Upon the death of old Father Ambrose, the Bishop of Denver assigned a new priest to St. Catherine’s parish. He was Father Bruno Ramponi, a young Dominican from Boston. Father Ramponi’s picture appeared on the front page of the BoulderHerald. Actually there were two pictures—one of a swarthy, short-necked prelate bulging inside a black suit and reversed collar, the other an action shot of Father Ramponi in football gear leaping with outstretched hands for a forward pass. Our new pastor was famous. He had been a football star, an All-American halfback from Boston College.

My father studied the...

For instance, the Actor awakes to an empty bed. He has been drifting in and out of consciousness and has followed the dead-end trails of every dream he might have dreamt reluctantly, even heartlessly. At the moment, he cannot sleep: his mind is attentive, less restless than focused, like a microscope or camera lens, ready to render the angles of his life to death if need be.

A voice within reminds him, “You’re alone.”

The Actor’s response is a mumbled “I don’t care,” while he stands and looks down at the messed side of his double bed. He wants to...

Maggie, Peggy, Margie. These were all names Michela had assumed in her quest to become American. Born Michela Guerrisi, she said, “I died. I wanted to hide under my desk and never come out when my teacher called my name for the roll in school.” But she didn’t die—though in her own mind, she always remained “in-between.” And within that in-betweenness there was one night when Maggie saw God and Sal Barnum too.

Maggie had gone to Parrazza’s funeral home on Bleecker Street, where the southern Italians were buried from, for Vito’s wake.

On the day he died, Vito...

“I don’t care what you heard your girlfriend Mary told you. I don’t think the Escort or the Chevette or the Rabbit or even the Cockroach, and I don’t care what else you call them in Japanese, is not the right size, any of them.”

“But I want a small car, Pa. You understand,I wantasmall carand not a big bazoom—though if you wanted to buy me a Merc, I wouldn’t fight you.”

“You, my dear, you think everything is the style and the color. Even the size to you is the style. But I am...

The priest plows a straight line with the assistance of one white ox and one white cow, the furrow he makes acknowledged by all Etruscans as a sacred boundary. The city stands watching, reverent, attentive; the engineers stand ready to build and to tunnel. Then what sprouts up from the new-plowed earth? A flower? A rock? A colony of worms? No, a head; a baby’s head, or rather face, grafted onto a white-haired head, is birthed from the earth, but attached to this head is a dwarf’s stunted body. The body’s hand thrusts something toward us: a book.

It is...

Ever since Nonna Nedda, the toothless, blind old grandma who could foretell your marital future after you prepared for her a bowl of soup, informed my dear mamma that I was destined by age eighteen to marry a man riding a dappled horse, I feared that I’d end up with the disgustinggabbillotu.

You had to stir the soup with your little finger after the broth was poured into a bowl. This was after you invited the old woman to your house. You had to sweep the floor and shoo out all your brothers and sisters as well as any...

At a recent conference of maverick scholars in far western China the well-known Italian sage, Giovanni Topolino, presented the thesis that the Chinese were the Italians of the Orient. Before he had a chance to dot his exclamation point, Lu Po, a famous philosopher from Beijing, jumped to his feet and declared direct lineage to the Italian adventurer and Mongolian spy Marco Polo.

“Look at me,” he shouted, pirouetting while pointing to his prominent nose. “And check out this curly hair. Can you deny my authenticity? My eminent friend and scholar from Italy, you’ve got it reversed,” Lu Po howled...

It is the bustling of c—the excitement that the guest is coming. He will stay a full day and one night in our city. Because my father is Padrone, therasof our region, the guest will stay with us—he will eat at our table and sleep in our bed.

Grandmother orders Zinnea to scrub the floor three times in just one day and clip the arbia to the windows. Even the saints on the walls get scrubbed. I, too, will be drawn into the cleaning frenzy and forced to scrub or polish if I don’t stay hidden...

