Articles by: Eleonora Mazzucchi

  • Facts & Stories

    Milan Has Won Its Bid to Host Expo 2015



    Mayor of Milan Letizia Moratti is elated that her city has won its bid to host the Universal Exhibition (Expo) 2015. The Italian Expo delegation met her with howls and ovations when the announcement was made by the Paris-based selection board. The Turkish city of Izmir, also vying to host the fair, lost out.

     

    The Bureau International des Expositions (BIE), made up of 152 countries, was ultimately persuaded by Milan’s presentation for a green-themed Expo. Lending his support was eco-pioneer and Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore, who called the proposal, entitled Nutrire il Pianeta, Energia per la Vita (Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life), “very solid”. Indeed the Milan outline includes a decidedly proactive agenda: waging war against famine and malnutrition, launching technology and sustainable development initiatives and forging the multinational cooperation to see those objectives through. Elaborating on the plans, Moratti said, “Our Expo will not just be a logo, but it will be a network to enable the construction of schools and hospitals for everyone.” She added: “We've done a lot of work in terms of listening and understanding, and we are not alone—we are collaborating with many charities and associations for a project that favours countries less fortunate than we are.”

     

    Joining Moratti, Premier Romano Prodi and Foreign Minister Massimo D’Alema at the presentation were Milan footballer Clarence Seedorf, along with musical artists Andrea Bocelli and the Senegalese Youssou N’Dour, both of whom gave performances to show their support.

     

    Meanwhile Turkish President Abdullah Gul gracefully conceded the victory—86 votes against 65 in the BIE count—and called Milan’s presentation “beautiful”. Italy’s politicians hailed the victory, including President of the Republic Giorgio Napolitano who proclaimed it was “a great day for Italy” and “a reason for pride”. The Italian delegation eventually joined Gul on stage to compliment the Turkish presentation, New Routes for a Better World—Health for All, with Prodi saying that “only two Mediterranean countries could end the presentation all together on the stage.”

     

    The next expos will be held in Shanghai in 2010 and Yeosu, South Korea in 2012, ahead of the Milan event.

     

     

     
  • Art & Culture

    A Prayer for Bensonhurst: Pictures of an Italian Neighborhood on the Wane


    Sicilian-born Delizia Flaccavento, a woman with brown hair cropped close to her head, wearing glasses and a button-up shirt, is speaking with an energy she can barely contain. A gaggle of women have huddled around her and they listen, glasses of wine in hand, as she talks about her project. Flaccavento’s exhibit, on view now at the Italian American Museum (temporarily housed at the John D. Calandra Institute), consists in a series of photographs she took of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and specifically its church, St. Dominic’s. The church is a pillar of traditionally Italian Bensonhurst, a community lynchpin, a repository for the Italian customs of yore, and—Flaccavento will be quick to inform—the only church in New York to still perform daily mass in Italian. Within the circle of middle-aged women that has formed around her, nostalgic voices ring “When I was a kid they used to take us to St. Lucy’s to hear Italian mass!”, “St. Barnabus in the Bronx still has one of those masses every Sunday...”

     

    And this was the photographer’s premise: she wanted to capture St.Dominic’s, its parishoners, its significance to Benshonhurst, just as the neighborhood is losing its Italian identity and becoming increasingly Latino. Remarking that Bensonhurst is going the way of Manhattan’s Little Italy, St.Dominic’s priest says he’s sure that in 10 or 15 years there will no longer be a need for daily services in Italian. Flaccavento’s subjects, the neighborhood residents photographed inside the church and out, are in truth, more recently immigranted than one might think. They constitute what she calls the “last wave” of immigrants from Italy, distinct from the Ellis Island masses at the turn of the century, and never really recognized by scholars. She studied the “last wave” and its descendants as part of her dissertation and found it was a group characterized by disillusionment with post-WW II southern Italy, where the pace of reconstruction was slow, economic conditions tough and jobs scarce. Through the documentarian’s lens we get a glimpse at these last authentic Italian Americans of our time, unwitting participants in the rites of a community that is slipping away, perhaps even at risk of extinction—bridesmaids in lavender dresses, boys twirling flags for the Carinesi d’America Association, elders wringing their hands in prayer.

