a handmade broom.

The importance of ritual as reclamation for diasporic artistic imagination is also evident in Maria Molteni’s series Vesuvian Antiphony, a video documenting the artist’s ongoing ritual of fashioning black rosary beads from fresh rose petals. Here, associations emerge between the meteorite goddess Cybele, Black Madonna shrines, lava rock deposits, pilgrimage to Mount Vesuvius, and the rosary, conceived as a cyclical and celestial orbit. Similarly, the objects in Counting to Infinity/Contando all’Infinito incorporate a series of looping works structured through the sacred concept of antiphony: an artistic metaphor for “a prayerful, communicative relationship between the celestial and the terrestrial.”

Cecilia Mandrile’s Quitapenas (Sanaglios)/Sorrow Dolls (Healing Rattles) invite a new kind of ritual between audience and object. These dolls negotiate the uncertainty and liminal space of migration, acting as both companions and witnesses. Mandrile says, “They were lovingly wrapped by inherited handmade, well-traveled crochet and linen. In that refuge, playing with the Italian words sanare and sonaglio, they were reborn as Sanaglios. These healing rattles become a wandering community themselves, reflecting on resilience and transience, fragility and transformation.” The dolls may be handled and played with, offering an experience of the unknown and the vulnerable. “In this encounter, the unsettling notion of the impossibility of a return meets the trust in a new departure: one’s heart beating in the hands of others.”

Stephanie Rebonati-Cannizzo’s Altar to a Canon celebrates “the spirit of the sacred in the everyday and in the (Italian) family tradition of gathering around a table.” Covered in ancestral textiles, the table extends the artist’s long-term research project Luigia, which explores the historical context of her Sicilian American and Northern Italian heritage. Here we encounter not only a literary canon but also a constellation of personal and cultural objects: a hand-painted Trinacria from a Sicilian bakery in Bensonhurst, pumice stones, shells, prayer cards, family photographs, a zine produced after the death of the artist’s grandfather, dried red rose petals, and a small statue of the Madonna. “The installation pays homage to an often-unrecognized canon of Italian and Sicilian American women and becomes an altar that gathers these layered elements, grounding them within a shared space of origin.”

Soglie (Portals)

While the traces of craft and identity become whole through the practice of ritual and assemblage, artistic mediation between memory and recollection transports us to places of our past, ancestral memory and inner lives. Angelica Bergamini’s Sussurralo alla Notte is from the artist’s series Intermundia Metakosmia (the space between worlds) and is a meditative and abstract space of pure color. This elemental work functions, Bergamini writes, as “a meditation on the communication between dimensions and a call from the ancestors—a request to whisper their name in the quiet intimacy of the night.” The color reflected from the back of the painting onto the white surface “is the aura of the painting, a way of suggesting the space beyond.”

This space of the beyond is also evoked in Marina Cappelletto’s dittico 14. From a series of imaginary architectural interiors revealed through windows and doors, this diptych has its roots in late medieval and Renaissance painting and in the writing of Italo Calvino. Cappelletto is interested in “making visible the contrasts that exist between perception and reality, the real and the imagined, and the present and the past.” Within this picture time seems ambiguous, revealed by the movement of water. This liminal space also represents the artist’s dual identity as an Italian and an American, her ties to the Italian language, and the inheritance of Italian image making and architecture.

For works like Cloud City, Nick Lamia’s process begins with plein aire painting and drawings, layering his imagery with artifacts of memory to reflect the relationship between nature and society. Lamia says, “Linear, diagrammatic structures and flat planes of color are metaphors for the constructed world, while irregular organic contours and passages of atmospheric, translucent paint stand in for nature. I’ve been inspired by experiences like hiking remote glaciers, wading urban trout streams, and sailing boats through storms at sea.” Within these constructions of color and line, there is what the artist describes as “light flickering just outside our range of perception, remaining tantalizingly beyond our ability to identify.”

Madeleine Tonzi’s Imago also reimagines the ephemerality of liminal space, exploring concepts of transformation, belonging, and relationship to place. The picture acts as a window to an imaginative beauty, evoking the American west, the empty spaces of architecture, transformation, belonging, and relationship to place. Tonzi shares, “The word itself describes the phase in which a butterfly reaches full maturity after completing metamorphosis. Symbolically, this landscape, which takes the form of a butterfly, represents both a fully realized relationship to one’s sense of place and relationship to the land, but also serves as a container or vessel that simultaneously carries its history and reflects back the world around it.”

