Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies

Written in the first person, The Road to Los Angeles is a posthumous novel in which John Fante addresses the topos of literary vocation for the first time through Arturo Bandini, the hero of the saga. The novel's salient aspect concerns 17-year-old Arturo who, completely captivated by his heterogeneous readings, feels an irresistible desire to become like his favourite writers. Thus, he continually envisages the scene of writing that will lead to his literary glory. This overwhelming compulsion to write induces in him a deep-set attitude of rebellion against his Catholic family and society at large. Along with his literary ambition, Bandini is obsessed by an eroticism that stimulates the most perverted fantasies in him. This article argues that Arturo's combined worship of literature and women's bodies defines a hazy territory whose effects are paralysing for his juvenile, albeit authentic, talent. Tellingly, his first attempt to write a novel culminates in an absolute failure which makes him understand that the scene of writing in which he illusorily imagines himself has no real connection with the practical organization of day-to-day life required by creative writing. Hence his abrupt decision to leave behind his family, his work at the cannery and everything else and to move to Los Angeles.

In John Fante's Ask the Dust, Arturo Bandini's ambition to become a great writer overrides his disadvantages as the son of Italian immigrants searching for his place in American society. With cocksure arrogance he cultivates the fantasy self-image of a confident womaniser to compensate for his lack of sexual experience. His inability to confront reality without distorting its features through his wild fantasies continually frustrates his attempts to write a novel as a follow-up to his short story The Little Dog Laughed. Criticism on the novel has traced his moral transformation from egotism to empathy without, however, taking into proper consideration Bandini's idea of himself as an author and the manner in which Fante constructs a series of narrative voices to create a self-dialogue within the text between the older Bandini as narrator and the younger Bandini as protagonist.

This article examines John Fante's short story ‘My Father's God’ in order to show the importance of the Catholic religion for the integration of a typical family of Italian immigrants in the United States. Told by a first-person adult narrator who is recalling his father's resistance against the most rigid and orthodox forms of the Catholic church, ‘My Father's God’ is the representation of a model of masculine rebelliousness which, on the one hand, preserves all the characteristics of Italianness and, on the other, attempts to distance itself from it precisely in order to facilitate integration into the American social fabric. The narrative voice shows how the father (Nick) refuses to place religion (including confession) at the centre of his life. On closer inspection, this rebellious character is in perfect syntony with a gallery of male figures conceived by the author. From the point of view of its narrative structure, ‘My Father's God’ may be read on a metanarrative level as the story of another story (the confession written by Nick) which as it unfolds throws a significant light on John Fante's artistic awareness.

This article focuses on the third novel of Nino Ricci's trilogy about Italian immigration in Canada. More precisely, taking my cue from the theme of nostos in the sense of a search for a fully-fledged identity, I will analyse the way that Where She Has Gone dramatizes the protagonist's predicament in terms of personal conflicts, psychological trauma and sexual ambiguities. Vittorio Innocente is a hero whose life seems to be split between Canada and Italy: this is at the origin of his personal crisis which is characterized by a deeply ingrained sense of peril. In many respects, the main point of the story is represented by the protagonist's return to Italy where he intends to meet all those people who knew him. In fact, he left for Canada as an eight-year-old boy with his pregnant mother who died during the journey after giving birth to a daughter named Rita. While living in Toronto, Vittorio has an incestuous relationship with his younger half-sister Rita, who was the fruit of their mother's adultery in Valle del Sole (Molise). The most dramatic moment of the diegesis takes place when Vittorio meets Rita in Valle del Sole as both are returning from Canada by different routes. Significantly, by looking into their mother's past, they both decide to give up their tormented relationship. The protagonist's journey back to his native village can be seen not only as that of an intellectual in search of his own roots but also as a compelling wish to meet, after many years, his own historic and socio-cultural past in order to better understand his unresolved life as well as his role in Canadian society.

This article discusses Dana Gioia's poetics of place in its intersections with the author's multiple diasporic legacies (Italian, Mexican, mestizo), which he often refers to as ‘Latin’. It explores the forms of cultural poiesis that has been fashioned by the Californian environments of diaspora and the role played by nature and the environment in the linguistic and literary dialogue resulting from the cultural transitions between America (both the USA and Mexico) and Italy. Gioia's ecopoesis is read as an aspect of the poet's ongoing engagement with public culture and commitment to preventing the decline of poetry's cultural importance. It restates his effort to reconnect poetry with the everyday lives of a wider and diverse reading public, stressing the importance of getting to know one's own specific locale more deeply. Gioia's environmentally oriented poems can thus be comprised within ‘a new third wave of ecocriticism, which recognizes ethnic and national particularities and yet transcends ethnic and national boundaries’ (Adamson and Slovic). Their transcultural vision crosses the frontiers separating the different cultures synthesized by the author's Latin self-identification and represents a crucial space for negotiation and imaginative creation tapping into the language of poetry to find ways to actively address our urgent environmental crises.

