Calandra Institute

All That Lies Between Us (2013), 55 min.Kevin Carey and Mark Hillringhouse, dirs.Ancestor's Song, by Maria Mazziotti Gillan (Bordighera Press, 2013)
2013-11-14 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York) | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
Film Screening & Book Launch
This presentation features Maria Mazziotti Gillan reading from her latest collection of poetry, Ancestor’s Song, and a screening of Kevin Carey and Mark Hillringhouse’s documentary about Gillan, All That Lies Between Us. Blending interviews, poetry, photography, and music, the film is a moving account of Gillan’s life and work. An award-winning author and poet, Gillan’s upbringing in an Italian-American community in Paterson, New Jersey, inspired much of her writing and led her to establish innovative literary ventures in that city, including the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College.

Book Presentation at the Gotham Center for New York City HistoryThe Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City (University of Illinois Press, 2013)Simone Cinotto
2013-11-12 18:30 - 20:00 | Baisley Powell Elebash Recital Hall, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue at 34th Street New York NY 10016
Looking at the Italian-American community of East Harlem in the 1920s and 30s, Simone Cinotto demonstrates how food was at the center of the lives of immigrants and their children. From generational conflicts resolved around the family table to a vibrant food-based economy of ethnic producers, importers, and restaurateurs, food was essential to the creation of an Italian-American identity. Italian-American foods offered not only sustenance but also powerful narratives of community and difference, tradition and innovation as immigrants made their way through a city divided by class conflict, ethnic hostility, and racialized inequalities.
**This event is co-sponsored by the Calandra Institute and will be held at:
Gotham Center for New York City History
Skylight Room, 9th Fl., CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue at 34th Street, Manhattan

The Legacy of Lena Spencer and Her Caffè LenaJocelyn Arem, Caffè Lena History Project
2013-11-04 18:00 - 19:30 | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
Folklorist Jocelyn Arem will speak about the life and legacy of Lena Spencer, the co-founder of Caffè Lena, the oldest surviving folk-music coffeehouse in the United States. Born Pasqualina Rosa Nargi to Italian immigrants, Lena Spencer moved to Saratoga Springs, New York, with her husband Bill in 1958. Inspired by the burgeoning folk revival movement, they opened a coffeehouse and theater with a European feel and homelike atmosphere. Spencer dedicated her life to nurturing generations of artists, some of whom became world famous, including Bob Dylan and Spalding Gray. Arem will read excerpts from her upcoming book, Caffè Lena: Inside America’s Legendary Folk Music Coffeehouse (powerHouse Books, 2013), including samples of Spencer’s previously unpublished original writing, and will play excerpts from archival recordings featured on the companion CD project.

[s]comparse (2011), 62 min.Antonio Tibaldi, dir.
2013-10-29 18:00 - 19:30 | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
An observational documentary, [s]comparse deals with cinema, migration, fiction, and reality. It focuses on African immigrants living in Sicily who are brought to the island of Linosa to work as extras in Emanuele Crialese’s 2011 film Terraferma. The job requires that they get into the water and interpret the part of refugees arriving by rickety boat, something most of them have actually experienced. Comparse is the Italian word for film extras, but while discussing their dissatisfaction with their low wages for the strenuous work involved, the extras refer to themselves as scomparse (the disappeared). Antonio Tibaldi’s spare film seeks to give them a voice and by doing so provides an alternative view of Italian immigration and its representations.
Post-screening discussion with the director led by Anthony Tamburri, Calandra Institute.