Tonzi’s ceramic sculpture Tilt combines tonal surface with a simplified form that becomes a sense of stillness and repose, a purity of gesture. In the tradition of Brancusi, Tonzi creates an evocation of natural form, a mountain tilted on its side, rendered in the chromatic memory of the desert. The artist grew up in Santa Fe and shares, “While much of my work reflects on the topic of place, this piece began to explore the concept of dislocation. The mountain, seemingly removed from its original environment, began to take on a sense of uncertainty, reflective of my constant sense of longing to be somewhere else.”

Finally, in spectral botanical imagery that speaks of remembered gardens, Farah Marie Velten’s photograms Pomelia Frangipani and cyanotypes Paparina Eucalipto begin with ephemeral artifacts foraged from plants she finds in her maternal homeland of Sicily. Rooted in memory and the senses, the artist makes prints with the “sun and water” seeking to recall the theme of home and land.

Pietra, Fuoco, e Cenere (Stone, Fire, and Ash)

The imprint of remembered places continues in Cianne Fragione’s tactile sculpture Fragments of Carrara/Journey to Ionian Sea: Travare il Rosa. This work evokes a sense of poetic attachment intersecting with archaeology, namely the sites along the Ionian coast in Italy. The artist explains that the work “extends my long-standing interest in fragments of language, space, and what is buried underneath to be found again. Marble fragments have been in my studio for decades. I move them around or set them in different positions. I add marks of my own, but just as often, I am content to let them age, allowing the surfaces to accept the material spillage that can occur in the course of working on something else nearby. I have always been fascinated by the complexity, richness, and evocative potential of these surfaces as images.”

Fragione’s meditation on the traces of landscape continues in her gestural abstraction May Violets Grow on Thistles, a result of a period of sustained inward-seeking atelier work. The artist shares that “reading Montale and listening to music rooted in the tarantella—that driving, insistent Southern Italian rhythm, both found their way into the painting. The title proposes an impossibility: violets do not grow on thistles. The words violet and thistle suggest a play between delicacy and what resists it. Yet violet and blue give the glimmers of hope or memory, a surface against scruffy, time-laden grounds, like motifs in an orchestral arrangement.” The layering and bricolage create a dialogue between remembrance and forgetting, “raw and earth pigments, oil-based paint, graphite, and collage are applied, obscured, and recovered across the linen, creating a stratigraphy that records time and decision-making.”

If Fragione’s work becomes stratigraphy, the images in John Descarfino’s Flesh and Stone embody their own form of ghostly cartography. This graphite series maps the artist’s ancestral home, Gibellina, Sicily, as a “a birthmark and a tomb of the earthquake-destroyed and concrete-encased town.” The delicate tonal drawings are composed of line, graphite rubbings, and tracing to call forth a sense of documentation contrasted with absence. So, too, Descarfino notes, “Although these drawings are anchored in specific sources, it’s the intimations of ritual, religion, folklore, and the superstitions of Sicily that stir my curiosity. The literal coordinates of the birthmark and tomb transition into the poetry of evocative mapping.”

Tactility continues in Vincent Stracquadanio’s paintings Are you a Ghost, Crane Your Neck, and Fata Morgana. Composed of disquiet and fiery terrain, these works invite close examination. The textured surface is transformed through ghostly Sicilian folklore, Mount Etna, and vernacular tradition. Fata Morgana is based on decorations in the artist’s family home, including Sicilian carrettos. The artist is inspired by work of Giorgio de Chirico and the imagery of Luca Guadagnino’s horror film Suspiria and, within the ambiguity of form and place, shifts between imagination and perception, the play of light and tactility revealing the painter’s brush. Stracquadanio says, “Spaces unfold like apparitions, rooms glimpsed in half-light, forms turning to shadow and curtains suspended mid-reveal. Moments feel caught in perpetual transition, like a memory caught mid-change, or a warning whispered too late.”

Terrain observed and imagined is also seen in Maria Morabito’s Transforming the Land. This painting reflects the artist’s interest in how regional terrains are shaped by the culture. Through networks of color and organic shapes, the artist seeks to “explore the interconnectivity of human experience drawing inspiration from cultural landscapes—tapestries of urban, rural, and archaeological sites that act as records of socioeconomic and technological evolution. These landscapes are dynamic, layered records shaped by human activity and become metaphors for the ways memory and place are continually reconstructed through perception and imagination.” Through the use of complementary color, the topographic surface becomes dynamic, acting as an exploration for memory and perception, using imagination as environment.