My father sat behind the wheel of the immense white Buick, driving us patiently through the city streets toward the Walt Whitman Bridge, and then, after we had crossed it, swiftly through New Jersey beneath a wide cataract sky, the light that day tremulous from the dense August heat. He was quiet as always, and gave off his familiar aura of distance and private suffering. My mother sat across from him close to the door. She hummed or sang bits of songs, appearing cheerful, well-adjusted, and not at all like the madwoman who, just the other day, had chased Jamie...

My meeting with Angelo Ralph Orlandella in 1938 began a friendship and collaboration that has continued and grown stronger for more than fifty years. At the time, I was a twenty-four-year-old Junior Fellow at Harvard University, carrying out a sociological study of the North End slum district of Boston, which, at the time, was populated almost exclusively by first- and second-generation Italian Americans.

Angelo Ralph Orlandella was then a nineteen-year-old high school dropout. (I have always called him Ralph because that was what his friends in the North End called him. Many years later, when his immediate boss was named...

This story, presented as a framed engraving of its time, is in truth a pretext for remembering and describing the life of our old village and its people—real or imagined—in that small corner of the world where we spent the most beautiful years of our lives.

In that remote, never forsaken corner of the world, where pigs wandered blissfully and hens flapped in the dust and sang the praises of a newly laid egg, where asses brayed with hunger, thirst, or love, and dogs coupled freely in our streets, which were littered with piles of manure and innumerable...

When Dante O’Brien left Holy Redeemer Seminary in September 1959, he disappeared for a few days; then he showed up out of the blue one night to a standing ovation at the Parkchester Café. The regulars, all neighborhood guys, were shaking his hand like he was some long-lost buddy back from the war. Joey Vitello, known as Joey V to distinguish him from the other neighborhood Joeys—Joey B, Joey C, and Joey D—was tending bar. Beers on the house.

This was a Catholic area of the East Bronx—mostly Italian and Irish—and the celebration had nothing to...

The day I returned from Sicily, my father telephoned me to say that my Uncle Nino was dying and wanted to see me. My father had no great love for my uncle, but he urged me to come as soon as possible. I took the next plane to Rochester and went directly to the hospital.

In the waiting room, I found Uncle Nino’s oldest crony, my Uncle Luigi, eighty-five years old and six feet tall. Usually, my uncle’s powerful body was as impressive as the side of a mountain, but now it was sagging. Lately there had been too many...

A man’s presence could provoke an anger in me that would last for days. His presence in my mind was an unanswerable offense because I did not know in what way I had been offended. I saw his face in the store windows I passed. I felt his presence in the flush of blood rising to my face and around to the back of my neck. All I would have to do was to take a few glasses of wine to anger me to such a point that only the most violent activity could, if not calm me, then exhaust...

I had just finished junior high the summer after President Kennedy died. It was the time of big hair and wild hearts. At least I had big hair. The biggest. I made it into a dime-store ritual, buying steel ratting combs, large velvet bows, three-inch bobby pins, steel clips to hold my peroxided spit curls in place. I stood in front of the mirror for hours ratting, smoothing, pinning, spraying my hive into a mound of perfection. I ratted it high until I looked like a shaman or an Egyptian goddess, pinning the velvet bow to my bangs as a...

Camille Paglia teaches humanities at the Philadelphia College of Art. Her bookSexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinsonwas first published by Yale University Press in 1990. I spoke to her by phone in December 1991; what follows is about one-third of the comments she made during our conversation.

Christina Bevilacqua: Having grown up Italian American and female, I was curious while reading your book to think about how someone else who grew up Italian American and female could have come up with some of the ideas and the way of presenting them that you did....

He came out of the back, his apron bloody. The butcher Mr. Ribalta had the biggest belly I had ever seen. When he leaned into the case to grab a handful of hamburger or lop off a rope of sausage, his stomach grazed the meat. I wanted to poke his fat, to see if my finger would sink into it like pizza dough, or press my ear against him, to hear his insides sloshing and grumbling. But I hung back from the meat counter until he crooked a plump finger and beckoned me forward.

