Culture

As Italian Liberation Day approaches every April 25th, the editorial pages of Italy’s national newspapers reignite the national discourse over Mussolini, fascism, and the future of Italian democracy. With the far right’s assent to power, editorial writers warn of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s deep, personal roots in the history of Italian fascism. Adding to the furor, as well as the…

For centuries, letters of introduction were considered almost as essential as passports for travelling within what is now Italy. A grand tour not only required a large number of passports to get through its many States, but you were also well advised to carry several letters from ambassadors or consuls or well-connected friends. The addressees of those letters were local…

“He was the Robin Hood of Italy,” my mother said when she first showed me the tattered old book in Italian that she kept in her cedar chest. I was immediately interested because I was an avid follower of the television series “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” which was very popular in the 1950s. The book told the story of…

Fiorello La Guardia, the larger-than-life mayor of New York City, was the big draw at the Third National Conference of the Canadian Federation of Municipalities on June 10, 1940. It was definitely a coup to have one of the most sought-after speakers in North America travel to Ottawa. By coincidence, this was also the day that Italian dictator Benito Mussolini…

While the earliest wave of Italian immigration to Alberta between 1896 and 1914 largely comprised labourers, there were skilled individuals among them. Italy had an established trade apprenticeship system, and skilled craftsmen such as carpenters, masons, metalsmiths, tailors, shoemakers, jewellers, watchmakers and others had standing in the community denied to unskilled labourers. In fact, mastro (master) was an honorary address.…

The 1920s saw the revival of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in the West, especially in Colorado and Oregon, with its anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic platform. The Klan's platform found support from America's long-standing opposition to immigrants who brought with them to America that “whore of Rome,” the Catholic Church. The KKK found context as well in the pseudoscientific movement of…

"If you look at events in Italy from the late 1960s to the late 1980s without any context, it would seem that at some point Italians divided themselves between communists and neo-fascists, and started killing each other. But that's not what it was." Vincenzo Bisignano was an 18-year-old union activist during Italy’s Years of Lead. The controversial decades were characterized…

When Saigon was overrun by Communist forces on April 30, 1975, thousands of Vietnamese began a rush for freedom. One of them was Luu Dat Phuoc, a successful businessman whose assets had been confiscated by the Communist government. Luu’s businesses were in Saigon, renamed Ho Chi Minh City after Vietnam fell to Communist forces, and included an import-export business and…

Long before the mid-nineteenth century, thousands of people were constantly moving between the United States and British North America, and Leghorn, Genoa, Naples, Rome, Sicily, Piedmont, Lombardy, Venice and Trieste. Predominantly traders, sailors, transient workers, Catholic priests and seminarians, this group relied on the exchange of goods across the Atlantic to solidify transatlantic relations; during this period, stories about the New…

Dedicated to my grandmother Maria Luisa Agostino, my great-aunt Carmela and my father-in-law Domenico Adornato who, like thousands of other Calabrese immigrants, cultivated their roots in Griffintown – “u villaggiu” – for over 50 years. Griffintown lies by the Lachine Canal just south of Montreal’s downtown. Neglected for decades after the closing of the Canal in 1970, the area is…

Bersani had begun to work as an RCMP informant in 1937 while he was still minister at the Italian Church of the Redeemer. For Vincenzo Monaco, Monday, 10 June 1940, began as another typically long day of bread deliveries for Corona Bakery – a business he and his brother Donato had started in the early 1930s. He loaded his horse-drawn…

It is widely accepted that the Italian contribution to the exploration of the New World ceased after a brief period of great discoveries. Cristoforo Colombo discovered America in 1492, and Giovanni Caboto landed in Newfoundland in 1497. Amerigo Vespucci explored the east coast of South America: his map was the first to recognize that the lands that the Europeans had…

Objects plundered by conquering armies go by many names: war trophies, spoils of war, war booty, and, in art historical discourse, spolia. Walking through any Italian city with an eye to the history of public statuary, we can discover the often dramatic lives of what are now meeting spots for an evening passeggiata. As we linger, waiting for our companion,…

Giovanni da Verrazzano’s name belongs on the same marquee as the great navigators Cristoforo Colombo, Giovanni Caboto and Amerigo Vespucci. Da Verrazzano – explorer, navigator, ethnographer, and merchant adventurer – was the first European to explore the Atlantic coast of North America between South Carolina and Nova Scotia. He travelled with his brother, cartographer Gerolamo, and together they were the…

On the Luganskaya Front An endless column ahead of me is standing still on the frozen trail to Lugansk. It is a column only in a manner of speaking. It would be better to call it an infinitum of wrecks lined up one behind the other. Wrecks… Everything is decrepit, worn out, perforated, consumed, and dented - a perfect match…

When, around the spring of 1989, I was told by a journalist that that year was the 100th anniversary of Antonio Meucci's death (which occurred in Staten Island, New York, on October 19, 1889), I inquired among the more important Italian telecommunications organizations - manufacturers, service providers, universities and professional societies - to ascertain whether they had in mind to…