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L’Esperienza Umana (The Human Experience)

In the figurative works in this exhibition, observation is suffused with the inner life of the sitter—longing, solitude, and even consternation. Erica Conti’s work Sogno reimagines beauty and surface through a repeated image, which expresses her interest in the human figure as a space of transformation and instability. The artist writes, “Bodies emerge from prepared surfaces using techniques that engage in dialogue with the Italian pictorial tradition, through a process of layering, glazes, and erasures.” These forms exist between presence and dissolution, the breaking of contours, sfumato, the play of light and shadow create a sense of psychological engagement, drawing the viewer within. Influenced by modern poetry, Conti seeks to create archetypal imagery of the human condition.

Since the sixteenth century, drawing from life has been at the core of Italian artistic practice. Bernardo Siciliano’s illusionistic oeuvre in the tradition of the Italian masters is infused with his memories of his grandfather’s architectural drawing and the modernist imagery of artists such as Lucien Freud and Richard Diebenkorn. While renowned for his large-scale contemporary paintings, the artist’s intimate painting Overlap #2 is a sensitive and enthralling depiction of the body at rest and continues the atelier tradition of naturalistic direct observation while also revealing the inner life of his subject.

Anthony Riotta’s Sicilian Stare takes the classical bust portrait and focuses on the psychological condition of his sitter. The artist practiced both photography and woodworking before turning to sculpture at the Art Students League of New York, continuing his practice in Florence. Riotta’s individualistic treatment of his sitter continues the Italian humanist tradition. The artist writes, “What I present to you in my art is what I see through my eyes. In my sculpture, I offer you the vision that calls to me in my subjects.”

Roberta Zaetta’s water and pencil series of young women reflects on contemporary representations of girlhood in media and fashion through the visual language of allegorical, mythological, and religious painting of the Italian Renaissance, particularly works that depict female sitters accompanied by symbolic attributes such as animals and plants. “These are images of girlhood as a paradigm of transformation, genesis, origin and end.” Girl with Crow suggests solitude, prophetic knowledge and change, with the tendrils of leaves and vines as images of growth. Girl with an Owl shows a crowned woman with the symbol of the goddess Minerva, recalling not only wisdom but also a quiet reflection on hidden knowledge. Girl with Birds is playful and turns our attention to the understanding between children and animals.

Geometrie e Vedute Urbane (Geometries and Cityscapes)

Of the adaption of geometry as a vessel for his chromatic experiments of hue, artist Paul Corio writes, “My work is about color—more specifically, the use of carefully mixed sequences of color that create the illusion of atmospheric space and spreading light. The principal vehicle that I use to present these things is geometry. Color wants very much to be a descriptive property of an object as opposed to an entity unto itself—red will quickly become a modifier of an apple or a fire truck rather than maintain an identity of its own.” As such in works like Creaky Crickets, Corio seeks to “create sequences of color that articulate space, atmosphere and a kind of spreading light” to compose abstraction as space.

Paul Fabozzi’s Corviale #1 and #2 are based on the monumental, eleven-story, nearly kilometer-long public-housing complex Corviale, outside of Rome. Fabozzi notes, “I visited Corviale near the end of my twelve summers teaching in Rome and in that sense, it represented for me the desire to have a wider view of Rome’s architectural past than could be found in the older historic sections of the city. Governments around the world have attempted to solve any number of particular housing problems using modern architecture’s rectilinear structures and economy of means. The often-ill-fated results have been well documented. Nonetheless, the isolation and immensity of Corviale took these notions to new levels of brutality, both visual and experiential.” Fabozzi’s process began with photographs transformed into what he calls “an open structure,” and then filled with intuitive and contemplative image-making in the studio, following an instinctual process that results in “a kind of suspended tension with the spatial logic of the initial experience in architecture.”

Artistic intervention within architectural space continues in Michael Dal Cerro’s Bus Station from a series of cityscapes that catapult the viewer into fantastic worlds. This imaginary transit station is laid out in bright phosphorus color across a composition of biomorphic geometries. “This series explores a range of issues: urban planning or lack thereof, overdevelopment and the commercialization and commodification of public space, what green rooftops might look like, and envisioning renewable energy in urban environments.” Dal Cerro’s influences include German expressionist art, Japanese woodblock prints, and popular culture such as movies and comic books.