Book Presentation: Paradigm: New and Selected Poems 1947-2009. By Alfredo de Palchi.
2013-10-22 18:30 - 20:30 | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
Book Presentation: Paradigm: New and Selected Poems 1947-2009. By Alfredo de Palchi. Translated from the original Italian by Barbarba Carle, Michael Palma, Sonia Raiziss, John Taylor et al. Panelists include: Luigi Fontanella, Irene Marchegiani, John Taylor. Anthony Julian Tamburri, moderator.
Alfredo de Palchi is a highly regarded poet, translator and publisher living in New York City. As a teenager, he was arrested and imprisoned for six years in postwar Italy. In prison he discovered the poet François Villon and wrote his first poem on the wall of his cell. He came to America in 1956 and began to promote Italian poetry with translations and the journal Chelsea, which he published for forty years. Writing his own poetry in his native Italian, he is here translated by major Italian-English translators of our time.

Christopher Castellani reads from All This Talk of Love (Algonquin Books, 2013)
2013-10-21 18:00 - 19:30 | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
All This Talk of Love, the third novel in Christopher Castellani’s series about the Grasso family, is a moving and engaging depiction of family history in the context of the immigrant experience. After World War II, Maddalena Grasso and her husband Antonio immigrated to the United States, leaving behind her parents, sisters, and brothers in Santa Cecilia. Decades later, Maddalena feels no need to delve into the past and expose the unmended rifts of another life. But her daughter Prima, seeing her parents aging, organizes a family trip to Italy, hoping to reunite Maddalena with her estranged sister and help her parents see their homeland one last time. Instead, this plan threatens to tear the Grasso family apart, until unwelcome surprises intervene, and their trip home becomes imperative.
“Castellani writes movingly, affectingly of immigrant life, of the dichotomy of cultures, of the persistence of love across generations.”
—Kirkus Reviews

Book Presentation: Cosa Grigia: Una nuova mafia invisibile all'assalto dell'Italia
2013-10-17 18:00 - 20:00 | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
From “cosa nostra” to “cosa grigia”! This book analyzes the ever growing influence that organized crime continues to have on Italian society. Author Giacomo Di Girolamo examines how that phenomenon once openly known as “Mafia” has insinuated itself into the very core of Italy’s every nook and cranny. Participants include: Giacomo Di Girolamo, Fred Gardaphé, and Stefano Vaccara. Moderator: Anthony Julian Tamburri. Nota bene: This event will be conducted in both English and Italian. Sponsored by La VOCE di New York and the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College/CUNY.

Symposium: "Italian Emigration: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow"
2013-10-11 18:00 - 20:00 | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
This panel will discuss both the history and current state of Italian emigration as seen from both the Italian and Italian-American Perspective. Panelists include: Dott. Salvo Iavarone (Pres., ASMEF); Dott.ssa Maria Addeo (ASMEF); Uff. Joseph Sciame (Chair, IHCC); Dr. Fred Gardaphé (Queens College & Calandra Institute); Dr. Joseph Sciorra (Queens College & Calandra Institute); Dr. Donna Chirico (York College, CUNY); and Dr. Anthony Julian Tamburri (Dean, Calandra Institute).
Sponsored by ASMEF (www.asmef.it) and the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College/CUNY.

Paese Mio Bello: An Exploration of Early Italian-American MusicTodd Cambio, Fraulini Guitar Company
2013-10-10 18:00 - 19:30 | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
In the early twentieth century, U.S. recording companies began producing records of music from the traditions of various recent immigrant groups. These recordings included folk music, topical songs rendered by popular singers, as well as instrumental pieces and audio from live theater performances. Paese Mio Bello is a collection of these early 78-rpm recordings from 1911 to 1939, a sampling of the rich diversity of musics of the Italian diaspora. Producer Todd Cambio, a luthier, musician, and a collector of 78-rpm records, will play selections from his compilation and discuss the music and its performers and composers.

"Made by Italians" The Economic and Social Impact of Italian Immigration to the United States: New Perspectives
2013-09-27 09:00 - 18:00 | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
The aim of this conference is to expand the range of investigations into the complex material and economic relationship between the United States and Italy over nearly a century and a half. This relationship has typically been studied from within specialized disciplines, from labor history to political treatises, from the import-export sector to the migration of talents and capitals from one side of the Atlantic to the other, from ethnographic discourse to popular culture, from literature to entertainment. “Made by Italians” wishes to break these disciplinary boundaries and have experts from the different fields enter into a dialogue.
Sponsored by: The Alfonse M. D’Amato Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies, SUNY Stony Brook, in collaboration with the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College/CUNY.

