Photo of the Week: Ruin Lizard at Villa Rufolo in Ravello

Photo by New York Scugnizzo

A Look at the 113th Annual Feast of Saint Ann in Hoboken, New Jersey (Part 2: Churches & Chapel)

Sant'Anna, ora pro nobis

St. Ann Church

The ornate high altar inside Saint Ann's Church

Statues of the Madonna Dei Martiri and San Rocco di Montpellier

(L-R) Stained glass windows of Santa Elisabetta, San Ludovico
XIV, Santa Teresa di Lisieux, and San Gennaro 

St. Francis Church

(L) Shrine to Sant'Anna. (R) Statue of Santa Rita

Statues of San Giovanni Battista and San Rocco

(L) Statue of the Madonna Dei Martiri.
(R) Stained glass window of San Giovanni Battista

Stained glass windows of San Giorgio and Santa Caterina d'Alessandria

(L) Detail of the ceiling depicting San Francesco d'Assisi's vision of the Crucified Christ. (R) Madonna della Libera, patroness of Rodi Garganico in Foggia

Santa Febronia Chapel

Societá di Mutuo Soccorso Santa Febronia Chapel on Fifth Street

Madonna di Tindari, ora pro nobis

Santa Febronia, ora pro nobis

Gesu Morto encased in glass beneath the altar 

The sanctuary

A Look at the 113th Annual Feast of Saint Ann in Hoboken, New Jersey (Part 1: The Procession)

After Mass, the Holy Name Society carried St. Ann out of the church

Father Remo Di Salvatore and His Excellency the Most Reverend
Arthur Joseph Serratelli enjoying the festivities

Departing St. Ann's Church, the procession
makes its way through the fairgrounds

Members of the St. Ann's Guild

Members of the Italian Apostolate of the Archdiocese of Newark, NJ

Our friends from the Madonna della Neve Society of Brooklyn, NY (& Steve)

Our buddy Jude with his mom and son

(Above & below) The procession wends its way through Hoboken

We stopped by Lisa's Italian Deli for cold water and watermelon

We enjoyed some delicious focaccia at the Madonna Dei Martiri clubhouse

Devotees erected shrines to St. Ann outside their homes and businesses

(L) Statue of Sant'Anna outside Failla Memorial Home.
(R) Donations are pinned on to the statue of San Giacomo

San Giacomo greets Sant'Anna outside the Monte San Giacomo clubhouse

We were treated to delicious roast beef and hot pepper sandwiches

San Giacomo joins the procession

(L) The Company Kafe generously offer participants watermelon. (R) Msgr. Paul Bochicchio blesses the participants outside St. Francis Church

The roisterous John Duke Band

After the procession, St. Ann is carried back into the church

San Giacomo and Sant'Anna are returned to the church sanctuary

Fr. Remo blessed us with the relic of Sant'Anna

Returning to the fairgrounds, we met up with some good friends
and enjoyed some of Lou's homemade wine

Among the Ruins and the Forest Passage

Roman Theater in Taormina by Louise-Joséphine Sarazin de Belmont
currently on view at the Morgan Library and Museum 

"It shows a healthy instinct that today’s youth is beginning to show new interest in religion. Even if the churches should prove themselves unable to cater to this instinct, the initiative is important because it creates a framework for comparisons. It reveals what was possible in the past, and hence what one may be justified in expecting from the future. What was possible is still recognizable today in only a single limited field, that of art history. Yet the futurists were at least right about one thing: that all the paintings, palaces, and museum cities mean nothing in comparison with the primal creative force. The mighty current that left all these creations in its wake like colorful seashells can never run dry—it continues to flow deep underground. If man looks into himself, he will rediscover it. And with that he will create points in the desert where oases become possible." ~ Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage, Telos, 2013, p.64

Navigating the ruins of modernity we sometimes catch glimpses of perennial beauty amidst the decadence and squalor. In New York City, an effort must sometimes be made to reach these rapidly disappearing oases, but the reward is often edifying and invigorating. In fact, the experiences are usually heightened by the clashing and antithetical tumult surrounding them.

