Through the Periscope

Changing Culture, Italian America

Martino Marazzi

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781438488608
  9781438488615
• eBook ISBN:
  9781438488622
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Italian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Offers a wider approach to Italian American culture, one that stresses both its material, urban components and the creativity of its formal literary codes.

The constant dialogue between literary forms of the Old and the New World is the core concern of the essays in Through the Periscope, which examine these ever-changing historical, intellectual, and psychological landscapes through the lens of Italian American culture. Moving beyond Little Italy, the book widens the spectrum of "pure" immigrant studies. It analyzes the longue durée of the revolutionary energies of 1848, an arc that leads from Margaret Fuller to Bob Dylan via the Great Migration of European peoples and languages, as well as the merging of various immigrant voices in the "changing culture" of turn-of-the-century New York. It reclaims the importance of Dante for Italian American writers and follows the metamorphosis of a Romance language dense in masterworks and oral nuances through the multiple signs of a new "illiterature." Points of arrival are both the majestic proletarian novels of the 1930s and a contemporary poem like Robert Viscusi's Ellis Island. Martino Marazzi's volume underlines the richness of such an epic cultural transformation and its fundamental importance for a more thorough understanding of Euro-American relations.

Part I

Changing Culture

Chapter 1

A Hard Rome’s A-Gonna Fall

Roman Sonnets, Sicilian Sulfur,
and American Ballads

1

During her long and very intense stay in Rome, Margaret Fuller lived a notoriously deep intellectual, political, and personal experience. One of the more fascinating aspects of that Roman period, as it is captured in her various writings, has to do with the shrewd perceptiveness of her position not only as an outsider, but an outsider passionately taking part—not just absorbing and observing—in those very societal challenges that she dissects and presents to her American readers and correspondents. For indeed in Rome Fuller appears replenished with ideas about, and with an almost physical sense of, the surrounding Roman society. And at the same time she has it all, so to speak, engaging at full tilt with the Roman auratic charisma, without hiding the many mundane disappointments, difficulties, and irritations. She doesn’t hold back: it is not a “marble faun” morbidity that pulls the strings.

What is more specific, and unique to her position, is her embrace of the Risorgimento as a revolutionary flowering where somehow transcendentalism and socialism meet and intertwine. The liberation of Rome from papal tyranny and the unification of Italy are viewed not only in practical, political terms, but also as momentous events befitting a higher concept of the soul. Freedom and justice are not abstract ideals, but emanate from the bosom.

And yet it is in my mind crucial to stress that Fuller’s Rome—and more generally Fuller’s Italy—is by and large very much premodern. We read it and see it on almost every page of her Dispatches and letters. Neither of them could be easily used as a mid-nineteenth-century handbook on the beauties and attractions of the eternal city, but it is a fact that she relishes in the spectacle of popular vitality, be it expressed in colorful processions or collective street dances (the inhabitants of Trastevere doing their saltarello in Dispatch 19¹). The Catholic devotion for the Dead, the very Roman celebration of the sacred infant—the Bambino at Aracoeli—, the Carnival, the moccoletti (the feast of the tapers), the Fair of St. Eustachio, these are just some of the very lively traditions that Fuller confronts, at times more critically, but overall with a sympathetic eye.²

Her aim, though, is not folkloric, even less touristic.³ In the midst of the “intoxications of joy” swarming through Rome “at the first serious measures of reform taken by the Pope,”⁴ she notes a band cheering the crowd playing Awakening of Italy—a popular anthem of national unity penned by Italian exile Giovanni Secchi de Casali in New York.⁵ The tumultuous sequence of events throughout Europe in 1848 soon invites her to bolder tones: “The news from France, in these days, sounds ominous, though still vague; it would appear that the political is being merged in the social struggle: it is well; whatever blood is to be shed, whatever altars cast down. These tremendous problems MUST be solved, whatever be the cost!”⁶ What is happening in Europe provides a lesson to be sent back home:

To you, people of America, it may perhaps be given to look on and learn in time for a preventive wisdom. You may learn the real meaning of the words FRATERNITY, EQUALITY: you may, despite the apes of the Past, who strive to tutor you, learn the needs of a true Democracy. You may in time learn to reverence, learn to guard, the true aristocracy of a nation, the only really noble—the LABORING CLASSES.⁷

The profound upheaval witnessed in Rome will lead to the ousting of the Pope and to the proclamation of the Republic. Enter Mazzini and Garibaldi. Fuller’s private life—this is well known—is completely transformed by a happily requited love and by maternity. Through all of this, her dialogue with home remains open. And the plight of “the people” always figures prominently as one of the main themes. The letters express a characteristic frankness; to William Channing:

I write not to you about these countries, of the famous people I see, of magnificent shows and places. All these things are only to me an illuminated margin on the text of my inward life. Earlier, they would have been more. Art is not important to me now. I like only what little I find that is transcendentally good, and even with that feel very familiar and calm. I take interest in the state of the people, their manners, the state of the race in them. I see the future dawning; it is in important aspects Fourier’s future. But I like no Fourierites; they are terribly wearisome here in Europe; the tide of things does not wash through them as violently as with us, and they have time to run in the tread-mill of system.⁸

To Emerson, from Rieti, in the countryside, more than one year later:

I love to see their patriarchal ways of guarding the sheep, and tilling the fields. They are a simple race, remote from the corruptions of foreign travel, they do not ask for money, but smile upon and bless me as I pass […] The ignorance of this people is amazing. I am to them a divine visitant, and instructive Ceres, telling them wonderful tales of foreign customs and even legends of their own saints [sic] They are people whom I could love and live with […]⁹

And, from the author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, this passing but revealing comment: “My poor Italian brothers, they bleed! I do not love them much,—the women not at all; they are too low for me; it will be centuries before they emerge from a merely animal life. The men too, though their sentiment is real, are in thought too much the fanfaron.”¹⁰ What is equally characteristic is the fact that such private notes seem to provide the background for a comparative analysis of searing perspicuity:

In reference to what I have said of many Americans in Italy, I will only add that they talk about the corrupt and degenerate state of Italy as they do about that of our slaves at home. They come ready trained to that mode of reasoning which affirms that, because men are degraded by bad institutions, they are not fit for better.¹¹

I listen to the same arguments against the emancipation of Italy, that are used against the emancipation of our blacks; the same arguments in favor of the spoliation of Poland as for the conquest of Mexico.¹²

It remains that—despite the huge, historical event of the Roman Republic—the people of Rome, as Fuller witnesses them unfiltered, appear a subject whose agency—however vital—is tinged with nihilism. Their discontent gives way to bloody bursts of revolt incapable of turning into occasions of lasting change and transformation. There is no doubt that this helps to explain, too, the nineteenth-century vision of dolce vita and grande bellezza that Fuller subscribes to in her own way, finding it a conduit of spiritual and personal solace. It certainly was not lost on Fuller that such fatalistic popular wisdom meant no easy resignation and contained a truly awesome dose of poetic justice. Or at least, this is what I like to think considering the significant presence, amid the poor remains of the tragic shipwreck off Fire Island in July 1850, of two great and most explicit sonnets by Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, the supreme and cutting master of Roman dialectal poetry: Le Pape and Diritto Divino. Given their preciousness and rarity (with regard to both Fuller and Belli), it is worth quoting them here in all their poetic splendor. I adapt Fuller’s longhand transcription from her papers at the Houghton Library in Harvard. Belli’s versions differ in no trifling details, but is their echo in Fuller that concerns me at this point.

Le Pape (Fuller gives a title in French) corresponds to La vita da cane, number 2120 of Belli’s last authoritative edition:

Ah! non fà niente er papa, ahi non fà niente

Ahi non fà niente lui, brutte marmotte!

Accussì ve pijasse un accidente

Come er papa fatica giorno e notte.

Chi parla con Dio Padre onnipotente?

Chi assolve tanti fiji [de] mignotte?

