• The Land of our Return: Diasporic Encounters with Italy

    John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036

    For Virgil’s Aeneas, Italy was “the land of our return” (in Robert Fagles’ 2006 translation), the place his ancestor Dardanus left generations earlier. The Aeneid…

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  • “Fade to White”: Colonial Mulattoes in Cinema and Literature of Fascist Italy

    John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036

    Rosetta Giuliani-Caponetto, University of Connecticut In 2006, Italy’s prime minister Silvio Berlusconi proclaimed, “We don’t want Italy to become a multiethnic, multicultural country. We are…

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  • Camilla Trinchieri reads from The Price of Silence (Soho Press, 2007)

    John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036

    Having taken a young Chinese woman under her wing, wife, mother, and respected teacher Emma Perotti finds herself on trial for the young woman’s murder.…

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  • Odyssey in Rome (2005), 86 min. Alex Grazioli, dir

    John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036

    Odyssey in Rome documents director Abel Ferrara’s attempt to finance and produce his film Mary (2005), a modern re-imagining of the life of Mary Magdalene…

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  • Rosario Candela: An Immigrant Architect in New York

    John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036

    Andrew Alpern When Rosario Candela (1890-1953) left Palermo to come to America with his father, he was an 18-year-old laborer with virtually no knowledge of…

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  • Chippers (2008), 52 min. Nino Tropiano, dir.

    John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036

    Chippers tells the story of Dublin’s well-established community of four thousand Italians, all coming from Casalattico in Lazio, who have owned fish and chip shops…

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  • Competing Understandings of Media in the History of Anti-defamation

    John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036

    Laura Cook Kenna, George Washington University Since at least the 1950s, some Italian Americans have organized anti-defamation campaigns to respond to unflattering, often mafia-inflected, representations…

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  • The Tree of Life (2008), 76 min. Hava Volterra, dir.

    John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY 25 W. 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York NY 10036

    Hava Volterra of Los Angeles tries to come to terms with her father’s death by traveling to Italy, the land of his birth, to trace…

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