Our ignored English-speaking writers

Americans to Italians, many descendants of migrants who left the boot to seek their fortune - or survive - in America, call themselves Italians. For them, we are the 'Italian Italians', says Annie Rachele Lanzillotto, who was born in the Bronx: 'We never hyphenated the sense of ourselves, we just doubled the authenticity of our cousins. We were whole like that, not composite, even though we were American'. She is one of the writers whose stories compose And there were red geraniums everywhere. Voci femminili della diaspora italiana in Nord America edited by Valentina Di Cesare and Michela Valmori, the first volume of the Strade Dorate - Osservatorio di Letteratura e cultura della diaspora italiana e italofona project, co-founded by Ilaria Serra and Emanuele Pettener.

Many of these authors are well known in the USA or Canada, where they live, but in Italy they are all but unknown. The literature originating from our migration, especially that of women, has been belittled, neglected, in fact completely ignored by the general public, which always seems to want to forget this perhaps considered inglorious part of its history. Slightly less so from the academy, where the studies of Francesco Durante, author of the first complete anthology of Italian American literature (Italoamericana, 2001-2005), have been joined by those of Margherita Ganeri, Maddalena Tirabassi, Martino Marazzi (author, among others, of the recent Through the Periscope. Changing culture, Italian America, 2022) and Caterina Romeo.

'Italy has always been the place where all my senses are amplified. It almost seems as if there is a giant tuning fork on its soil and my brain immediately tunes into another level, which has always been there, vibrating in the place where the mind goes just before sleeping, that sweet spot where whole, perfect novels are born,' writes Marianne Leone. Like her, all the authors in the book, descendants of second, third and fourth generation Italian migrants, consciously or unconsciously retain a strong sense of belonging. Having arrived in Italy for the first time, for example, Mary Saracino feels an undeniable familiarity: 'In shops and cafés. On street corners and in ice cream parlours, the people I saw reminded me of myself, my mother and father, my sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles'.

Almost all of them, however, have lost their language - which many have not taught to their children, hoping to protect them from contempt and racism - or which has remained in the form of stumps of dialectal words metamorphosed by word of mouth from generation to generation, now incomprehensible to those outside the family, as Maria Laurino reconstructs well in Words. They have thus lost a fundamental part of their culture, and find themselves trapped in a nostalgia for their roots that is as powerful as it is sultry. In a state of perpetual transition between land of origin and landfall. Both of which, sadly, reject them.

It happens, wandering around the Little Italy of some North American cities, to find oneself in a kind of space-time gap. One sees, for example, a bar called 'Azzurri', the démodé font, the large faded sign, and finds oneself projected into the 1960s and 1970s: the curtain of plastic bead threads on the door, and inside, in the haze, men in cowls, V-neck striped jumpers in autumnal colours, the suits with brown corduroy waistcoats. This is what happens in the stories in this volume, because the authors have preserved in their memories, or in the memories acquired from their ancestors, an Italy that no longer exists, where 'there were red geraniums everywhere', stocky, resistant, with their exuberant bursts of red, the 'blood-coloured strength', like that of the tough women and men who crossed the ocean. An Italy that nostalgia has filled with meaning, and that we can rediscover, and sometimes discover, by reading their moving and 'always unquestionably honest' texts, as Serra and Pettener observe.