Dr. Joseph Luzzi, Assoc. Professor of Italian, Bard College
"Why do so many Americans separate Italian American culture —with its folk traditions, Mafia stereotypes, and sentimental songs— from the “high” Italian culture of the Renaissance and other glamorous vestiges of the “Made in Italy” look? Is the distance between the Little Italy of Snooki and Tony Soprano and the fabled cultural realm of Dante’s poetry and Michelangelo’s art too vast to travel, or do these seemingly separate worlds connect and inform each other in unexpected ways? Drawing on my discoveries in writing my memoir and cultural history, My Two Italies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, July 2014), I will explore the political, geographical, and sociological differences that have created this great divide. I will describe how the story of my family’s dramatic emigration from southern Italy and my career as a scholar and teacher of high Italian culture have brought me inside the “two Italies” and their link to the late Unification of Italy in 1861, the centuries-long conflict between the Italian north and south, and the American need to make Italy a place with a healing Tuscan Sun."