Domenica Ruta reads from With or Without You: A Memoir (Spiegel & Grau, 2013)
2013-09-26 18:00 - 19:30 | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
Domenica Ruta’s With or Without You is a lyrical memoir about a chaotic childhood in a working-class town, the power—and sometimes stranglehold—of a mother-daughter relationship, the painful realities of poverty and addiction, and an exceptional individual surviving deep traumas. A finalist for the Keene Prize for Literature and a recipient of residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, Ruta has penned here a love letter to her mother—to both the woman who scraped together money to send her to French lessons and painting classes and the one who spent her welfare money on cocaine. This book is an unconventional coming-of-age story and a sharply observed chronicle of one woman’s redemption from her past.
“Freakishly brilliant, brilliantly freakish, this is one of the best memoirs I have ever read. Domenica Ruta has done something every artist with a failed family must do. She has created herself.”
—Gary Shteyngart

Book Presentation: Italian Signs, American Politics, edited by Ottorino Cappelli
2013-09-25 12:15 - 13:30 | Queens College, 65-30 Kissena Blvd. Flushing NY 11367
Italian Signs, American Politics: Current Affairs, Historical Perspectives, Empirical Analyses. Ottorino Cappelli, editor.
This book analyses intra-ethnic elections in the United States, in the circumstance of American politicians of Italian descent who ran against each other in the State of New York. The first part examines the 2010 gubernatorial campaign between Andrew M. Cuomo and Carl P. Paladino, the highest-level intra-Italian electoral contest in contemporary times. The second part addresses the Congressional races between James Lanzetta and Vito Marcantonio in East Harlem in the 1930s, and the 1950 New York City mayoral elections, where the three major candidates: Vincent Impellitteri, Ferdinand Pecora, and Edward Corsi were all Italian-born. The third part investigates the relationship between social demographics and the success of Italian American politicians in hegemonic districts where intra-Italian elections occur frequently.
Participants include: Ottorino Cappelli, State Senators Joseph Addabbo and Tony Avella. Moderator: Anthony Julian Tamburri. Sponsored by the Italian Club of Queens College and the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College/CUNY.
Admission: free; open to the public; Contact: John D. Calandra Italian American Institute; 212-642-2094; calandra@qc.edu
This event takes place at Queens College, Kiely 270, 12:15 pm.

Italian Identity in the Third Millennium
2013-09-19 18:00 - 20:30 | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
This symposium is a continuation—a sort of inter-mission—of the last three symposia ILICA has sponsored on the topic. After two events last fall and a third this past spring in Rome, ILICA concludes this discussion in November. This event, in the meantime, offers the four Italian Americans an opportunity to gather their thoughts, so to speak, before the final edition in November at John Jay College. Speakers will include: Donna Chirico (York College), Louisa Ermelino (Publishers Weekly), Fred Gardaphé (Queens College & Calandra Institute), Robert Viscusi (Brooklyn College). Sponsored by: ILICA (Italian Language Inter-Cultural Alliance) and the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College/CUNY.