Sign promoting the Into the Woods
exhibition outside the Museum

Consider our recent venture to the Morgan Library and Museum in Midtown Manhattan to view the ongoing exhibits: Sketching Among the Ruins and Into the Woods: French Drawings and Photographs from the Karen B. Cohen Gift. A cultural refuge of relative peace and tranquility, the stark contrast between the museum and its modern urban surroundings quickly becomes evident when entering the galleries. The artwork on display evokes a long-forgotten world, seemingly alien to many of the current denizens of Gotham.

Located in the lower level gallery is Sketching Among the Ruins, a small collection of oil paintings by various landscape artists jointly given to the Morgan Library and Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2009 by Eugene V. Thaw, a trustee of both institutions. 

Focusing mainly on studies of the Roman Campagna and its many ruins, the highlight of the collection is clearly The Roman Theater in Taormina, Sicily (1825), by Louise-Joséphine Sarazin de Belmont (1790-1870). Oil on paper and mounted on board, the painting was executed during her travels through the Papal States and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies between 1824 to 1826.

Interestingly, she made a similar painting in 1828 with a more active Mount Etna and two Capuchin monks giving alms to a beggar. This version can be found in the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

Roman Theater in Taormina by Louise-Joséphine Sarazin de Belmont
at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

Opposite the landscape sketches in a glass showcase on the wall is A Focus on the Figure: Selections from the Karen B. Cohen Gift. This assemblage of figurative drawings celebrates the 139 works (42 drawings, 95 photographs and two letters) generously given to the Morgan Library and Museum by Karen B. Cohen.

Among the works presented here is a chalk drawing of the Death of Alcestis (ca. 1814) by the renowned French painter Pierre-Narcisse Guérin (1774–1833). A hauntingly beautiful piece, it masterfully depicts the (once-)popular myth of the tragic death of Queen Alcestis, who willingly sacrificed her life in exchange for her husband’s (King Admetus of Thessaly). In the ancient Hellenic world, she came to personify the feminine virtues of selflessness, loyalty and devotion.

Portrait of Mrs. J.P. Morgan, Jr.
by John Singer Sargent

Between the two installations hangs a Portrait of Mrs. J.P. Morgan, Jr. (nee Jane “Jessie” Norton Grew, 1868-1925) by John Singer Sargent (1856-1925). The painting is flanked by bronze busts of Anne Morgan (1873-1952), the youngest of J.P. Morgan’s four children, by Malvina Hoffman (1885-1966); and Reverend William Stephen Rainsford (1850-1933), rector of St. George Church in New York City from 1883 to 1906, by Daniel Chester French (1850-1931).

On the second floor, in the Engelhard Gallery, we viewed Into the Woods: French Drawings and Photographs from the Karen B. Cohen Gift, a selection of over fifty works on paper depicting rural landscapes and their inhabitants.

Losing ourselves in the woods, metaphorically speaking, we circled the gallery several times, returning to the most interesting pieces and marveling at the evocative beauty of a bygone age. My favorites were Moonlit Landscape (1862) by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875), Study for Forest of Fontainebleau: Hunters (ca. 1866) by Paul Huet (1803-1869), and Fisherwoman Holding Nets (ca. 1865-75) by Jules Breton (18227-1906).

Fisherwoman Holding Nets by Jules 
Breton, p. 11 of the exhibit brochure

While scrolling through the digitized sketchbook of Charles François Daubigny (1817-1878), which focused on the newly expanded railway that brought 19th-century landscape artists from Paris to the wilds of Fontainebleau Forest seeking unexplored sceneries and agrarian laborers, it suddenly dawned on me that I haven’t taken a proper holiday this year and that Central and Prospect Parks aren’t cutting it lately. I need to pack my sketchpad and set off on a verdant excursion posthaste! 

No visit would be complete without seeing the interior of J. Pierpont Morgan’s stately library and study. Filled with priceless literary works, musical manuscripts, and works of art, the jewels of the collection are the illuminated manuscripts, among which are the Crusader Bible (1240s), Farnese Hours (1546), and Glazier Codex, a 5th century Coptic manuscript containing the first half of the Acts of the Apostles.