The notion of admixture and synthesis is developed through an entirely different stylistic approach in the work of Thomas Germano whose painting Tenochtitlan invites us to contemplate the syncretic nature of art making. Modern ideas of abstraction and color theory are synthesized with the artist’s interest in seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting and the work of the Romantic artist Joseph Mallord William Turner. The title of Germano’s work refers to the Nahuatl name for present-day Mexico City. The cathedral shown in this image was constructed in part from materials taken from the demolished Templo Mayor, the principal temple dedicated to Aztec deities. Germano observes that, beyond historical processes that may be understood simultaneously as destruction, colonization, erasure, and syncretism, this form of Spanish architecture ultimately has its roots in Italian design of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, first articulated in the work of Brunelleschi and later developed by Borromini. The artist writes, “I paint fast, scrape away, repaint, apply a dark glaze, find light to create consistent light through the composition, then in a stream of consciousness, I invent skies that are more expressive than the controlled architectonic forms below.”

Natura e il Ciclo della Vita (Nature and The Cycle of Life)

In Jillian Verzino’s It Wasn’t What You Expected, marbled surfaces feature layered organic forms evoking scagliola, the plaster-based method used to simulate marble inlay. The contrast of the fruit forms with the decorative patterning and boundaries suggests the cycle of life, “a nagging ancestral reminder, as Neapolitans are notoriously obsessed with death given their proximity to volcanic Vesuvio.” Verzino’s practice is influenced by both her work as an organic vegetable farmer and her Roman Catholic upbringing as well as the pietre dure seen in the churches of Naples (a technique of inlaying precisely cut and polished pieces of colored hard stone into a stone surface to form decorative or pictorial designs).

Luca Di Napoli’s four-part series 4th War, Nos. 1–4 began as a reflection on a quotation by Albert Einstein: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” Di Napoli made pencil drawings that were then stained with digital grafts in acid and vibrant colors. The artist explains, “These images are metaphors for a future that has already occurred, where humanity returns to an ancestral and silent condition. There is no sound of battle, only the stillness of a world that has shed its skin. Red vibrates among the rubble like a signal: It is life persisting, a mutation advancing, or the final warning of a history repeating itself. A visual exploration of the aftermath, the ancestral, and the inevitable.” Here we find a place where humans live among the symbols of death and mutant nature within a Brueghelian world. “This is not a chronicle of war, but a vision of what remains: a silent world, governed by new and indecipherable symbolic laws.”

The darkness of humankind’s folly is also addressed in Daniel Lanzilotta’s sculpture The Mask, described by the artist as a modern-day totem. It is composed of more than 3,000 handmade beads, crafted from plastic debris over a fifteen-year period, whose “molecular structure is that of life forms reconfigured.” The artist asks us to contemplate not only our own culpability but also the enduring legacy of plastic: “Its existence is forever like Democritus’s ideas of indescribable particles we now call atoms.”

Apertura: Fotografia (Aperture: Photography)

Photography also invites contemplation while interrogating notions of memory and identity. Tim Roda’s dark theatrical tableaux Untitled 75 and 81 are part of a series of silver gelatin images taken at the Archie Bray Foundation for Ceramic Arts in Helena, Montana, and depicting both a real family event and the traces of memory, oscillating between documentation and manipulated tension. The artist shares that his Italian American childhood had a profound influence on his decision to become an artist. “Much of my work stems from memories, both real and borrowed, fused with present day social commentaries. I translate memories and current observations to create a celebration of life in Italy and the US.”

Bryan Sansivero’s Hymn to the Sea is an example of the artist’s well-known painterly depictions of abandoned homes throughout the world. Sansivero’s work contains multitudes—memory, forgotten identity, death, loss, and tragedy—and yet also functions as a portal for the imagination of his viewer. At the core of his practice is the power to evoke a sense of mysterious emotion. “This image shows the deserted house of a widow who died in her bed alone. She collected nautical related items including shells, model ships, and books, and the back wall features photographs likely of her family and friends as well as the window herself.” Sansivero notes an uncanny coincidence: The date he took this photo is the same date that the Titanic sank.

Renato Tonelli’s Madonnina sulla Via Francigena is from a series of poetic and atmospheric photographs of madonnine found alongside the roads of the artist’s native town of Pontremoli. These small statues are expressions of everyday Marian devotion and neighborhood piety. They serve as protective symbols and focal points for prayer, a conduit for private faith within the shared religious life of the community. Before these altars could be erected, written authorization was required from the Curia Diocesana, the local administrative authority of the Catholic Church. “Each Madonnina, or shrine, has its own reason for being built, usually as a thanks to an urgent prayer having been answered.”