Workshop on "Intercomprehension" and Multilingualism: Teaching Italian to Romance Language Speakers
2013-09-14 09:00 - 18:00 | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
Introduction and objectives of the workshop
This workshop intends to introduce both the high-school and college teacher of Italian to new methodologies in teaching the target language to students who are native speakers or have an excellent knowledge of another Romance language such as Catalan, French/French Creole, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish. The basic goal is to demonstrate how the student’s knowledge of a Romance language can facilitate his/her learning of Italian. Through teaching strategies specific to this profile of a student, his/her knowledge of Italian can be more readily acquired as s/he moves forward in studying Italian.
The main objectives are to provide the teacher of Italian with those methodologies and strategies that will create the ideal classroom for this specific student profile. In so doing, we help create a body of students who will move forward in his/her study of Italian with greater facility and more quickly. As a result, both the teaching and the learning of the language should prove more efficient, and the potential for a greater number of students at the advanced levels increases.
Program
* Clorinda Donato: “The Ties that Bind: Italian for Spanish Speakers in Intercomprehension”
* Elisabetta Bonvino & Diego Cortés Velasquez: “Intercomprehension with EuRom5: ‘You already know Spanish? Good, now you can learn French, Italian, Catalan, and Portuguese!'”
* Irene Zanini-Cordi & Fabrizio Fornara: “The FSU Experience: From Spanish to Italian”
* Barbara Spinelli: Adopting a Multilingual Approach in a Web 2.0 Environment
* Markus Muller: “Intercommunication or the potential of a paradigmatic shift in foreign language teaching”
Conference organizers: Roberto Dolci & Anthony Julian Tamburri
Free, but space is limited to 50 participants, so register soon.
Registration until September 6, 2013 at: calandra@qc.edu

Lo Studio dei Nipoti: Four Artists. September 12, 2013 through January 10, 2014
2013-09-12 09:00 - 17:00 | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
The Calandra Institute presents an exhibition by Lo Studio dei Nipoti (“The Studio of the Grandchildren”), a nonprofit artist collective for U.S. artists of southern Italian ancestry. The works featured here, by artists Nancy Agati, Cianne Fragione, Rose Michelle Taverniti, and Marisa Tesauro, represent an effort to engage with immigrant culture in the United States through the lens of the Italian-American experience while seeking to evoke realities of Italian-American life in their true range and variety.
Lo Studio dei Nipoti was founded as an online community in 2009 by Taverniti. In the summer of 2012, Lo Studio established a residency program in Monasterace, Calabria. This exhibition’s artists were among the first participants.
Agati is a sculptor whose structures refer to traditional cultural forms and Italian fine-craft traditions with their emphasis on high skill and careful finish. Fragione, a painter, revels in both the light of the Italian south and its distinctive indigenous forms, visible in decorative designs and church architecture. Taverniti works on drafting film, creating large-scale drawings that study the rich surface textures of centuries-old buildings in rural Calabria. Tesauro constructs sculptures that convey the complex textures of an ancient landscape — human and natural — in continual decay and renewal.
Taken together, these pieces are an artistic expression of the historical ramifications of Italian diaspora in the United States and Italy.
On view: September 12, 2013—January 10, 2014
Gallery Hours: Monday-Friday, 9 am—5pm
Exhibition Opening: Thursday, September 12, 2013, 6 pm
Artists’ Talk: Tuesday, November 19, 2013, 6 pm

Travelling Theater, Travelling Languages
2013-06-18 18:30 - 20:00 | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
Performances by Teatro della Ginestra and Francesco Foti, moderated by Lucia Grillo (Calandra Institute). Part of the “In Scena Italian Theater Festival NY.”

Book Presentation: Poetry by Maria Famà and Prose by George Guida
2013-05-17 06:30 - 20:30 | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
Book Presentation with
MARIA FAMÀ
&
GEORGE GUIDA
Friday May 17, 2013
6:30-8:30 pm
Bordighera Press hosts an evening with Maria Famà and George Guida, who will read from their most recent publications. Books will be available for purchase and signing by the authors.