Though currently not on view, the library’s collection of Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts and letters from Naples will certainly be of interest to many of our readers. In a cursory search online I found: Fasciculus temporum (ca. 1498); In laudem neapolitane civitatis (ca. 1480); Psalter, prayerbook of Ferdinand I of Aragon (late 15th century); and De sphaera Mundi (last quarter of the 15th century); among many others.

Also in the archives can be found drawings from a veritable who’s who of celebrated artists from the Kingdom of Naples, such as Francesco Solimena, Luca Giordano, Mattia Preti, Francesco de Mura, Andrea Vaccaro, Aniello Falcone, Paolo De Matteis, Salvator Rosa, Massimo Stanzioni, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and Giacinto Gigante.

J.P. Morgan's Library (photo from previous visit)

What’s more, they have a bronze Hellenistic sculpture of Eros holding a torch (second or first century BC), unearthed from a Roman villa at Boscoreale, Naples, and a bronze bust of Alfonso II d’Avalos (1502-1546), Marquis of Pescara and Vasto, by Annibale Fontana (1540-1587).

Running Eros with Torch
(photo from previous visit)

The fact that so many of our ancestral treasures are at our fingertips and readily available for study and research mere miles away is utterly mind-boggling. Alluding to the malicious vandalization of the Archivio di Stato di Napoli by the retreating Germans in late September 1943, a friend pointed out, in a strange twist of fate many of these Neapolitan masterpieces probably survive today because the preeminent American financier and collector J. Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) accumulated them before the massive destruction of WWII.

Another quick search and I discovered that the Fascículos temporum was acquired at the Aldenham Library sale in London, at Sotheby’s on March 1937; In laudem neapolitane civitatis with the Aragonese library was brought to Spain in 1550 by Ferdinand of Aragon, Duke of Calabria; and the De sphaera Mundi was purchased in July 1910 from Alexandre Imbert (1865-1943), a French antiquarian (born in Naples and based in Rome) who devoted most of his time between 1907-1912 helping J.P. Morgan build his prodigious collection.

I’m not sure if any of these items were once part of the State Archives of Naples, but even if one historical document or drawing was rescued from that spiteful act of barbarity it was a blessing.

 

Sign promoting the Ferdinand Hodler
exhibition outside the museum

Needless to say, art institutions (like all others) are not free from modern decadence, the pernicious long march through them was implacable. Unfortunately, for every Sketching Among the Ruins and Into the Woods, there is a Ferdinand Hodler and Bridget Riley exhibit. It could be these are just reminders that there is no beauty without ugliness or perhaps there’s just no accounting for taste, but I’m inclined to think there is something more insidious behind them. Otherwise, the cultural upheaval we are witnessing in the arts would be inexplicable. 

Maybe it’s just me, but considering J.P. Morgan never collected modern art and there is an enormous amount of unseen treasures kept in storage, I would like to see more of the great bibliophile’s wondrous collection put on display. After all, there is no shortage of museums and galleries in the city to see modern art—heck, just look at every defaced building. This is not to say they shouldn’t have any visiting exhibits, after all, I absolutely loved the Tolkien: Maker of Middle Earth exhibit back in 2019, I just think the installations should just better reflect J.P. Morgan’s grand vision.

Before leaving I grabbed a free Into the
Woods brochure as a keepsake and
bought a handful of postcards from
the gift shop for my collection

Until the progressive rot that poisoned the art world is reversed, I’ll take whatever I can get. These types of exhibitions can still be invaluable connections to our past, with the caveat that you separate them from the modern adulterations surrounding them. For me, they not only serve as a brief escape from the modern world, they are a tangible link to our pre-modern culture, which as an anti-modern is crucial to passing on a healthier and saner worldview to future generations. They should be encouraged and supported whenever possible.

Worth scheduling a visit, Into the Woods: French Drawings and Photographs from the Karen B. Cohen Gift runs till October 22, 2023, and Sketching among the Ruins runs till November 12, 2023.