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Rosa Berland is a historian of modern and contemporary art with a special interest in the artistic production of diasporic America. In addition to past work at The Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and The Frick Collection, she has published extensively on modern art, serves as the Honorary Director of the Edward E. Boccia Artist Trust, and teaches art history at Molloy University, Rockville Centre, New York. She previously curated an exhibit at the Calandra Institute dedicated to Boccia.

This exhibition is dedicated to the memory of her mother Evelyn (Botti).

Early History

The Waldensians originated in the late twelfth century as a lay reform movement founded by Peter Waldo of Lyon. Committed to apostolic poverty, asceticism, preaching in the language of common people, and the authority of scripture, they called for a return to the simplicity of early Christianity. Practitioners emphasized commoners’ ability to learn about God without the intervention of Catholic leadership or rituals. However, they did not directly challenge Church doctrine. They initially conceived of themselves as a movement within the Church.

Nonetheless, their decision to preach without formal authorization brought them into direct conflict with the Roman Catholic Church. Waldo went to Rome in 1179 to present his views on the faith to Pope Alexander III. While he was not completely rebuked at that meeting, the Third Lateran Council later that year condemned his ideas. A few years later, at the Synod of Verona in 1184, Pope Lucius III formally excommunicated the Waldensians. As they continued to preach despite the punishment, their enduring efforts made them medieval Europe’s most enduring dissident Christian community, and unlike many other heterodox groups, they survived.

By the late Middle Ages, many Waldensians had taken refuge in the Alpine valleys of Piedmont, in northwestern Italy. These valleys became both a spiritual homeland and a defensive stronghold. Over the following centuries, Waldensians endured periodic persecution, including forced conversions, expulsions, massacres, and restrictions on property ownership and worship. In the sixteenth century, Waldensians formally aligned with the Protestant Reformation, adopting a Reformed (Calvinist) theology at the Synod of Chanforan in 1532.

The seventeenth century brought some of the most violent episodes in Waldensian history. The Waldensians faced mounting repression from Catholic leaders in the Duchy of Savoy, across modern Italy’s Piedmont and Val d’Aosta. Under pressure from the Counter-Reformation, the Dukes sought to exterminate the Waldensians’ Reformed faith. These tensions erupted in 1655 when troops under Duke Charles Emmanuel II carried out massacres and forced expulsions that became known as the Piedmont Easter, killing between 4,000 and 6,000 Waldensians, according to some estimates. This drew international Protestant outrage from as far as Oliver Cromwell’s England. An exile to Switzerland followed, and later a dramatic Glorious Return in 1689, when the Waldensians marched back into their valleys to reclaim their homeland.

One aspect of Waldensian history that has received less attention is the group’s presence in early modern Southern Italy. Beginning in the Late Middle Ages, groups of Waldensians migrated south from Piedmont into the Kingdom of Naples. My family’s ancestral village, Faeto, in the province of Foggia, in Puglia, was a known Waldensian haven that produced the preacher Antonio di Francesco, who the Inquisition tortured for his faith. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Waldensian communities were established in parts of Calabria, most notably in Guardia Piemontese. These Waldensians initially maintained a semi-clandestine religious life. However, their communities increasingly came under suspicion by the Spanish authorities, who ruled the Kingdom of Naples. In 1561, under the authority of the Spanish viceroyalty and the Inquisition, the Waldensian community in Calabria faced brutal repression.

A turning point came in 1848, when King Charles Albert of Sardinia, who also ruled the Duchy of Savoy, granted the Waldensians civil and political rights through the Edict of Emancipation. For the first time in centuries, Waldensians were legally recognized as full citizens. Emancipation allowed them to live beyond their secluded valleys, and Waldensians established churches in Turin, Florence, and Rome. The community founded schools, charitable institutions, and theological faculties. Waldensians became active in Italian education and print culture, seeing literacy and devotion to scripture as pillars of their identity.

Waldensians in America

Many Waldensians emigrated to colonial North America. It began in what would become New York City. Giovanni Schiavo, the great chronicler of Italian America, in The Italians in America Before the Revolution, argued that Waldensians formed the first identifiable Italian American community, noting their settlement on Staten Island in the 1650s, which was founded in response to the Piedmont Easter. For Schiavo, this group demonstrated that Italian American history began not with the mass migrations of the late nineteenth century, but with a seventeenth-century Protestant colony.