Mystics in the Family
Poetry by Maria Famà
&

The Pope Stories and Other Tales of Troubled Times
Fiction by George Guida

SYMPOSIUM: Caring for Your Loved One: Planning Strategies for Elder Care. Options for the Italian-American Family.
2013-05-09 18:30 - 20:30 | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
In light of population aging and high disability rates among the elderly, many Italian American families face difficult decisions concerning hospitalization and care arrangements for elderly, disabled relatives. Often times, adult children become deeply involved in the daily lives of their chronically ill or medically fragile parents.
How do Italian American families meet the needs of their elderly? Are there particular cultural expectations concerning custodial care functions? In the face of changes in homecare legislation, Medicaid funding, and the continuing pressure to do more with less, creative thinking is critical for family caregivers.
Members of the panel discussion will include: Alec Pruchnicki, M.D., St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital; Anne B. Pagano, M.S., Fordham University; and Salvatore M. Di Costanzo, Esq., McMillan, Constabile, Maker and Perrone, LLP. Carmine Pizzirusso, Research and Technical Coordinator, Calandra Institute. Each participant has extensive experience providing medical, clinical, technical and/or legal services to Italian-American patients/clients and their extended family members.
Discussants will explore the challenges faced by Italian-American caregivers regarding hospitalization and home care options; strategies to support primary family caregivers as well as formal (hired) caregivers and the increased importance of financial planning, i.e., Medicaid and Community Needs Trusts.

Mussolini's National Project in ArgentinaDavid Aliano, College of Mount Saint Vincent
2013-05-07 18:00 - 19:30 | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
During the 1920s and 1930s, Mussolini’s regime used propaganda to promote fascist Italian ideologies in Argentina. Although politically a failure, the attempt provoked a debate about national identity outside of the nation-state and the potential roles citizens living abroad could play in their country of origin. In this presentation, historian David Aliano, author of Mussolini’s National Project in Argentina (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012), uses the experiences of Mussolini’s efforts in Argentina to demonstrate how national projects take on different meanings once they enter a contested public space. He details how both Italian Argentines and native Argentines reshaped Italy’s national discourse from abroad by enmeshing it with Argentina’s own national project. Aliano offers new perspectives on the politics of identity formation while showing the dynamic interplay between the Italian state and its emigrant communities.

Lingue Migranti: The Global Languages of Italy and the Diaspora
2013-04-26 09:00 - 18:00 | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
This year’s annual, two-day conference seeks to build on the growing literature dealing with language and migration as it concerns Italy and the diaspora.
Click here to view the program.
Italy as a cultural zone developed throughout the centuries with a plethora of distinct languages. Regionally-based Romance languages—e.g., Neapolitan, Sicilian, Tuscan, Venetian—and their local variants were the numerous languages spoken by illiterate peasants as well as professionals, scholars, and creative writers. In the aftermath of unification in 1861, the state sought to impose the Tuscan dialect as the national standard in an attempt “to make Italians” in the same period that mass emigration began in earnest. Tensions emerged during that time and, with the onset of a more recent immigration, continue to inform the interrelated spheres of language and migration, from issues concerning standard Italian versus dialects, especially along a north-south divide; to representations of “Italian” as the esteemed language of the Renaissance versus the marginalized language of working-class emigrants and their descendants; to responses to “foreign” influences of vocabulary and literatures.

Book Presentation: Il confine liquido: rapporti letterari e interculturali fra Italia e Albania
2013-04-22 18:00 - 20:00 | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
Il confine liquido: rapporti letterari e interculturali fra Italia e Albania, edited by Emma Bond and Daniele Comberiati, is the first systematic analysis of the literary and cultural relations between the two countries, from the 15th Century to the present day. Thanks to contributions by scholars of Albanian history and literature, scholars of postcolonial and migrant literature, and translators and experts on the Italian politics related to Albania, Il confine liquido provides a rich, complex portrait of the two countries’ interconnected history.
The volume is divided in two parts. The first section deals with the most relevant historical and cultural problems characterizing relations between the two shores of the Adriatic Sea. The second section contains specific analysis of works by Albanian-origin authors who write in Italian. The volume also includes an interview with Ornela Vorpsi, a major voice among Albanian writers expressing themselves in Italian today.
At a moment in which the intercultural relations between Italy and Albania are consolidating, Il confine liquido provides an articulated investigation of the overlapping history of the two countries from a postcolonial point of view, and offers a contemporary analysis of literary works which have grown out of that history. It offers a collection of works that constitute a bridge between the two shores of the Adriatic Sea.
Daniele Comberiati, Anita Pinzi, and Peter Carravetta will discuss the book.

