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Under the Southern Sun
Stories of the Real Italy and the Americans it Created
By Paul Paolicelli St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2003 Paul Paolicelli
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-6902-8
CHAPTER 1
Il Mezzogiorno
Down the Autostrade and into History
South of Rome, the scenery changes. The landscape becomes dramatic and even dangerous. The soft rolling hills of Tuscany, the incredibly sprawling plains and gentle knolls of Lazio become the jagged and rugged mountains, ravines, cliffs, and the near deserts of Campania, Calabria, Basilicata and Puglia. Driving down the single autostrada along the western coast that leads to the deep South, all of Italy's history passes by with the terrain.
Monte Cassino dominates the terrain where the Germans drew their line of defense in 1943 during the Second World War. The Allies fought for every inch of earth in the valley. The rebuilt abbey sits solidly and majestically atop its mountain, a silent and stately reminder of thousands of lives lost, including hundreds of Italian civilians caught in the deadly crossfire, while still others starved to death attempting to hide in the hills during that terrible winter.
The abbey had also been destroyed by the Longobards, Saracens and an earthquake over the fourteen centuries before the Allies advanced. We don't know the death tolls from those particular events. The Goths sacked the place before St. Benedict founded his monastery on the remnants of a Roman fortification. The Romans fought in this region against rebelling native tribes.
Blood is in the soil here.
Yet the abbey remains and endures.
A few kilometers farther south, Vesuvio broods over Naples, a unique emblem of indifferent power. It was on the hills of this volcano that Spartacus hid from the Romans, its fertile soil, rich with fruit and grain, feeding and protecting his rebellious slave army for a time.
Less than a century later, Vesuvio's deadly eruption killed thousands more when it destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum. The relics from that ancient tragedy give us a direct and fascinating look at the objects and organization of daily life two thousand years ago, household items that are still stylish and functional and a haunting reminder of how quickly life can be taken, cities destroyed.
Driving through Italy is driving through time.
Driving through Southern Italy is driving through the geography of the entire sweep of Italian history. This is where Italy began. In fact, it was the tribes here who were first called "Italian." Early populations in the North were a mixture of Gauls, Goths and various other migrations until late in the Roman era.
Nearing the shores of Southern Italy, one goes from driving through ancient Italy to driving through ancient Greece, for the majority of the coastline of the South, from Sicily and up to and including Naples, was known as Magna Graecia. The natives of this region, the Etruscans ranging south throughout what is modern-day Campania, the Brutians in Calabria and the Lucani in Basilicata, began trading with the Greeks at the dawn of modern civilization. Centuries later, as Greece struggled with overpopulation, she established her first colonies along the shores of modern-day Sicily, Puglia, Basilicata and Calabria — the bottom of the "foot" of Italy.
It is Southern Italy and Greece where modern civilization began.
And it is here, too, where the confusion over Italian history, and ultimately Italian-American history, begins ... who were these people and who are they now?
* * *
My own confusion had begun several years before. I was on the floor of the Democratic Convention in 1984, when Mario Cuomo, then governor of New York, made his now famous and often quoted speech about his father's life in America — a man who had been born not far from Naples. Cuomo talked of what he had learned from his father's struggle. It was, of course, an Italian-American experience which Cuomo related so eloquently that evening in San Francisco. His story demonstrated the innate dignity and achievements of his father's generation. He described his father as "a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example ..." And, describing his childhood, Cuomo said, "I learned about our obligation to each other from him and from my mother. They asked only for a chance to work and to make the world better for their children...."
It was a personal and stirring speech, delivered in the Moscone Center, which was named for still another Italian-American of political achievement.
And it was a speech I found strangely troubling.
I was not there as a cheering Democrat, but as a member of the huge press corps covering the event. Also, I was most definitely not there as an Italian-American, but as a professional journalist helping to report on the American political process. I had never mixed the two — my profession and my family — and was uncomfortable that Cuomo had. I never talked about my father's or grandfathers' experiences in public. I barely talked about them at all. Cuomo's stories of his father's principles and hard work was just not the kind of subject I thought appropriate for public discussion.
If pressed to describe my poorly defined attitudes toward my ethnic identity from that time, I would have probably paraphrased Herman Wouk's title from his novel dealing with Jewish ethnicity in conflict with public personae; I had lived mostly in an Inside, Outside world. In my "inside" world — the world of family, close relatives, the same blood — I celebrated the accomplishments and mourned the losses of my own relatives, especially that first, largely uneducated and hardworking generation, like Cuomo's father, who had made our American lives possible.
At the level of "outside" world — school, the church, workplace, society in general — I went about my life in the way I believed the "average American" would go about it. While I certainly felt no shame over my origins, I did not want to be identified as a representative of any particular group other than my chosen profession. I belonged to no political or fraternal organizations, had no strings to any societies or groups of any sort, either religious, ethnic or social, and believed that lack made for a more objective journalist.
Yet I recognized the ring of truth in Cuomo's speech that night. I identified with the powerful metaphors he used for a generation capable of self-sacrifice and spirituality, the same qualities I admired in my own family. I remembered similar feelings from my own childhood and the stories of my parents' early experiences. Cuomo talked about the "simple eloquence" of his father's example — a man uneducated and inarticulate in English who taught the future New York governor "all I needed to know about faith and hard work."
The words stayed with me for a long time, and it was longer still until I came to an understanding of why they troubled me.
I didn't know it at the time, but I was reacting culturally — exactly the same way my relatives and ancestors would have reacted — as a Southern Italian. Keep your business to yourself. Don't talk about personal things. Tell the government or those who represent it what they need to hear. Volunteer nothing, be polite, move on. Smile, invite them to dinner. Never share your true feelings unless you can trust, and you can only trust blood, the inner circle; the rest might never understand, so don't waste time trying to tell them.
No one had ever spoken those actual words to me, but they were what I believed and what I would learn an entire culture believed: the Southern Italian culture, the majority of whom came to America from the relatively new country called "Italy" to find the life that Cuomo had so passionately described.
It took longer still for another question to arise in my mind: If Mario Cuomo had learned all he needed to know about truth and values from his father, a hardworking but poorly educated immigrant, where had his father learned those values?
And, in a broader context, how could the Cuomo family, in a single generation, produce a major American political figure? Obviously, Cuomo had learned some important lessons from his immigrant family. What about people like Frank Capra, whose family came to America with little formal education and poor language skills, yet, within twenty or so years, Capra was helping define America through his films? Or the poet John Ciardi, or composer Henry Mancini, or businessman Lee Iacocca, all sons of Southern Italian immigrants, along with countless athletes and entertainers. The examples of Italian immigrant families who had, in less than a normal life span, produced great American success stories such as artists, musicians, actors, scientists and bankers were endless, and the overwhelming majority of them had been from Southern Italy and Sicily.
Surely there was something in the Southern Italian experience that could explain that success.
A Trip Through Time ...
Driving down to Italy from the north through the countries of the European Union, one can't escape the obvious remnants of the nation-state system so prevalent during the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In order to visit with friends in Switzerland, a country with roughly the same population as the Los Angeles region, I had to stop at the border for a customs check, show my passport and pay a road tax (good for one year).
Just ten years ago this was the process for most Western European countries and all of Scandinavia, and is still the process in what is now the collection of independent states that was once Yugoslavia.
Today's relative ease in driving about Europe reflects an attempt on its part to diminish outward claims of sovereignty and the long legacy of nationalism. Europe has been in a constant state of political change from the end of ancient feudalism through the Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, the rise of the concept of nation and the struggle, often bloody, through various social experiments and "isms" ranging from Communism to Fascism to Nazism to Socialism in an effort to determine individual and governmental balance.
My reading of this history always returns my American thoughts to Abraham Lincoln. I believe it was Lincoln, more than any other American, who clearly saw the weakness in this sort of small state system, and saw his own times for what they were. It was Lincoln's deep belief in union, that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, that was at the core of his thinking when he chose the terrible and bloody American Civil War over the concept of individual state's rights to secede.
Lincoln, and only a handful of others, understood in the mid-nineteenth century what would happen to the United States if they weren't united; essentially what occurred in Europe over the following century. On the Continent, there was an incessant and often violent attempt at domination and subjugation of others by one national entity or another, unending political and diplomatic intrigue, and a constant changing of borders — much like malignant cancer cells migrating into strange and ultimately fatal masses. During this same period Americans were saved, directly as a result of the Civil War, from the upheaval and madness of Europe, which continues in some parts of the continent to this very day.
The Balkans are the purest example of this remnant of European nation-state philosophy.
In 1992, I visited Ljubljana, Slovenia, on a consulting trip for the Independent Media Fund. I took the fast train from Rome to Venice, where I transferred to the Slovenian train. At the border, we came to a halt. Two heavily armed soldiers came through the car barking orders in what I assumed was Slovenian. One guard, a thick, heavyset woman with her hand on an automatic rifle, demanded to see my passport, then motioned for me to leave my possessions on the train and report to an office in the station.
A fellow passenger saw my confusion and explained, in Italian, that I needed to obtain a temporary visa in order to continue the journey — a visa I had to pay for with Slovenian money, which further complicated the transaction. And this was a benign experience — Slovenians had no objections to Americans visiting their country. Just five years before that journey, I would have been subjected to even further scrutiny, since the Iron Curtain would have been still very firmly in place.
Slovenia has two million inhabitants, give or take a few. Yet it maintains a separate government, currency, flag, national anthem, national border, requires visas of visitors, has a separate official language from the rest of the peninsula and is a sovereign and wholly separate nation from the rest of the Balkans and Europe. It takes a little more than an hour by car to cross the entire east-to-west span of Slovenia, and then there's another border. This time it's Croatia, which also has its own official language, currency, requires an entry visa and so on. And thus it is down the length of the Balkan peninsula.
Imagine going on a trip of around one hundred miles from Erie, Pennsylvania, to Cleveland, Ohio, and having to stop at a state border guarded by heavily armed soldiers, apply and pay for an entry visa, exchange money, buy a dictionary in order to read Cleveland menus and negotiate hotels, be subjected to a search of your body and possessions and see more armed men and women guarding all of the main entry points into the city.
Now consider this: Cleveland is more than twice as big as the capitals of Slovenia, Macedonia, Croatia or Bosnia-Herzegovina — all of which impose these impediments on travelers, as well as having separate languages or dialects, flags, anthems and sovereignty. (And there are almost as many Slovenians in the Cleveland-Pittsburgh corridor as there are in Slovenia proper).
In his fascinating work, The Myth of Nations, the Medieval Origins of Europe, UCLA Professor Patrick J. Geary writes,
... there is nothing particularly ancient about either the peoples of Europe or their supposed right to political autonomy. The claims to sovereignty which Europe is seeing in Eastern and Central Europe today are a creation of the nineteenth century, an age which combined the romantic political philosophies of Rousseau and Hegel with "scientific" history and Indo-European philology to produce ethnic nationalism. This pseudoscience has destroyed Europe twice and may do so yet again....
Today's European Union is an attempt at a United States of Europe, which hopes to eliminate the very political conditions that have been choking Europe and causing many of its social, economic, religious and political problems since the end of feudalism.
Italy's role in all of this is unique.
The Northern states of Italy, from the twelfth century on — most notably Venice and Florence — were independent, and vastly influential throughout the then-known world. They were essentially city-states dominated either by royal houses of extraordinary wealth and great influence over the Roman Catholic Church (the Barberinis, Medicis, et cetera), or the doges of Venice, who were the first major international businessmen and government leaders.
The North of Italy meant (and still means) wealth, education, sophistication and relative comfort, the epitome of each in all of Europe at the time. Commoners could farm, learn trades, apprentice in the arts and go into the lower clergy or domestic service. Aside from the plague, which swept through on a nearly generational basis, life was on the whole quite tolerable and even enjoyable.
John Milton, the English poet and civil libertarian, went to Italy to confer with Galileo. Mozart studied the Italian masters. Tintoretto was hired to do the artwork in churches throughout Germany. Shakespeare set several of his plays in Northern Italy, obviously fascinated by its geography and government. Venice negotiated prices and trade for the entire middle section of Europe and the Adriatic region. Northern Italy was the cultural head and heart of Europe.
Immediately to the south of Venice and Florence lay Rome and the Papal States, an independent patch quilt of territory run by the Roman Catholic Church and controlled directly by its clergy. The popes were the major political players of this period. When England's Henry VIII demanded a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, the pope refused. Not because of any spiritual or religious consideration, as we were taught in Catholic schools, but because Aragon and Spain were far more important politically to the pope's aims than the relatively unimportant island of England. Permitting the divorce would have alienated the Spanish nobility related to Catherine and several popes.
The pope's influence was a dominant and often determining factor in forming the political coalitions and rulers of Europe. It was the pope who crowned the first Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne. It was the pope who first sanctioned and blessed the Norman rule of Southern Italy and continued to play a key role in Southern rule. It was the pope who took offense at Napoleon's insistence that he crown himself. And it was the pope who had been involved in every political movement in Western Europe until this very day with a Polish pope largely credited with helping bring down the Iron Curtain.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Under the Southern Sun by Paul Paolicelli. Copyright © 2003 Paul Paolicelli. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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