     
     Viewers linger at the vivid pictures, commenting on bright colors and movement, but more to the point, see themselves reflected in those scenes of neighborhood life. Bob Ciofalo, one of the founders of the museum, points to the portrait of an altar boy and exclaims “that was me!”. A forty-year-old woman, visibly moved, smiles to herself when she sees the picture of an anxious bride before her wedding, immersed in a voluminous ivory taffeta: “I made my husband wait just like that.” Professor of Italian Ed Jackson, an African-American born in an Italian neighborhood in the Bronx and reared on its food and dialects, recognizes the streets where he now goes to get a genuine cup of cappuccino or dance to traditional Italian music. He and Bob are good friends and they playfully jostle each other as they insist that “it was the Irish and the blacks that didn’t get along! We swear!”. Just like St. Dominic’s, that evening’s exhibit succeeded in uniting the faithful.
     
    Conversations lasted well into the hours and curious anecdotes rose to the surface with the tides of memory the photos inspired. “In the seventies I was a photographer at events—weddings, bar mitzvahs, that sorta thing”, Bob explains. “And at this one really posh wedding, with 11 violins in the orchestra and everything, the father of the bride just refused to be photographed. So I went up to him and you know what I said? I whispered into his ear ‘Hey schmuck, in 20 years you’ll be dead. Don’t you want your grandkids to know what you looked like?’” 
    And so it is with Ms.Flaccevento’s photographs. In 20 years, won’t a new generation want to know what the old neighborhood was like?
     
    Images: Delzia Flaccavento,  Ed Jackson, Bob Ciofalo, a guest, at the Italian American Museum  exibition
  • Facts & Stories

    How to Fight the Mafia? Serve a Mean Fried Rice Ball


    It takes only one figure to make any skeptics see that the anti-Mafia food tour is a necessary development: 80 million euros. That’s how much the Mafia extorts every day from shopkeepers alone in Italy. The Mafia’s earnings more than double to 200 million euros a day when you factor in loansharking and other crimes.

     

    The food tour, scheduled to travel through major Italian cities starting next week, is an expanded version of the anti-“pizzo” (term for the money the Mafia unlawfully collects from business-owners) street market already popular in Palermo, Sicily. The street market features food exclusively produced by businesses who have refused to pay the pizzo and is sponsored by Italy’s Anti-Racket Federation and the Addiopizzo (“Goodbye Pizzo”) Association.

     

    The aim of the country-wide tour, which will sell Sicilian specialities like fried rice balls, wines, and octopus, is to raise money for anti-pizzo organizations (14% of proceeds are to that end) and to show that businesses can come out in the open against the mob rackets that have oppressed them for decades. The silence and compliance of those victimized by the Mafia are precisely what Addiopizzo is trying to combat, an attitude that has permitted the Mafia’s activities to persist.

     

    So far Addiopizzo has had definitive measures of success. It started out as a secret campaign plastering Palermo with anti-racketeering stickers and then went public, to find that many wanted to join in their effort. Its crowning achievement was the publication of a list of businesses that pledged to stand up to mobsters. It was one of the only public, vocal stands that any businesses in Sicily had taken against the Mafia—overdue and welcome seeing as six out of 10 Sicilian shopkeepers still pay a pizzo.

     

    Now Addiopizzo can make a large-scale impact with its food tour taking off from Rome and going on to 22 more Italian cities, including Milan, Turin, Bologna, Rimini, Bari and Naples. It is in talks to launch similar tours internationally, possibly in New York, Chicago, Moscow and Barcelona.

     

     

    A look at the anti-pizzo food stands in Palermo, Sicily
  • Facts & Stories

    Illy + Coca-Cola = Ilko


    Just because Italians don’t like mass-marketed American coffee (read Starbucks), it doesn’t mean Italian companies don’t either. In fact Italian giant illycaffe, Italy’s most recognizable coffee brand abroad, is joining forces with Coca-Cola to create just such commercial fare: canned ready-to-drink (RTD) coffee beverages. You’ll see the three “chilled espresso” varieties, Caffè, Cappuccino and Latte Macchiato, hit American shelves in 2009 where they’re expected to compete with the popular Starbucks range.

     

    But the cold canned-coffee goodness that Austrians, Croatians, and Greeks didn’t even know they wanted will be available to them as soon as next month, when Ilko Coffee International, the name of Coca-Cola and illy’s joint venture, releases the coffee products across Europe—a year ahead of Asia and the Pacific.