Chi và in carrozza a benedir la gente?

Chi manna intorno le indulgenze a botte?

Chi è che conta li denari sui?

Chi porta in petto e fà li cardinali?

Le Gabelle, per Dio, non le fa lui?

E poi la gran fatica de facchino

De strascià tutt er giorno i mermoriali

E mettelli a pezzetto in der cestino!¹³

Diritto Divino is Belli’s Li soprani der Monno vecchio (sonnet 360):

C’era una volta un rè che da palazzo

Mannò fuori alli popoli sto editto:

“Io so io, e voi no siete un cazzo

Sciori vassalli buggiaroni, e zitto!

Io fò dritto lo storto, e storto il dritto

Anco ve posso venne un tanto ar mazzo

E se v’impicco no ve fò strapazzo

Che la vita e la roba io ve l’affitto

Che a sto monno chi non nasce con titolo

O de papa, o de rè, o de Imperatore

Quelli, non pò avè mai voce in capitolo.”

Poscia mannò lo boja pe corriero

A interrogar le genti in sur tenore

E tutti rispondieno: è vero! è vero!¹⁴

For quite different reasons, the—literally speaking—emersion of both these sonnets is very significant. Le Pape/La vita da cane circulated among the mazziniani after Mazzini himself had transcribed it in London and sent it around to Italian comrades in November 1846. This followed the publication in a monthly printed in Lausanne earlier that year by Venetian exile Filippo De Boni, who would later publish it again. We know from other sources that this typically paradoxical critique of the Pope’s indolence and corruption was known even in the papal inner circle.¹⁵ As a political satire, it certainly was instrumental to the cause of anticlerical Italian republicanism, and as such, it was later included—under the title L’uccupazione der papa o ’na vitaccia da cani—among the Sonetti conservati dalla tradizione popolare in the 1870 historical edition of Belli’s masterpiece, edited by Luigi Morandi only a few months before the last and final defeat of Pius IX marking the end of the Papal States.¹⁶ It wasn’t then by chance that Fuller was carrying the sonnet with her to America, with Belli still very much alive and largely unknown. In general—but not always—her choices tend to avoid the easy picturesque and betray a wider critical vision. Fuller’s political and existential proximity to popular Italy and to the democratic aspirations of the Risorgimento make her a unique witness. And yet in many details her observations seem to overlap with those of her dear friend William Wetmore Story, whose Roba di Roma—a successful two-volume conversational narration of contemporary Rome—can be regarded as one of the launching pads of a touristic interpretation of Italy as rarified cradle of the arts and site of a gaudy street life. Indeed, Belli’s sonnet (now with yet another title, La Fatiche der Papa) will make its first public appearance ever in Story’s book in 1863.

Even more ideologically revealing is Fuller’s transcription of Diritto Divino / Li soprani der Monno vecchio. To my knowledge, this scathing indictment of absolute power, with obvious innuendoes to the connection between autocratic rule and sex (see the rhymes palazzo : cazzo : mazzo), and between lawmaking and economic exploitation (editto : dritto : affitto), will not see the light until Morandi’s 1870 edition, which reports it as part of Belli’s popular fortune. It is to Fuller’s credit that she had deemed it worthy of some serious consideration. We can only speculate as to her access to Belli’s poetical lode; suffice it to say that biographical trivia attest to the poet’s intimate acquaintance with the Ossoli family.¹⁷ What transpires from Fuller’s appreciation of Belli’s Diritto Divino / Li soprani der Monno vecchio is the radical edge of her political engagement, ready to detect—behind the surface of Roman fatalism—a lucid awareness of the violence and arrogance of power.¹⁸

Nevertheless, such a sensibility seems to be an exception to the rule, for in other aspects Fuller’s Rome and Italy show a certain kind of buoyancy that is not that dissimilar from W. W. Story’s more predictable account. To be sure, Fuller—no matter how attracted by the signs of Roman culture and daily life—is always su...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Changing Culture
• Part II. Transitional Modes of Italian American Letters
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover