The ANNOTICO Report

Francesco Durante's second volume of "Italoamericana". "Letteratura e
storia degli italiani negli Stati Uniti", which comes after the first,
published in 2001 and devoted to the 18th and 19th centuries, continues the
exploration of Italian American history and literature, focusing on the
important experience of the Great Migration and the "Little
Italies", where Italy's ancestral culture first mixed with the new American
lifestyle.

In this 950-page book, divided in five parts, more than eighty authors are
presented with their practically unknown texts, taken from rare collections
of Italian American newspapers and books, and many times from manuscripts.
We meet the incredible "pulp" novels by Bernardino Ciambelli, Paolo
Pallavicini, Italo Stanco, Corrado Altavilla, the exilarating "macchiette"
by Eduardo Migliaccio (Farfariello) and Tony Ferrazzano, the comedies by
Giovanni De Rosalia, and Riccardo Cordiferro's dramas and poems. A large
section is devoted to anarchists, socialists, fascists and anti-fascists,
including important texts by Arturo Giovannitti, Carlo Tresca and many
others.
A special section is devoted to the first generation of Italian American
authors who decided to write directly in English - Luigi Donato Ventura,
Lisi Cipriani, Louis Forgione, Giuseppe Cautela, Pascal D'Angelo,
Constantine Panunzio, Angelo Patri, Emanuel Carnevali, and others.

The book is full of surprises: for instance, it shows that Italian American
short stories were published in America before Ciambelli, who is
traditionally considered the "pater" of this genre. When published in 2001,
Italoamericana was defined by Robert Viscusi "an atom bomb in the field of
Italian American studies."
Biography

Francesco Durante is a journalist in Naples, Italy, and a professor of
Comparative Literatures in the University of Salerno. He translated works
by Bret Easton Ellis, Raymond Carver, William Somerset Maugham, and John
Fante. He edited for the Mondadori "Meridiani" series the volume Novels and
Stories by John Fante and is now editing, for the same series, Domenico
Rea's works. Besides Italoamericana, his bibliography includes Figli di due
mondi, the first anthology of Italian American writers of the Thirties and
Forties.