“My grandfathers were from Abruzzo and Basilicata. Southern Italy. A breed apart from the rest of the Italian peninsula. They knew of Dante, Machiavelli, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, of popes and of Garibaldi. They knew of the Renaissance, and of papal wars. But their parents would have thought of those names and events as being from another country—one that spoke a language similar to, yet different from, their own, and with a different form of government and society. My grandparents and the overwhelming majority of Italian immigrants to the United States during the great migration hadn’t been tanning in the Tuscan sun. They and their ancestors, since the fall of Rome, had been broiled by the Southern sun of il Mezzogiorno, the ‘high noon,’ ‘middle-of-the-day’ region of Italy; the South. The places that even now the tourists seldom find.
“The concept of ‘Italy’ had only occurred in my great-grand-parents’ lifetimes. There was no ‘Italian’ nation prior to the middle of the nineteenth century. More important, the supposed unification of the Italian peninsula never included the South of Italy as an equal partner. Its inhabitants were from a different land that could be obscured and ignored from a distance and relative comfort of America.
“And so it was.”
* Quoted from Under The Southern Sun by Paul Paolicelli, Thomas Dunne Books, 2003, p.xii