Frank Capra: America's Director
2013-04-15 18:00 - 20:00 | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
To date, Bordighera Press’s Saggistica series has published eight volumes. Vito Zagarrio’s study on Frank Capra, The “Un-Happy Ending”: Re-viewing The Cinema of Frank Capra, is the series’ inaugural study. Professor Zagarrio will be in town in mid-April, so we wanted to invite him to present his volume. Also present will be Distinguished Professor Fred Gardaphé. Dean Anthony Julian Tamburri will moderate and make some comments as well.
“No other film scholar in Europe and North America has been as insightful and influential as Vito Zagarrio, in uncovering and analyzing the complexities of a film director too long believed to be one-dimensional. Zagarrio took the lead, moreover, in recovering large parts of Capra’s work, the late silent and early sound films made at Columbia between 1928 and 1934, only a small number of which were then in public circulation.” —Robert Sklar, from his “Foreword”
Vito Zagarrio studied in Florence, Rome (Centro Sperimentale), and New York, earning a Ph.D. from New York University. He is a full professor of film analysis at Roma Tre University. He is a well-known scholar of Italian and American cinema. Alongside his academic career, he has developed a career as a film director. His first full-length movie was La donna della luna with Greta Scacchi. His latest film, Tre giorni d’anarchia, met with great success in festivals around the world. Zagarrio is the director of the Costa Iblea Film Festival and Roma 3 Film Festival.

My Reincarnation (2010), 100 min.Jennifer Fox, dir.
2013-04-10 06:00 - 19:30 | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
My Reincarnation chronicles the story of the Tibetan Buddhist Master Chögyal Namkhai Norbu and his Italian-born son, Yeshi. Weaving together archival material, still photographs, and over 1,000 hours of footage shot from 1988 to 2009, the film follows Namkhai Norbu’s rise to prominence as a Buddhist teacher in the West, while Yeshi, recognized at birth as the reincarnation of a famous spiritual master, breaks away from his father’s religion to embrace an Italian lifestyle. His father continually admonishes him to be a teacher: to return to the monastery in Tibet and meet students waiting for him since his birth — a prospect Yeshi rejects. At stake for Namkhai Norbu is his spiritual tradition; for Yeshi, his own identity is on the line. As this story of family and inheritance unfolds, both father and son evolve, giving My Reincarnation the scope and depth of great narrative fiction.
Post-screening discussion led by Robert Garot, John Jay College.

Robert Viscusi reads from Ellis Island (Bordighera Press, 2013)
2013-04-03 18:00 - 19:30 | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
Robert Viscusi’s epic poem is composed of 624 Italianate sonnets arranged in 52 groups of twelve, called “books.” The poet uses the literary device chiasmus: The last sonnet answers the first. But Ellis Island exists in two states: the printed volume, and an online version at ellisislandpoem.com that generates random sonnets using lines from the 624 sonnets. In this way, like an immigrant, the poem Ellis Island belongs to two epochs. The old, the print version, is in order every time a reader opens the book. The new-epoch poem on the Internet is different every time a reader visits the website.
“Viscusi has constructed a wonderful machine for generating sonnets, an effort that reproduces the equally demented project of Ellis Island itself.”
— Mac Wellman, author of Murder of Crows

L'Aquila 3D: Inside the Closed City, presentation by Barnaby Gunning
2013-03-28 18:00 - 19:30 | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
Almost four years have passed since the L’Aquila earthquake of April 6, 2009, and there has been little progress towards the reconstruction of its devastated medieval city center– most of which has been off-limits to the public. British architect Barnaby Gunning has been working on a project to construct a 3D model of the city in its present state. The first stages of the project saw over 400 volunteers taking nearly 60,000 photographs of the city and a further 200 getting trained by Google to use SketchUp. In this presentation, Gunning discusses the L’Aquila 3D project and takes the audience on a virtual tour of the historic city center.

