In March 1985, a parish priest had introduced me to Vincenza after I contacted him about my research on yard shrines and domestic altars among New York City’s Italian Americans. As a young “urban folklorist” at the onset of my career and new to the practice of fieldwork—ethnographic research with living people—Vincenza was everything I could have hoped for. A diminutive septuagenarian wearing a floral house dress and slippers graciously greeted me at the door of her finished basement kitchen in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where she spent most of her days. At first blush, I couldn’t help but view...

Many immigration historians have emphasized that the family has been socially and psychologically central to the Italian-American experience. Accordingly, different scholars and observers pointed out that the relevance of food habits and food rituals in Italian-American culture is related to a strong familyethos. The private ideal of a rich family life, symbolically represented by the familial consumption of food, is portrayed as lying at the core of the Italian-American ethnicity in scholarly works; Italian-American narratives; oral histories; community cookbooks; and popular culture, such as film and advertising. Scholars have traditionally interpreted the intimate connection between food and family culture,...

I have always known aboutcuscuszu. A unique and difficult-to-prepare ceremonial dish found on the coastal province of Trapani in northwest Sicily,cuscuszuis a version of the North African grain delicacycouscous. Brought to the island in the ninth century by the Saracens¹ who ruled for more than two hundred and fifty years,couscousbecame localized ascuscuszuin towns and villages following the Sicilian seacoast from the city of Sciacca to the inlet at Castellammare del Golfo. Maghrebcouscousis made from worked grains of semolina steamed in either a large, flat perforated spoon or a double boiler;...

For many Italian North Americans, the basement kitchen is the social center of the home. Less formal and often more spacious than the rooms upstairs, this is where Italian women typically prepare food, families gather for dinner, entertain guests, and celebrate holidays. The basement is also where Italians make tomato sauce, preserves, and sausages: a workplace where no one worries about making a mess.¹ In contrast, Italians maintain the kitchen upstairs in pristine condition: a showroom that is virtually unused except for receiving the occasional special or unfamiliar guest. Although such a setup is pervasive in cities across North America,...

Baldassare Forestiere’s Underground Gardens and Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers are two works of “grassroots art” that express the conflicted and often bifurcating experience of Italian immigration to America. Under a ten-acre parcel of land in rural north Fresno, California, Baldassare Forestiere (1879–1946) dug more than 100 underground grottoes where he lived from 1909 to 1946. Throughout his extensive site, Forestiere planted a variety of plants and trees. While living in suburban Watts near Los Angeles from 1921 to 1954, Simon Rodia (1879–1965) built three towers reaching more than 80 feet surrounded by numerous other forms, all enclosed by...

In June of 2004,The New York Timesreported that the fig trees in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn were dying.¹ Accompanying this horticultural death was another transition. Like the fig trees, the elderly Italian-American people who tended them were also gradually disappearing from the neighborhood. The article demonstrated what most residents of the New York tri-state area already knew: The ethnic make-up of a neighborhood often may be “read” through the residential landscape choices of its inhabitants. For people of Italian descent, the fig tree (Ficus carica) is one of many ethnically significant components of the landscape.

Throughout...

In his Sicilian language poem “Chi vita fazzu” (“The Life I Lead”), the late Vincenzo Ancona contemplated his retirement in Brooklyn, New York after two decades of working in America. In particular, he reflected on the miniature tableaux he had created by weaving multicolored telephone wires into representational figures depicting his former life as an agricultural laborer in Castellammare del Golfo (Trapani province).³ “The Old Well” and “The Grape Harvest” were two of the “evanescent things” he had crafted “with patience and some ingenuity/and unconventional materials” (e cu ’na gran pacenza, modi e versu/fabricu cosi pi diri a lu ventu/cu...

In 1936, an immigrant from the town of Borgotaro in Italy’s Emilia region opened the Val-Taro Restaurant and Bar at 869 Second Avenue, between 46th and 47th Streets, New York.¹ The club was located in the heart of a tight-knit Northern-Italian community in Manhattan’s Turtle Bay neighborhood. The club was to feature dancing to live accordion music and an orchestra four nights a week. Surely the owner, John Brugnoli, must have been anxious with anticipation. The club would bring to fruition years of hard work, saving, self-sacrifice—and, in traditional New York City fashion, a lengthy wait for a liquor...

“Two-Ton Tony Likes Berks Spaghetti” headlines a photograph of national boxing champion Tony Galento in a 1939 issue of theReading Times(Berks County, Pennsylvania) newspaper. A local girl, holding a banner advertising “Holy Rosary Greater Italian Day” stands beside him, while Galento stuffs a huge forkful of pasta into his mouth.¹ How was it that 50 years after the mass immigration of Italians to the United States, Italians had come to use a constellation of symbols like spaghetti to express a newly developed ethnic identity? During the period between the two World Wars, in the industrial city of Reading,...

Devotion to St. Gerard Maiella in Newark, New Jersey is more than 100 years old. It was first brought to Newark during the great migration of 1880–1924¹ when large numbers of Southern Italians, my own ancestors among them, came to Newark from the regions and provinces in which St. Gerard lived his life. Places such as Potenza province in the region of Basilicata, where St. Gerard was born and grew up, as well as from the small town of Caposele located in Avellino Province in the region of Campania, in which St. Gerard died.²

In Newark, devotion to the...

This chapter is equal parts: commemoration of a deceased brother-in-law, Giuseppe (Pep) Poldi; personal journal; and ethnographic voyage into death and cultural darkness. Although I turned to the theme of death with dread—approaching the coffin with great caution, so to speak—I also knew I could not avoid the topic indefinitely. It required understanding and closure. This chapter is also a fulfillment of a death-bed promise: As godmother to Pep’s son, Otello, I promised to help keep his memory alive in his children.

My intricately entwined roles as ethnographer and family member forced me to closely examine my role...

The expansion of Neo-Paganism and revival Witchcraft¹ in North America is among the most interesting outgrowths of the contemporary “New Age” movement.² Italian folk magic is among those which have received considerable attention, spawning a proliferation of books, Web sites, and small groups of practitioners. Still, these reclaimed magical practices bear only a slight resemblance to the folk magic that existed (and, in some cases, continues to exist) in Italian-American ethnic communities. In this chapter, I trace the development ofStregheria, or Italian-American revival Witchcraft, showing how it has been constructed by combining traditional Italian folk beliefs and practices with...