Evidence also indicates that Waldensians settled across the colonial East Coast and eventually spread south in distinct groups. Protestant settlements sprang up along the Delaware River in what would become New Jersey and Delaware, and as George B. Watts notes, they had a Waldensian component. Watts also links early eighteenth-century Presbyterian and Huguenot settlements to Waldensians in the refugee community at Manakin (near present-day Richmond, Virginia). Watts also identified Waldensians colonials in Georgia and South Carolina.

In the 1850s, Mormon missionaries, most notably Lorenzo Snow, preached in the valleys of Piedmont, resulting in the conversion of roughly seventy Waldensians, who subsequently emigrated to the Utah Territory. These converts settled primarily in Salt Lake City and surrounding communities, forming a small but documented stream of Waldensian migration farther west, distinct from later Presbyterian-affiliated colonies.

In the 1870s, Waldensians began settling what is now Monett, Missouri. These Italian Waldensians, who had first migrated to Uruguay, came north to the United States to establish an agricultural colony. They organized what became known as the Waldensian Church and Cemetery of Stone Prairie. They would eventually embrace the Presbyterian faith, which many future Waldensian migrants would do as well. Monett served as an early and enduring Waldensian center, functioning as both a religious and cultural anchor for Italian Protestants in the country, as seen in the town’s museum and cemetery. From Monett, some families later moved to establish a smaller colony in Wolf Ridge, Texas.

Another notable nineteenth-century Waldensian settlement was established in Valdese, North Carolina. Founded in 1893, it was planned as a rural colony with farms, textile work, and a strong congregational center in the Waldensian Presbyterian Church. Today, the town has an active bocce club, Le Phare des Alpes, established in 1909. It contains some of the most visible expressions of Waldensian heritage in America, through annual commemorations such as the “Waldensian Festival,” which features outdoor dramas recounting the Glorious Return to the Piedmont valleys. Valdese has a well-maintained church, cemetery, and museum, along with touristic sites, and preserves strong ties to the Waldensian Church in Italy.

Beyond these rural and small-town colonies, Waldensians also established congregations in major urban centers, such as New York, Chicago, and Galveston, Texas (which had many Tuscan Waldensians), where they navigated life as Italian Protestants within overwhelmingly Catholic immigrant neighborhoods. In New York City, they organized around the American Waldensian Aid Society, which is now the American Waldensian Society, providing material aid to Italy. In Chicago, Italian Waldensians formed a notable urban community. Frank J. Cicero highlights the Chicago experience in detail in his memoir Relative Strangers, which examines how Italian Protestants, including his family, negotiated identity, congregational life, and interethnic relations in a predominantly Catholic Italian environment. Cicero’s story demonstrates that these urban Waldensians were not marginal anomalies but part of a broader, though underrecognized, Protestant strand within Italian American history.

The Waldensian diaspora is not peripheral to Italian American history. It is foundational. Waldensian history is deeply interwoven with both Italian and Italian American historical development. The American Waldensian Society’s 120th anniversary is a testament to this, and the Waldensian motto captures their resilience over centuries and continents: Lux lucet in tenebris (the light shines in the darkness). Out of the darkness, they illuminate an often-overlooked piece of the Italian American mosaic.

See a bibliography for further reading about Waldensians.

Stephen J. Cerulli is the custodian of the Calandra Institute library and bibliography and frequently indexes the Institute's publications. A PhD student in history at Fordham University, he also serves on the boards of the American Italian Cultural Roundtable, the Giovanni Schiavo Series, and Casa Lago Press, and works as the Editorial Assistant for the Italian and Italian American Studies series at Palgrave Macmillan.

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The conference was free and open to the public and was also live-streamed. Andrew Checchia and I (both staff members) represented the Institute at the conference’s first day, October 24, 2025. The programming focused on Gramsci’s writings about the United States and the broader impact of his work in America. Checchia’s presence reflected the Institute’s commitment to public-facing programming that connects scholarly work with wider audiences, a mission also advanced by my efforts to make the Cammett Collection of Gramsci-related works—a gift from the estate of Professor John Cammett (John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY)—accessible to the broader community via digitization. In addition to the complete writings of Antonio Gramsci, the collection contains volumes on Italian Communism and Fascism.

