Institute's Upcoming Events

The Philip V. Cannistraro Seminar Series in

Italian American Studies

Thursday, September 10, 2009, 6 p.m.

Rosario Candela: An Immigrant Architect in New York

Andrew Alpern

When Rosario Candela (1890-1953) left Palermo to come to America with his father, he was an 18-year-old laborer with virtually no knowledge of English.  Yet he overcame his humble background, talked his way into the School of Architecture at Columbia University, and became an architect who designed many of the finest apartment houses in New York City. Architectural historian Andrew Alpern will discuss Candela’s unusually fast rise within his profession and the exceptional buildings he produced.

Writers Read Series

Monday, September 14, 2009, 6 p.m.

Michael J. Agovino reads from The Bookmaker: A Memoir of Money, Luck, and Family from the Utopian Outskirts of New York City (HarperCollins, 2008)

Michael Agovino grew up in the Bronx’s Co-op City. His Italian-American father, a buttoned-up union man who moonlighted as a bookmaker and gambler, was dogged in his pursuit of the finer things in life. When the point spreads were on his side, he brought his family to places he only dreamed about. With bad luck came spousal arguments, unpaid bills, and eviction notices. The Bookmaker is both a bold, loving portrait of a family and an intimate look into some of the most turbulent decades of New York City. The author transcends the personal to illuminate the ways in which class distinctions shaped America in the last half of the twentieth century.

“Mr. Agovino has crafted a sensitive and engrossing memoir of Italian-American life on the lower rungs of New York’s socioeconomic ladder—and a portrait of how the best intentions in urban planning can go awry. All of the characters in The Bookmaker are extraordinarily vivid, thanks in part to the author’s uncanny ear for the accents and cadences of New Yorkers of every stripe, especially, of course, middle-class Italian Americans.”

—The Wall Street Journal

Documented Italians

Monday, September 21, 2009, 6 p.m.

Chippers (2008), 52 min.

Nino Tropiano, dir.

Chippers tells the story of Dublin’s well-established community of four thousand Italians, all coming from Casalattico in Lazio, who have owned fish and chip shops in the city since the 1900s. Five different families tell their stories and offer insight into the experience of how a small community has maintained links with its hometown, created a cultural identity, and assimilated into Irish society.

Post-screening discussion with the director led by Joseph Sciorra, Calandra Institute.

Writers Read Series

Tuesday, October 6, 2009, 6 p.m.

John Giorno reads from Subduing Demons in America :

The Selected Poems of John Giorno, 1962-2008 (Soft Skull Press, 2008)

An innovator of poetry and performance, John Giorno’s career spans fifty years and is intertwined with contemporaries such as Andy Warhol, William S. Burroughs, and Brion Gysin. He helped pioneer the open exploration and celebration of “queer” sexuality in poetry in the 1960s. Giorno’s anti-war work with Abbie Hoffmann resulted in Spiro Agnew labeling him one of the "Hanoi Hannahs" in the 1970s. His AIDS Treatment Project, begun in 1984, set the bar for direct, compassionate action in the AIDS crisis. Subduing Demons in America is a survey of his revolutionary work as a poet, and as a sexual, spiritual and political radical. Giorno’s poetry uses found materials, montage techniques, and careful exploration of the nature of the mind through meditation. He is fabled for his high-energy performances, honed at rock and art venues around the world.

“His litanies from the underworld of the mind reverberate in your head and ventriloquize your own thoughts.”

—William S. Burroughs

The Philip V. Cannistraro Seminar Series in

Italian American Studies

Tuesday, October 13, 2009, 6 p.m.

Competing Understandings of Media in the

History of Anti-defamation

Laura Cook Kenna, George Washington University

Since at least the 1950s, some Italian Americans have organized anti-defamation campaigns to respond to unflattering, often mafia-inflected, representations of their ethnic identity.  Even as these protestors have sought to shape the perception of Italian ethnicity, their strategies and outcomes have been deeply shaped by popular understandings of media.  Using the debates surrounding the television show The Untouchables and the film The Godfather as examples, cultural historian Laura Cook Kenna will outline how ideas about media— artistry, influence, and audiences—have intersected with and underpinned the anti-defamation arguments and the ways ethnic images are interpreted and contested. 

Documented Italians

Monday, October 26, 2009, 6 p.m.

The Tree of Life (2008), 76 min.

Hava Volterra, dir.

Hava Volterra of Los Angeles tries to come to terms with her father’s death by traveling to Italy, the land of his birth, to trace the roots of his family tree. With the help of her feisty 82-year-old aunt, her father’s sister, Volterra travels from city to city, digging through ancient manuscripts and interviewing a wide range of scholars, to piece together the story of her Italian Jewish ancestors. Using both Monty Python-style animation and computer enhanced marionettes, the film tells the story of Jewish money lenders, mystics, scientists and politicians, while reflecting on how our parents and their roots affect our sense of identity and belonging.

Post-screening discussion with the director led by Sara Reguer, Brooklyn College.

Writers Read Series

Wednesday, November 4, 2009, 6 p.m.

