On Oct. 13, the German and Romance Languages and Literatures department hosted a lecture entitled “My Two Italies,” which featured Joseph Luzzi, a professor of Italian Studies at Bard College. Luzzi’s lecture was based on his recently published memoir of the same title, which describes his experience as the son of Italian immigrants and a scholar of Italian Studies.
Luzzi, who is especially interested in Dante, has spent a great deal of time studying Italian culture and politics. A number of professors, graduate students and undergraduates gathered in Gilman to learn about Luzzi’s books and his thoughts on Italy and Italian American identity.
Luzzi was inspired by the fall of former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to write a work detailing how the issues of modern Italy were related to the nation’s past. However, the book soon evolved into something very different. Having intended to use personal stories as illuminating diversions, Luzzi now found that his familial story could be intertwined with the history, politics and culture of the Italian nation.
Luzzi had long struggled to reconcile the Italy that he had devoted his academic career to, which comprised the Florentine intellectual world of the Renaissance, with his family’s Italy, a land where they had lived a peasant life in Calabria. In “My Two Italies,” he strove to connect these two conceptions of the nation, one of the artistic world of Dante and the other relating to impoverished life of his family in southern Italy.
Anita Dam, a senior undergraduate student, spoke about her reasons for attending this lecture.
“I’m the co-V.P. for Ciao JHU Italian Club, and my advisor, [professor Christopher Celenza] told me about the talk, which I later circulated to the Italian Club,” Dam said. “I decided to attend because I was interested to hear about Joseph Luzzi’s book after reading the description.”
Dam has been a part of the Italian Club and has studied the Italian language at Hopkins, but emphasized that the club is open to people who do not have as much experience with the subject.
“Ciao JHU Italian Club does not require any of its members to know or learn Italian,” Dam said. “Also, Joseph Luzzi’s talk and book [were] in English.”
During the lecture, Luzzi read a number of extracts from his book and commented on their meaning and importance. One striking passage from the opening of his book recounted how, on one Easter Sunday, a favorite relative visited with a rabbit that Luzzi was ready to treasure as a pet until he found that the rabbit had become dinner. This story, Luzzi said, helped to illuminate his feelings, as a child, about being raised in a manner that was different from that of his friends and classmates.
Luzzi spoke at length about the issues facing Italian immigrants and the Italian-American identity. He found that there are two popular conceptions of Italy and of Italian Americans: that of Mafioso, corruption and gangsters as inspired by The Sopranos and The Godfather films; and that of beautiful, pastoral Italy as exemplified by novels like Under the Tuscan Sun. Luzzi sought to delve behind those myths and determine the reasons behind the lack of a strong Italian American literary canon and civic traditions. He sees these issues as a result of the issues of political and linguistic fragmentation in the Italian homeland that can be traced back for centuries.
Luzzi concluded the lecture with an extract detailing his father’s struggles at the end of his life and then described what he felt were the two main themes of the book. His father had worked very hard after coming to America, and despite the effect this had on his physical health, his father had been proud of what he had been able to achieve. The first theme of the book, inspired by the hardworking father who gave up a happy life in Calabria, explained how parents can discount the present for the sake of their children’s future happiness.
The second theme of Luzzi’s book was the importance of the story of immigration to nearly every American family. Luzzi said that remembering the narrative of exile is a way of preserving the experiences of past generations, and he expressed his hope that he could help keep the stories of Calabria alive for his children.
Dam found this lecture to be both informative and relatable because of her personal experiences.
“I really enjoyed this book talk,” Dam said. “Since Joseph Luzzi is from an immigrant Italian-American family, his background and book really resonated with me personally, since my parents were also immigrants to this country. I was able to draw parallels in Luzzi’s childhood and my own, [like] understanding and preserving my family’s culture while trying to assimilate with what it meant to be American.”