~ Giovanni di Napoli, July 26th, Feast of Sant'Anna

Upcoming exhibitions:

• Seeds of Knowledge: Early Modern Illustrated Herbals — October 6, 2023 through January 14, 2024

• Morgan's Bibles: Splendor in Scripture — October 20, 2023 through January 21, 2024

• Spirit and Invention: Drawings by Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo — October 27, 2023 through January 28, 2024

• Medieval Money, Merchants, and Morality — November 10, 2023 through March 10, 2024

“Doing Diaspora” Well

Italian Americans watching a flag raising ceremony at the Feast of
San Rocco in NYC, photo ca. 1942, by Marjory Collins (1912-1985)

Guest Op-Ed

Submitted by Erasmo Russo

It has been jokingly said that the average Italian maintains that his fellow Italian is not authentically Italian unless he too has suffered to the same degree at the hands of the state with its poor governance and malfeasance as he himself has suffered. There is some truth in this linkage of shared suffering as an eternal bond, sufficient enough to unite the ethnos or nation, or indeed to create the nation. Those of us old enough to have lived through the Second World War or been raised with parents and grandparents who did, know well this notion. The older people often said, “you don’t know what sacrifices and misery we had in those days.” Or, “I never complain because my parents suffered more than I ever did. They came through the war.” Italians often even joke that unless you studied and passed the Italian driving test with its mechanical and road components, or have been through a grueling oral examination in an Italian school, or had to memorize more than 20 lines of Italian poems to recite aloud, you can not possibly be a “real Italian.” We may add, if you have not had to live on 800 euros a month, paid once monthly at the end of the month, had a motorino or Fiat as your first vehicle, you can not be a “real Italian.” Until recently mandatory military service was a bonding right of passage for Italian men, something most diaspora Italians did not experience. Those who remain abroad for long stretches of time often exhibit a modification of their pronunciation and even their native gestures. There is a certain reality to this. Being raised in Italy, one of course is infused with the history and culture. Diasporic communities often have children who attend the local foreign schools and coupled with their physical distance and separation from Italy, this often leads to a dissonant formation. While we are blessed with a nation state as a firm reference point and perennial font of our culture and language, there can be a significant disconnect between those who are able to be nurtured by them and those who are not. Without still living in the Patria, our diasporic communities must both remain in constant contact and travel back, or in the least, as historically happens, must successfully replicate and transmit language and culture. Further complicating matters, when one is fortunate to have a nation state, one must be continually updated because the arts, literature, and culture in general evolve and change and that very font or source becomes more complex. In assimilationist host countries our children are quickly pressured to spend more time on notions such as the American “our founding fathers” or the French “our ancestors, the Gauls,” both equally rather silly fictions employed to create a shared foundational myth around which to rally diverse unrelated peoples. Our culture and civilization should not be filtered through translation, but lived organically. At the same time, the natural diversity of the Italian regions and islands is a vast richness and there should be many ways of “doing diaspora.”

Prince Line poster depicting steamship
departing the Bay of Naples for New York

Diasporic communities are often backward-looking while the Patria is present or future-looking. Emigrants and their children abroad often resort to nostalgia for the time and place they left and construct their version of the ethnos and the culture based on time capsule thinking, while those who remain at home are living as citizens in the actual contemporary State. For this reason, interactions between those who left decades ago and those who still live at home inevitably are subject to a gap of sorts. The popular culture references to shows, trends, styles, music and commercials are vastly different. Some diaspora Italians had been away so long they never adopted such things as Nutella or following San Remo or Festivalbar songs. Meanwhile, greater wealth and Europeanization of large parts of Italy has lead to a loss of many local dialects and traditions which now survive abroad. In some cases old folkways at home have become a source of embarrassment for younger generations. For example, the now popular false narrative that all people ate a primo, secondo, and dolce all the time has taken root. Ask your grandparents and parents and they will tell you that often a one dish meal was the norm for many families, especially during the 1930’s and the World War. Also, pasta with polpette or polpettine was indeed a meal in many regions and should not be denied or shunned as a lower class diaspora invention. Conversely, diaspora communities hungry for their roots often serve with pride humble dishes to guests and at formal occasions which would be unthinkable in modern Italy.