“Oh, Swiss Girl,” he called. “Yo-do-lo-do-lo-do-lay.”...

“When we move to Medford,” said Terry, “can Bobby drive me to work?”

Carmine looked at the girl. His wife always referred to Bobby DiFazio as thecompare’s son; the children more frankly called him Terry’s boyfriend. Carmine didn’t speak of him at all.

“You think because you give permanent waves, you can do what you want?” he asked his daughter. For six months she had been doing shampoo and sets in a beauty shop off Hanover Street. Hanging down straight from its part, when it got to her ears her hair suddenly coiled itself into two motionless scrolls, like...

Sometimes for what seemed like no apparent reason Anna took a complete and intense dislike to someone the moment she saw the person. Another woman, Anna’s age, moving into her line of sight wearing a blue business suit, might look at herself in a mirror approvingly when Anna thought that the suit was so straight it should be made of metal. Or a younger woman wearing a tight black dress and sunglasses might arrive at a dinner party contemptuous of everything that wasn’t her. These episodes brought up a surge of hatred in Anna that surprised and satisfied her each...

My cat wasn’t much to look at and wasn’t very polite either, having introduced herself the first time years ago when my apartment door had been left wide open on a hot summer day, coming inside from the trash barrels in the alley where she had lived up until then; but as a dead cat she looked instead like an apartment-size black panther, standing gracefully poised, alert and pretty, preserved with her white-sock feet firmly attached to a mahogany stand on the mantelpiece in my living room.

My cat Bast was stuffed and mounted for me by my upstairs neighbor...

When the baby was born, the mother asked the midwife to take the afterbirth outside.

“I can’t,” Alfonsina whispered. “You got a girl. Don’t you want her to stay home?”

The mother didn’t. Armando was somewhere in the streets, already drunk, angry that he’d made a buttonhole.

“Take it outside,” the mother said. “This is America.”

“I can’t,” Alfonsina said. “Men go out of the house. No one wants a man who stays home, aricchione, under his mother’s skirts. You know that. A woman belongs in the house,” she told the mother. “Let me put it down the toilet.”...

Why Mrs. Natoli knitted in the cellar, poking away with those needles just to let it unravel, was beyond me. When her knitting got as far as her lap, she started all over again with the same loopy yarn. Watching her rip it out was like seeing someone yanking a bandage off.

I stayed with Mrs. Natoli most days because she liked the company and my big sister, Lisa, didn’t. Once when I was five, my mother made Lisa and her friend play Barbie dolls with me. No sooner did we open up our cases when they dangled a leopard...

My grandmother Mama Rose stood four feet ten inches, had ten children, twenty-one grandchildren, flaming red hair until the day she died at the age of seventy-five, and liked Elvis Presley, her hometown of Naples in Italy, “As the World Turns,” and going into the woods to collect wild mushrooms. What she didn’t like was me. This wouldn’t have been a problem except that she lived with my family and so every day became a battleground for us.

Although my parents had technically bought our house from her back in 1962 when we moved back to Rhode Island, Mama Rose...

Tides wash all prints away except the fragments stones claim. It is the incompleteness of things that still hurts; that still haunts. Tears held back may break our bones, but names will never hurt us. From the corners of our eyes, stones. Stones in every beating vein. Hearts turned to stone and inscribed with a name. Small stones placed on other, larger markers. It is a way to remember.

The last time I saw Uncle Louis he sat quietly by a sunny window in the living room of my in-laws’ apartment. My mother- and father-in-law had arranged a luncheon in...

Denise, a petite, dark-eyed woman with the gift of gab, inherited the Card Palace from her mother’s brother Frank, who, like everyone else in the family, succeeded in keeping secrets. After reaching a certain age, the family stopped asking Frank if he was dating. In twenty-seven years, he had never answered yes. Frank was gay, and everyone held their breaths, hoping that he didn’t like the boys who frequented his shop. Frank, a good man, was interested in baseball cards. He showed up at Easter with sweet cakes and wore Bermuda shorts to picnics.

He died from AIDS—though no...