     

    Muhtar Kent, Coco-Cola’s president, says of the deal in his company press release: “Illy is a proven leader with an uncompromising commitment to high-quality espresso coffee and a strong history of innovation with whom we are proud to partner.” And illy is also presumably “proud to partner” with Coca-Cola into a $10 billion-dollar RTD market they hope to dominate. The RTD coffee category has been growing rapidly over the last few years, with a global growth rate of about 10% every year. illycaffe’s Chairman, Andrea Illy, added that the partnership with Coca-Cola squarely put illycaffè “into the world of strategic alliances”.

     
    For Coca-Cola this is just another foray into the realm of non-carbonated, non-soda beverages. The company has been seeking to expand its lines—of teas, coffees, and waters—ever since health-conscious consumers, tired of ballooning guts and hillbilly-yellow teeth, cut coke out of their diets. Coca-Cola exec Vinay Kapoor will head the successfully launched addition, Ilko Coffee, in Milan.
     
     
     
  • Facts & Stories

    Would You Like Some Dioxins with That Pizza?


    If you haven’t heard, here’s the skinny—or should we say the fat?—on Italy’s latest waste management crisis. Up until recently the city of Naples had been quite literally mired in trash: piles of garbage bags overflowing onto the streets, clogging roads and sidewalks and emanating waves of stench, much to the displeasure of locals and tourists alike. It seems as though the putrid mounds have been carted away, but as if that hadn’t been bad enough, now mozzarella di bufala, Naples’ Campania region’s prize export, has taken a hit.

    The agricultural provinces around Naples is where much of mozzarella production occurs (other mozzarella regions are Puglia and Lazio), and the buffalo farms that churn out the particular bufala brand are under scrutiny. Abnormal dioxin levels were found in the buffalo milk of some of these farms and many are saying that the cause is improper waste disposal from Naples. Of the close to 2000 farms that make mozzarella di bufala only a sliver were found to contain dioxins (the Italian Confederation of Farmers say those levels don’t pose a health hazard) but that hasn’t stopped health inspectors’ reports from creating widespread panic. Japan and South Korea have banned all imports of the mozzarella and Neapolitan sales of mozzarella di bufala have gone down by half.

    Illegal dumping of toxic waste in parts of Campania, due to the breakdown of public disposal services in Naples, is the primary culprit for the dioxin presence. Others speculate it is the burning of trash at low temperatures, improvised by many locals at the height of the garbage crisis —as opposed to an incinerator’s “normal burning”— that released dioxins into the air.

     

     

     
  • Facts & Stories

    i-Italy: “A Space as We Define It”


     It started Italian-style: a little late and amid the sanguine din of various conversations going on at once, with some people sitting and reaching across aisles to shake hands, and others standing to greet incomers like long-lost friends. A capacious auditorium at the CUNY Graduate Center is where interested parties of Italians and Italian-Americans gathered for the Italian American Digital Project’s official launching on Monday. The event served to inaugurate IADP, the not-for-profit organization that will head i-Italy.org, and to recognize the students of the Empowerment for Italy-U.S. Community (EUSIC) project who helped get i-Italy off the ground and make it what it is today: both a community space and a website for journalistic content.

     

    The website’s ambitious agenda, which many readers here are familiar with, was brought to fruition with the participation of professors, journalists and intellectuals. Chief among them is Prof. Anthony J.Tamburri   (John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, City University of New York) who opened Monday’s ceremony by saying that at first he had been skeptical about a web-venture that teaches “Italian-American culture to Italian-American citizens”. But the results spoke for themselves. Over the next couple of hours, Prof. Ottorino Cappelli, one of the website’s loving and charismatic creators, used an onstage projector screen to guide the audience through the website’s multimedia capabilities—from blogs that are its journalistic backbone to You-Tube- facilitated video content-- and the wide array of issues it covers. Though the blogs provide in-depth commentary and news from professional writers, the site’s “community” (that has since its inception attracted over 300 registered users) has also contributed some of the most entertaining and thought-provoking pieces. Annie Lanzilotto, a writer from the Bronx who also keeps an i-Italy blog, showcased her very funny video “La Signora and the Soprano” (generating laughs all around), while Prof. Cappelli introduced, via Skype connection, Marina Melchionda, a university student from Naples writing a chapter-by-chapter interview of her grandfather’s emigration from Italy to Maryland.

     

    i-Italy’s dynamic functions are indeed precisely what’s required, in the words of Prof. Fontana, who co-championed the EUSIC portion of the operation from the University of Rome La Sapienza, to reflect the “different stratifications and attitudes” of an Italian-American community that falls on a spectrum “of those who feel very Italian to those who feel very American”. He and Prof. di Nicola went on to honor EUSIC’s students with diplomas for their contributions. Though these students may represent a distinctly Italian end of the spectrum, they all have experience living in the U.S. and can be credited for starting a meaningful, overdue conversation between Italians and Italian-Americans that has hardly ever existed in any formal capacity.