Salvatore Scibona reads from The End: A Novel

(Graywolf Press, 2008)

A small, incongruous man receives an excruciating piece of news: his son has died in a POW camp in Korea. It is August 15, 1953, the day of a tumultuous street carnival in Elephant Park, an Italian immigrant neighborhood in Ohio. The man is Rocco LaGrassa, and his years of dogged labor, paternal devotion, and steadfast Christian faith are about to come to a crashing end. He is the first of many exquisitely drawn characters we meet in The End, which follows an elderly abortionist, an enigmatic drapery seamstress, a sullen teenage boy, and a jeweler into the heart of a crime that will affect all their lives. The End, Salvatore Scibona’s debut novel, was a 2008 National Book Award finalist and winner of the 2009 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award.

“A masterful novel set amid racial upheaval in 1950s America during the flight of second-generation immigrants from their once-necessary ghettos. Full of wisdom, consequence, and grace, Salvatore Scibona’s radiant debut brims with the promise of a remarkable literary career, of which The End is only the beginning.”

—Annie Dillard, author of The Maytrees

Documented Italians

Monday, November 9, 2009, 6 p.m.

Le Cirque: A Table in Heaven (2009), 74 min.

Andrew Rossi, dir.

Sirio Maccioni came to America as a waiter on a cruise ship. He rose through the ranks of New York’s finest restaurants and opened Le Cirque in 1974. Since then, it has been one of the world’s most celebrated restaurants, entertaining dignitaries, artists, celebrities and New York’s social elite. Le Cirque: A Table in Heaven follows Maccioni, his wife Egidiana, and their three sons from the shuttering of Le Cirque at the Palace Hotel at the end of 2004, through preparations for the eatery’s celebrated rebirth in New York’s Bloomberg Tower two years later. The documentary explores the challenges of reinventing the legendary restaurant, the conflicts between the two generations of Maccionis, and the enduring allure of gourmet simplicity.

Post-screening discussion with the director led by food historian Cara De Silva.

The Philip V. Cannistraro Seminar Series in

Italian American Studies

Monday, November 16, 2009, 6 p.m.

Lost Boys, Recovered Memories: Lorenzo Carcaterra’s Sleepers

Christopher Wilson, Boston College

In 1995, New York writer Lorenzo Carcaterra stunned audiences with a memoir entitled Sleepers, which told the story of the author and three friends, all from Hell’s Kitchen, who had been sentenced to a juvenile prison as boys. There, the memoir claims, they had been abused by a ruthless gang of guards. Even more sensationally, Sleepers described an elaborate conspiracy (including a local priest) to subvert the criminal trial that ensued years later when two of those boys murdered one of the guards. Christopher Wilson’s presentation will discuss the uses of ethnic, literary, and political memory in this memoir—patterns suggested especially by Carcaterra’s recent editorship of Alexandre Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo—in order to decipher its claims about contemporary justice, victim’s rights, and neighborhood authority.

The Philip V. Cannistraro Seminar Series in

Italian American Studies

Wednesday, December 2, 2009, 6 p.m.

Cesare Lombroso and the Science of Criminology

Mary Gibson, John Jay College

Cesare Lombroso is widely-known as the “father of criminology,” but the Italian context of his life and thought is generally misunderstood or entirely ignored. Often identified only with his famous notion of the “born criminal,” Lombroso in fact produced a more complex theory that also incorporated psychological and social factors. As a supporter of Italian unification, a pioneer in psychiatry, a Jewish citizen in the new liberal state, and a socialist at the end of his life, Lombroso was a major figure in Italian national life and the international field of criminology. Mary Gibson will analyze Lombroso’s theories of “criminal man” and “criminal woman” in relation to the political, social, and cultural currents of his day.

Writers Read Series

Wednesday, December 9, 2009, 6 p.m.

Maria Laurino reads from Old World Daughter, New World Mother: An Education in Love and Freedom (W.W. Norton, 2009)

Few books have discussed feminism through the prism of Italian-American identity. In Old World Daughter, New World Mother, Maria Laurino seeks to reconcile her upbringing in an Italian-American home, where sacrifice was the ideal of motherhood, with her desire to start a family while pursuing a career. Laurino merges the personal and the analytical, combining lived experience, research, and reporting on contemporary work-family issues. With a passionate literary voice, she reveals how she learned from “Old World” and “New World” perspectives, negotiating a “sustainable mix of self and selflessness.”

“Ranging from the tug of old superstitions to the terrors of the glass ceiling, from the fear of freedom to the joys of feeding loved ones, Laurino explores the uncharted land where ethnicity meets gender, and takes us on an eye-opening tour of our own pasts, presents, and futures.”

—Ellen Feldman, author of Scottsboro

Documented Italians

Monday, December 14, 2009
Neapolitan Heart (2002), 92 min.
Paolo Santoni, dir.

In this film exploring the transnational aspects of the Neapolitan song, director Paolo Santoni journeys between Naples and New York profiling singers and songs both well-known and obscure. He finds Neapolitan music being performed at concerts in Italy, in the casinos of Atlantic City, at serenate in the streets of Naples, and in New York City’s various Italian-American neighborhoods. Interviews with and performances by Peppe Barra, Rita Berti, Mirna Doris, Jimmy Roselli, Jerry Vale, and others tell the story of Neapolitan music and its ongoing popularity.

Post-screening discussion led by Jason Pine, Purchase College, and Joseph Sciorra, Calandra Institute.

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