Enrico Caruso: A Modern Media StarGiuliana Muscio, Università degli Studi di Padova
2013-03-21 18:00 - 19:30 | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
Naples-born Enrico Caruso became the recording industry’s first megastar when his 1904 “Vesti la giubba” sold 1 million copies. As the Metropolitan Opera’s internationally renowned Italian tenor, he strengthened the link between opera and Italianness, and his recordings of Neapolitan songs made a bridge between upper-class opera listeners and the wider popular-music audience. Caruso stayed in close contact with the Italian-American community and with performers of the Italian immigrant stage; he also toured extensively and became a global icon of New York culture. He participated in the world of silent cinema in newsreels and in the feature films My Cousin (1918) and The Splendid Romance (1919). His image appeared in print advertising and in the press — even in comic strips. Film historian Giuliana Muscio discusses the adroit way Caruso took advantage of new and various forms of publicity that transformed him into a modern media celebrity.

Book Presentation: Pioneering Italian American Culture; Escaping la Vita della Cucina
2013-03-15 18:30 - 20:30 | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
Daniela Gioseffi’s book launch and 72nd year event celebrating the publication of Pioneering Italian American Culture; Escaping la Vita della Cucina: Essays, Reviews and Interviews by and about Daniela Gioseffi, with an introduction by Angelina Oberdan of Clemson University NC.
Comments by George Guida, Robert Viscusi, Alfredo De Palchi, Josephine Gattuso Hendin, Stephen Massimilla, etc. Hosted by Anthony J. Tamburri, Co-editor of VIA Folios/ Bordighera Press with Fred Gardaphe and Paolo Giordano.

Annie Rachele Lanzillotto reads from L Is for Lion: An Italian Bronx Butch Freedom Memoir (SUNY Press, 2013)
2013-03-13 18:00 - 19:30 | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
This poignant memoir takes readers into a world of immigration, gay subculture, cancer treatment, mental illness, gender dynamics, drug addiction, and domestic violence — a world peopled by a vast array of Italian-American characters. In the street, Annie Lanzillotto bounced her Spaldeen ball on the stoop; inside, she tapped calls for help on the heat pipes when her father beat her mother. Later, she was forced to quit college by the discovery of a massive tumor inside her chest, a circumstance that initiated her truth-seeking journey for survival. The journey crescendos with a return home to the timeless wisdom of Lanzillotto’s immigrant grandmother, Rosa Marsico Petruzzelli.
“Annie Lanzillotto … portrays the iconic Italian-American spaces of kitchen, stoop, sidewalk, and street … and, above all, the family war zone as an uncanny intermingle of poignancy and brutality.”
— John Gennari, author of Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics

Poster Exhibition of the Italian Heritage and Culture Committee-New York
2013-03-12 19:00 - 21:00 | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
In celebration of 2013 Year of Italian Culture in the United States.
Co-sponsored by the IHCC-NY.

Strangers in a Strange Land: A History of Italian-Language American Imprints, 1830-1945James Periconi, Independent Researcher
2013-03-05 18:00 - 19:30 | John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY, 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036
James Periconi will discuss his book — with essays by Robert Viscusi, Francesco Durante, and Martino Marazzi — which catalogues the Italian-language book-publishing industry that began in the nineteenth century and flourished in the United States in the fifty years before World War II. This industry created and reflected a vibrant national literary and political culture among a broad spectrum of Italian Americans living and working in the United States. The publishers included the Società Libraria Italiana, or Italian Book Company — which published poet Riccardo Cordiferro and author Bernardino Ciambelli — and numerous political presses, such as Libreria Editrice dei Lavoratori Industriali del Mondo (the IWW press), for the militant socialists and anarchists of the Italian-American community.