     

    Among the evening’s notable speakers were Michael Arena, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist (Cuny University Director of Communications and Marketing) and Vincenzo Amato, the star of Emanuele Crialese’s films, including most recently “The Golden Door”. Mr. Arena underscored i-Italy’s progressive philosophy of bringing news and user-generated content to the web, especially at a time when the newspaper business is in failure. When I spoke to him personally, anxious to figure out what i-Italy’s chances were for the future, he responded optimistically. “We’re in a very exciting time. There’s no comparable place for gathering like this website.” He added: “with blogging things are changing for everyone”, and the Italian-American community is going along with the change. At the podium Mr.Arena had also spoken out on behalf of Italian-American writers. Because of the nature of their professions, he said, they have tended to be isolated and out of touch with one another. Like Annie Lanzilotto, who earlier echoed a similar feeling, in i-Italy they have found a forum for expression.

     

    Mr.Amato, a genial, handsome young man in loose khakis and sneakers, bounded onto the stage with boyish zeal. He submitted to an onstage interview with Prof. Tamburri and on his part, talked about his experience as an Italian living in New York for 15 years. Though Amato has only appeared in Italian-language movies—his acting career began when he met Crialese, his then-neighbor, smoking a cigarette in the hallway of their East Village apartment building—he describes himself as thoroughly Italian-American, or at very least, as a New Yorker. As such he is a fan and regular reader of i-Italy despite, he joked, the fact that he is media-incapacitated (he owns neither computer nor television and dedicates the bulk of his time to sculpting). For his role in “Golden Door”, that of an Italian coming to the U.S. at the turn of the century, he had researched the rural Sicilian villages from which many immigrants originated. What he said he had found were people leading extremely secluded lives, very tied to their land and who, a hundred years ago, could never even have imagined what America looked like--who thought that going to America was “like going to the moon”. Amato’s glimpse into the past presented a fitting and jarring contrast for the high level of connectivity, through media and web-based initiatives, that exists between Italy and America, and between Italian-Americans and Italy today.

     

    In their warm, hopeful video addresses, broadcasted through i-Italy’s website, Consul General Francesco Maria Talo’ and Renato Miracco, the director of the Italian Cultural Institute, re-iterated the need for a “modern channel” that acts as a junction for different generations of Italian-Americans, newly-arrived Italians to the U.S. and contemporary, every-day Italy. Vice Consul Maurizio Antonini attended in representation of the consular office, while Dr. Amelia Carpenito Antonucci, attaché for Cultural Affairs, represented the Italian Cultural Institute.

     

    Part of the process of forging a relationship between Italian-America and Italy, of discovering the relationship that always existed, is honoring it. Maria Sauer, a 17-year old from Bayside, New York, senior editor of her high-school newspaper and member of i-Italy’s community, was also in attendance on Monday. When I met her after the event, she said in earnest that she thought the website was “very cool”. She told me she had come because, with the encouragement of her Italian AP teacher, she had submitted an essay to i-Italy’s Italian/American Citizen Journalist-Digital Witness Contest (she was one of the contest’s 10 selected finalists). Her thoughtful essay—which she will also use to win a scholarship from the Columbus Citizens Foundation—traced her Italian grandfather’s journey from immigrant to law student and, through his story, her own attachment to Italy. During Monday’s proceedings the contest’s top three submissions, stories like Maria’s that explore identity and family history, were announced and the winners awarded prizes. Thierry Aucoc, the Senior Vice President of Alitalia for North America, was present to award the 1st place prize, two round-trip tickets from any American gateway to any destination in Italy. 

     

    i-Italy certainly has a lot going for it. George de Stefano, a journalist and i-Italy contributor, praised the high quality of the website’s posts and its “open, lively and dynamic environment”. He even stated that the blog posts were much better than anything he had seen on the New York Times’ website in response to Ian Fisher’s widely-read article on the state of present-day Italy. Ms. Lanzilotto, also unequivocally enthusiastic about the site, said it was a free, un-censored zone, “a space as we define it”. Nevertheless, before the event’s participants were invited to join in a dinner at—you guessed it—an Italian restaurant and to revel in wine and conversation, Prof. Cappelli made some closing remarks. He asked that i-Italy.org continue to be supported because now that it is past its founding stages, “we must see if it can stand on its own two legs”.
  • Life & People

    “Watch the Pallino”. Bocce Ball in Toluca, Illinois.