The first day of the conference focused on the theme “America in Gramsci,” where opening remarks highlighted how the programming was incredibly timely, given the global political moment, returning often to excerpts from Gramsci’s notebooks and their explorations of democracy, freedom of expression, equality, and anti-racism. Audience engagement at the conference was notably strong, particularly during the discussion period.

In addition to presentations of academic papers, the conference moved beyond the theoretical framework, engaging artistic practice and community life. Perhaps most touching was a twelfth-anniversary presentation about the Gramsci Monument—Thomas Hirschhorn’s 2013 art installation in a Bronx housing project courtyard. The residents from the Forest Houses project hosted lectures, ran a radio station, and printed a daily newspaper from the Monument space over the course of that summer. Hirschhorn joined the conference via Zoom, and former Dia Art Foundation curator Yasmil Raymond, who coordinated the project with Hirschhorn, was present in person to discuss it with NYU professor Ara Merjian.

Hirschhorn was trained as a graphic designer before turning to art in the early 1990s. He is a Paris-based artist who creates political art to convey what he calls the “hard core of reality.” He aims to present his work outside exclusionary spaces like museums or festivals in order to create greater opportunities for public engagement. His works are commonly made from accessible materials such as magazines, cardboard, and duct tape. The Gramsci Monument was the last in his series of monuments dedicated to four great thinkers (the others being Baruch Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, and Georges Bataille) created in housing projects around the world.

At the conference, Raymond and Hirschhorn paid tribute to the late Erik Farmer, who had passed away just two weeks earlier on October 8 and who served as the Tenant Association president at the Forest Houses and been instrumental in coordinating the project. They described him as someone who never stopped showing up for the people he loved, bringing his enduring spirit, joy, and kindness to the creation of the Monument and going the extra mile to ensure that his community could receive and benefit from the prestigious artistic and educational project, which was both the last monument in Hirschhorn’s series and the first to be built in the United States.

The John D. Calandra Italian American Institute collaborated on the Monument by donating books for its Library, helping ensure that Gramsci’s work was readily available to Bronx residents and other visitors. Raymond spoke of “desegregating the experience of art” and expressed gratitude to Calandra’s dean Anthony Julian Tamburri for his support. The Monument made visible what was formally articulated in the theoretical presentations—that everyday cultural practices are foundational to political change.

In that presentation and others, the conference highlighted the importance of intellectual history not only as the study of ideas in abstract form but also as a way to understand how people live, gather, and imagine themselves within their communities. The Monument embodied Gramsci’s belief that cultural transformation happens in the everyday practices of collective life. The Cammett Collection’s presence in the Monument and the Institute’s current digitization effort reflect a commitment to making this kind of political knowledge accessible beyond academia.

Embodying Gramsci’s thinking about hegemony and organization, the Monument brought people together, including physically with wooden platforms and plywood. Spaces were created within the Monument, museum-style, to showcase documents, books, and personal artifacts of Gramsci’s. Beyond this, art-making spaces, lounges, and a bar run by residents brought together a zone that was inspired by the power of organizing within a shared group.

This highlights a common theme from Gramsci’s thought that the talks returned to throughout the conference. Gramsci wrote in his Prison Notebooks that our own thoughts are influenced by not only theoretical discourse but also by the everyday practices of how communities gather, speak, learn, and imagine themselves. The Gramsci Monument offered a striking example of this principle, demonstrating how access to knowledge and cultural participation can reshape the intellectual life of a neighborhood. The Institute’s involvement, providing books for that project, as well as the current efforts to digitize and preserve the Cammett Collection for broader public access, reflect the same commitment to making Gramsci’s work available beyond traditional academic settings.

In a similar spirit was the fascinating interdisciplinary presentation by Roberto Dainotto (Duke University) titled “Byt, Or a Generation that Squandered the Poetry of Taylorism.” Dainotto spoke about Roman Jakobson’s observation that a revolutionary imagination can be weighed down by byt, a Russian word referring to the everyday routines and habits of life that can dull the possibility of change. From this starting point, Dainotto traced how Gramsci’s thinking on Taylorism shifted over time.