This article aims to analyse Susan Caperna Lloyd's literary output, emphasizing the writer's multiple transitions. No Pictures in My Grave, her 1992 travel memoir, followed by The Crucifixion of Lucy Reyes (2017) and Dance It Up (2023) – both currently in manuscript form – will serve as the primary objects of investigation. As will be shown, the exploration of her cultural roots as an American of Italian origin is just the starting point for a more complex quest, which leads her to uncover powerful feminine icons and ancestral mothers, who provide her with alternative models of femininity. In her latest work, Caperna Lloyd also delves deeper into the intricate transition between life and death, discovering that these states are not mutually exclusive but rather complementary.

This article questions the ethical profile of some of the characters in Henry James’s literature in relation to concrete life places and situations. It refers first to the Diary of a Man of Fifty, because this short tale anticipates the themes that would dominate James's later works. It focuses in particular on Portrait of a Lady, not without mentioning Daisy Miller, because the descriptions of Italy in those pages help to flesh out the themes that the article wishes to highlight: the encounter between America and Europe (Italy in particular, with Florence and Rome), and the way circumstances determine the moral development of James’s characters. Self-consciousness through conflict with the surrounding world is one of the most vivid topics in James's literature. The personal condition of those who left the USA to settle in Europe became the subject of many of his novels, with all the baggage of incomplete experiences, anxieties and the pain of an integration never fully realized.

In 1884, Dario Papa and Ferdinando Fontana, both well known in the milieu of Scapigliatura, published a reportage that is a kind of written photograph of New York at the time. Papa had travelled to America with Fontana to discover the secrets of modern journalism. Another well-known writer of the Scapigliatura, Giuseppe Giacosa, friend of Arrigo Boito and Emilio Praga, travelled to the USA a few years later. Giacosa also wrote a series of interesting travel notes later collected in Impressioni d’America, but here are especially mentioned some articles dedicated to him in the local press and preserved at the New York Public Library.

This article focuses on the relationship between Giorgio de Chirico's artwork and American criticism. It starts from the distorted and misrepresented view created by André Breton (and widely disseminated in the USA especially through James Thrall Soby's exhibitions and books) of an ‘early’ de Chirico, a leading painter of international art until 1917–1918, and a ‘late’ de Chirico, artistically doomed from 1919 until 1978, the year of his death. As an early indication of a more correct interpretation, I have focused on the great de Chirico exhibition held at the New York Cultural Center in 1972 that featured works ranging from 1911 to the early 1970s. Despite many negative reviews from American critics, still bound by modernist stereotypes, the exhibition was highly appreciated by major American artists such as Philip Guston and was the first spark of a dialogue between de Chirico and Warhol destined to yield important results in the ‘After de Chirico’ exhibition in 1982. The article then analyses the new climate that, since the 1980s, has fostered a proper reappraisal of de Chirico's entire oeuvre also in the USA, through a series of exhibitions, essays and articles up to 2023, finally dispelling the cliché of the ‘late’ de Chirico.

This article investigates the representations of Italian Americans in the successful TV series The Bear (2022–), following Ryan Calabretta-Sajder and Alan J Gravano's innovative critical framework according to which the field of Italian American cinema, TV and media studies needs to go beyond the strict notion of ethnicity and be, instead, reconsidered as an intersectional area including issues as class, gender, sexuality, power and production. The Bear portrays Carmen (‘Carmy’) Berzatto, a young top chef who returns to his hometown of Chicago to take over his family's Italian sandwich shop and who is living through an emotional breakdown because of his brother's death. The series received great praise for its ground-breaking narration style and nonconformist characters. Still, while the narrative arc of the series does not focus on the Italian roots of the protagonist and his family, many of the climatic moments recurrently exploit the commonplace repertoire of Italian American type: loud, quickly bursting into fits of rage, family obsessed, food enthusiast, somehow involved in dirty business. This analysis will explore how, in this contemporary depiction of Italian Americans, the author paradoxically departs and at the same time relies on the stereotypical dominant cliche usually employed for these characters. As a result, a transitional narration emerges, portraying figures precariously balancing between innovation and conservatism. With a discursive approach, this article will examine how The Bear follows this contradictory pattern, seemingly dismissing crystalized representational myths of Italian descent in the USA and simultaneously validating them.