     

    Bocce ball is the sport of Italian old men. The very name conjures images of pot-bellied curmudgeons in speedos, with deep tans and cigarettes dangling from their lips, playing an afternoon round on a beach on the Adriatic coast. I always believed the inherent uncoolness of bocce, given its association to the denture-wearing cohort, assured it would never be popular anyplace beyond Italian shores.
    And yet, there is a place: the landlocked little town of Toluca, Illinois.
    “Watch the Pallino”, a documentary screened Wednesday March 5th at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and presented by Joe Sciorra of the John Calandra Institute, traces the peculiar history of the bocce craze in Toluca. Director Stephanie Foerster returned to her mother’s hometown to capture the annual Labor Day weekend bocce tournament, and through interviews with residents, shed light on how the favorite summer sport of Italian seniors made its way across the continents.
    Thirty-four-year-old Foerster dedicated her documentary to her grandfather, also a Tolucan, and her love of the town shows. She wanted to convey something essential about the place and found it in the community’s brimming passion for bocce, a sport (or hobby, if one prefers) practiced by nearly every Tolucan, man, woman, or child, with a set of hands.
    Bocce ball was introduced at the turn of the century by Italian immigrants. They flocked to Illinois in search of opportunity and were hired as miners in Toluca, often playing bocce after work around the town’s drinking holes. Soon the “lawn bowling” fever caught on, and it can very well be said that the social sport— ­­because the beauty of it is that anyone can play, even with a few drinks in ‘im— helped bridge relations between the Italians and the town’s mostly German-English population.
    Today, to accommodate the 256 teams that sign up for the Labor Day tournament, any old space will do. The favored grassy plots are optional (some will even brave passing cars to play along asphalt streets), but a ready supply of beer isn’t. The tournament’s more competitive players may need a mug here or there to take the edge off. Shirley, a tempestuous woman in her sixties and one of the movie’s more memorable characters, bitterly acknowledges a loss to some young women: “We lost to a couple of whipper-snappers!” Later she’ll console herself with a tall, cold glass of pale ale.
    Against a score of dramatic Sicilian melodies, or upbeat folk tunes from southern Italy, kids, twenty-somethings (who feel they have to step up their game, because “the old men will beat you silly”) and septuagenarians all face off in a series of matches. Although the musical choice pays homage to the sport’s Italian origins, Foerster also uses it to reflect an overlapping of past and present, transformation and assimilation. As she put it, “No one in Toluca is saying ‘I’m in this ‘cause I’m Italian’”, or no one plays to sample Italian culture. If anything, people play to get closer to their next-door neighbor. Many Tolucans add that for them, playing bocce is a way of re-connecting with the town as a whole—the young with the old, those who have moved away with those who stayed behind. Every community is sustained by at least one common cause—be it church, school or mud-wrestling. It just so happens that in Toluca it’s bocce ball, or as some there say, “butchy ball”.
    Foerster sagely allows for the experience of the town and its people to unfold organically, with long shots of games, close-ups of sneakers in the grass, players’ fervent stares and fluttering t-shirts with “Toluca Bocce Club” emblazoned on the front. The characters themselves speak candidly, at times comically, to the camera, and with what seems like very little manipulation from the filmmakers. It’s a veritable open window onto interactions between players and generations, a perfectly preserved slice of Americana. And some Tolucans, not without self-awareness, do their own philosophizing on the bocce trend. One observes: “Bocce is most like life”, referring to the unpredictability of the game, “Everything’s going fine and then one day, all of a sudden, you get a letter that somebody’s been in a car crash or that, I don’t know, your son’s been thrown in jail.” Could the reasons for playing be socio-anthropological, existential even? Another asserts that “the Romans and the Egyptians played. It’s said that even prehistoric man played bocce with rocks.”
    Back in the modern world bocce ball may be seeing a resurgence. Among the audience of about 40 people present at the screening you could hear murmurs and echoes about the goings-on of the New York bocce world. One eager woman informed that in some bars in Brooklyn, where she goes on the weekends, you can play bocce. Another added nostalgically: “What they’re doing in Toluca is great. When I was a kid my grandfather used to take me to bocce courts in the Bronx all the time. Now they’re filled with weeds.”


     

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