Taylorism is a method of organizing labor developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the early twentieth century in which work is broken down into small, measurable tasks to increase efficiency. It sought to make labor more rational, streamlined, and scientifically managed. In his early writings in L’Ordine Nuovo, Gramsci saw potential in this reorganization of labor, believing it might lead to new forms of collective life and cooperation among workers. Later, however, in Notebook 22, Gramsci revisited the issue in light of Leon Trotsky’s 1923 survey of Soviet workers, published in Problems of Everyday Life, which asked why Taylorist methods had failed to take hold in the Soviet context. Gramsci used these responses to reflect on the deeper reality that technical changes to labor cannot succeed if they do not also address how people live, understand themselves, and make meaning in their daily lives.

For Gramsci, the labor style’s failure to proliferate in Soviet society was due not only to industrial or technical problems. It revealed a deeper tension at the heart of political transformation. Structural reforms, such as Taylorism’s rational reorganization, cannot take root in isolation. They interact with superstructures: the cultural habits, forms of social life, and shared understandings that shape how people see themselves and what they believe work should mean. These patterns of everyday living, Trotsky’s byt, carry memories, identities, and inherited expectations. Dainotto emphasized that without attending to these cultural dimensions of daily life, efforts to reorganize labor or social systems remain incomplete. Technical reforms alone cannot remake social life if they do not also address how people live, learn, relate, and imagine themselves within a community.

Placed alongside the discussion of the Gramsci Monument, Dainotto’s reflection reinforces the idea that intellectual history is not just something studied in classrooms or archives. It becomes most meaningful when it is encountered in the textures of daily experience. The Monument, built among and cared for by residents of Forest Houses, created spaces where knowledge was shared not as a distant academic resource but as something lived and shaped collectively. The presence of the Cammett Collection books in that setting made theory accessible in a literal, physical way, inviting neighbors to read, rest, build, talk, debate, and understand themselves as part of a larger history of thought.

In the same way, the ongoing efforts to digitize the Cammett Collection continue this work by extending access beyond the walls of the Institute. Whether on early twentieth-century factory floors, a courtyard in the South Bronx, or a reading room where a rare volume becomes newly available to the public, the possibility of cultural and political change depends on how people gather, share knowledge, and make meaning together.

The conference illustrated that Gramsci’s work resonates today because it speaks to this ongoing challenge: the building of culture as a collective practice, rooted in everyday life, shaped by the relationships we form and the spaces we create for learning and reflection. Gramsci’s ideas continue to matter because they remind us that transformation begins not only in theory but in the shared, ordinary acts of living and imagining a different future together.

Nicole Kruse is the research programs coordinator at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, where she works to expand access to the Institute’s archival and research collections.

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Based in Midtown Manhattan, the Calandra Institute has grown into the premier institution for Italian American Studies since its founding in 1979. Started by a group of concerned Italian Americans aiming to redress imbalances in treatment of Italian Americans in higher education, the Calandra Institute has grown to encompass a much more varied—and expanding—set of goals.

Under the aegis of Queens College and The City University of New York, those goals guide our constant stream of projects and publications, stories from which will soon appear on this page. Subscribers can expect commentary on current events of concern for Italian Americans, new publications by affiliated researchers, interviews with prominent scholars, field reports from academic conferences, and previews of our numerous publications.

Those include our journals, the peer-reviewed Italian American Review and the literary Voices in Italian Americana, as well as books from our in-house Bordighera Press. Bordighera has brought important works in Italian American studies to print since its inception in 1990. On this blog, we plan to publish interviews with authors of Bordighera releases, as well as potential snippets of interesting material. Other contributors to the blog may include professors and staff members at the Institute, experts who regularly serve as consultants on US, Italian, and other international affairs. They include scholars producing essential work in sociology, history, psychology, musicology, folklore studies, and other fields.

Along with commentary on our new releases, other articles may highlight selections from our vast library, which includes Italian American classics, rare texts from Antonio Gramsci, and a nearly complete collection of Il progresso italo-americano, the most widely circulated and longest-running Italian-language daily newspaper in US history. There may also be behind-the-scenes content from Italics, the Institute’s Italian American history and culture TV series, available on CUNY TV and YouTube.

In short, this blog will grow into a repository of accessible knowledge about everything Italian American, an avenue to expand your understanding of the community’s history and culture, whether you’re an established academic, a curious reader, or an Italian American exploring your own identity. It will grow with the Institute’s ever-evolving scope, and it will serve the needs of both our voracious New York City Italian American community and the Italian diaspora—in America and beyond. As with everything the Institute does, the aim is to further explore and promulgate the experience and creative output of people from that diaspora.

From the Desk of Anthony Julian Tamburri, Ph.D., Professor and Dean

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