"Lontano me ne andro'
E mi ricordero'
La luna ed i falo'
Il cielo e la poesia..." (Pippo Pollina, "La luna e i falo'")
In 1950, Cesare Pavese published his final novel, The Moon and the Bonfires (La luna e i falo'). In this acclaimed work, an unnamed narrator returns home to Italy after a long stay in The United States of America. While in his adopted homeland, the narrator has become wealthy beyond measue, but still he often yearns for the country of his birth, Italy. He returns home hoping to use his new found riches to purchase land, but instead he revisits the sites of his childhood and reconnects with lost friends. Along the way, he learns of the devastating toll that World War II and the resistance movement that it sparked in Italy have taken on the people and places he associates with his upbringing in the Piedmont.
The story of Pavese's nameless hero is that of millions of Italians who left their country in pursuit of a new life in the United States of America. As Jerre Mangione and Ben Morreale point out in their landmark study of the Italian-American diaspora, La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience, the high point of this mass exodus unfolded between 1880 and 1924 (xiv). It was roughly two decades after the unification of Italy that many of that newborn country's residents began to leave, transporting not only their families and what meager possessions they owned to another nation, but also slowly transplanting their culture to that land.
Today, Americans of Italian lineage serve in the United States Congress, govern states, sit on the Supreme Court of the United States, coach in both the NCAA and professional sports leagues, are award winning stars of film, television, and stage, write acclaimed literary works, and represent the United States in the Olympic games, among many other accomplishments. However, Italians new to America's shores were not always held in such high regard. Life for Italy's first immigrants to the United States was often fraught with discrimination, poor housing conditions, linguistic barriers, and inter-generational conflicts. Their journey from Italian to Italian-American, and finally to American-Italian has been a long, sometimes painful, and always fascinating one.
In 2014, students enrolled in the course "Italian-American Cinema" at The University of Virginia in Charlottesville began a semester-long investigation of how American filmmakers have documented and depicted the Italian-American experience in the 20th and 21st-centuries. Through a close-reading of novels such as Pietro di Donato's Christ in Concrete and analyses of documentaries, and narrative films like Big Night, The Godfather Trilogy, Mean Streets, Raging Bull, From Here to Eternity, Two Family House, Marty, Moonstruck, Mac, and others, the students reconstructed a detailed history of Italian-Americans in relation to immigration, race, politics, crime, family life, popular culture, food, sports, and architecture. The result of their work is the archive that you are presently perusing.
Moons and Bonfires: An Archive of Italian-American History consists of original entries written by teams of students from The University of Virginia on a wide array of topics relating to the Italian-American experience. It also includes a blog with entries by a rotating team of authors. Although its primary function is that of course project, visitors to this site are also encouraged to use it as a resource for their own research and teaching about the Italian-American diaspora in the United States.
Benvenuti e buona lettura!
-Sarah Annunziato, PhD
Works Cited:
Mangione, Jerre and Morreale, Ben. La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian-American Experience. Harper Colins: New York, 1993. Print.
Pavese, Cesare. La luna e i falo'. (1950). Einaudi: Torino, 2000. Print.
Pollina, Pippo. "La luna e i falo'." Perf. Pippo Pollina. Storie di note, 1999. MP3.
E mi ricordero'
La luna ed i falo'
Il cielo e la poesia..." (Pippo Pollina, "La luna e i falo'")
In 1950, Cesare Pavese published his final novel, The Moon and the Bonfires (La luna e i falo'). In this acclaimed work, an unnamed narrator returns home to Italy after a long stay in The United States of America. While in his adopted homeland, the narrator has become wealthy beyond measue, but still he often yearns for the country of his birth, Italy. He returns home hoping to use his new found riches to purchase land, but instead he revisits the sites of his childhood and reconnects with lost friends. Along the way, he learns of the devastating toll that World War II and the resistance movement that it sparked in Italy have taken on the people and places he associates with his upbringing in the Piedmont.
The story of Pavese's nameless hero is that of millions of Italians who left their country in pursuit of a new life in the United States of America. As Jerre Mangione and Ben Morreale point out in their landmark study of the Italian-American diaspora, La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience, the high point of this mass exodus unfolded between 1880 and 1924 (xiv). It was roughly two decades after the unification of Italy that many of that newborn country's residents began to leave, transporting not only their families and what meager possessions they owned to another nation, but also slowly transplanting their culture to that land.
Today, Americans of Italian lineage serve in the United States Congress, govern states, sit on the Supreme Court of the United States, coach in both the NCAA and professional sports leagues, are award winning stars of film, television, and stage, write acclaimed literary works, and represent the United States in the Olympic games, among many other accomplishments. However, Italians new to America's shores were not always held in such high regard. Life for Italy's first immigrants to the United States was often fraught with discrimination, poor housing conditions, linguistic barriers, and inter-generational conflicts. Their journey from Italian to Italian-American, and finally to American-Italian has been a long, sometimes painful, and always fascinating one.
In 2014, students enrolled in the course "Italian-American Cinema" at The University of Virginia in Charlottesville began a semester-long investigation of how American filmmakers have documented and depicted the Italian-American experience in the 20th and 21st-centuries. Through a close-reading of novels such as Pietro di Donato's Christ in Concrete and analyses of documentaries, and narrative films like Big Night, The Godfather Trilogy, Mean Streets, Raging Bull, From Here to Eternity, Two Family House, Marty, Moonstruck, Mac, and others, the students reconstructed a detailed history of Italian-Americans in relation to immigration, race, politics, crime, family life, popular culture, food, sports, and architecture. The result of their work is the archive that you are presently perusing.
Moons and Bonfires: An Archive of Italian-American History consists of original entries written by teams of students from The University of Virginia on a wide array of topics relating to the Italian-American experience. It also includes a blog with entries by a rotating team of authors. Although its primary function is that of course project, visitors to this site are also encouraged to use it as a resource for their own research and teaching about the Italian-American diaspora in the United States.
Benvenuti e buona lettura!
-Sarah Annunziato, PhD
Works Cited:
Mangione, Jerre and Morreale, Ben. La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian-American Experience. Harper Colins: New York, 1993. Print.
Pavese, Cesare. La luna e i falo'. (1950). Einaudi: Torino, 2000. Print.
Pollina, Pippo. "La luna e i falo'." Perf. Pippo Pollina. Storie di note, 1999. MP3.