The personification of Italy standing
between the old and new worlds

In broad terms, Italians have only endured diaspora conditions for approximately 150 years, ironically since the unification of Italy more inhabitants of the Peninsula and the islands have move abroad than any time in history; often due to the economic hardship and political oppression generated by the ill-conceived dominance of one state over the rest, rather than the mere pursuit of cultural or personal outlets or discretionary business expansion. In contrast to peoples such as the Greeks, Armenians and Jews, who for millennia found themselves not only ruled by foreigners, but often living in host countries which spoke alien languages and practiced other faiths and traditions, Italians are late-comers to living in diasporic conditions. The smaller ex-pat communities in the Greek islands, North Africa and the Middle East often functioned as trading outposts for the various pre-unitary states and did not often have numbers large enough to provoke hostile postures by the local populations and often consistently interacted with their homelands. One thinks of the Venetians and Genoese in Turkey and the Sicilians in Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. Consequently, most Italians are still slowly adapting and modifying survival strategies in their new distant contexts. Many Italians crave the stability and structure of the cities and towns they left and grow attached to the areas they now settle in foreign countries. This generates competing and inconsistent longings. Is our new ghetto worth preserving in perpetuity, as much as our native ancestral city or borough? Or should we conceive of it only as a transitory stop on our slow return journey home, hopefully in some sort of triumph, with a greater degree of prosperity and security, whereby our children may do what they want, rather than what they have to do.

A crude propaganda advertisement
from the 1942 Honolulu Advertiser

One of the chief areas of contention is that new arrivals often fairly note changes in more assimilated local populations, but also often assert their “authenticity” based on their perceived higher degree of suffering and grievances suffered while in the Italian state. While shared suffering can indeed serve as a bond, this is qualitatively different than suffering at the hands of a third party or foreign state and does not work well to unite Italian diasporic communities. The common bases of our nationhood or peoplehood are naturally, our language, our faith, our folkways, our customs and our food. Again, as shown by the examples of Greek, Albanian, Armenian and Jewish diasporic experiences, such bases are the most natural and strongest ways of maintaining our communities’ identity and most importantly, maintaining our linkage amongst our communities and keeping them in constant dialogue and cooperation across time and geography. We can even have recourse to koine languages which many of our communities have adopted. For example, like the Greek and Aramaic speaking Jews who abandoned Hebrew for daily communication, many of our communities could and do easily use English or Spanish in addition to Italian to speak to each other across regions. While Italian and regional languages are preferred, in some places like North America, the majority of the diaspora has adopted English by this late date. There is a sort of perversity in using another nation’s language while doing everything else from our own culture. Gradually though, constant use of another semantic field and cultural reference points from the other language begin to change us as much as the physical culture of the host country.

The proper posture should be one of peaceful, even grateful attitude, coexistence with the host country, but while maintaining a type of distacco, or separation or aloofness. It is healthy to recognize our otherness and remember we are indeed different. We can respect our host’s ways and laws and rules, but we don’t have to become our hosts. The notion that in order to “succeed” we must “change,” “evolve” or generally mimic our neighbors is always a losing strategy. Doing so renders one a poor copy of the host and lesser original. We risk falling into macaronic vignettes.

Still going strong: The San Rocco Society in New York City are preparing to celebrate their 134th Annual Feast of San Rocco this August in Little Italy

We are at a crossroads. In the 1970s Arthur Koestler argued that Jews faced two diametrically opposed choices. They either had to assimilate coherently into local host countries and create and maintain a hyphenated identity which tipped more to the host country, or move to Israel and become Israelis. While Koestler did assert that in some ways it was easier to live out one’s ethnic culture in a host country, especially in terms of religious practice, free of any nationalist pressure, it still retained a hint of incoherence. Many of us in our diaspora perceive ourselves as “Italians in the United States” or “Italians in Venezuela.” This posture is more and more yielding to “Italo-Americans” and “Italo-Venezuelans” etc. While we know we have a modern state to which we can always return, we still struggle with coherence. A broader question lurks in the background for another day- should we return to the Patria and reform and rebuild it, infusing it with our experiences from abroad? Or should we remain abroad as diasporic guests in someone else’s nation, and complain about the issues of our State? Or should we assimilate and become our hosts, to whatever degree we can or are allowed to become? Of course in the case of Italy, we ask, which State? The current iteration of the Republic; the Savoy Monarchy; The Pre-unitary states?