Thursday,
March 22, 2007
The
ANNOTICO Report
Dr.
Gaetano Cipolla lives and
breathes
Cipolla claims: Forty percent of the 22 million
Italian-Americans in the
[People
don't realize that the Mediterranean was long the
Its
also the birthplace of the sonnet and Sicilian was
Sicilian,
he explains, is a different language and not, as most people believe, a
dialect of Italian. It was the first language of
Sicily,
which Cipolla doesn't mention, had it's FIRST
period of Brilliance during "Magna Grecia "
(Sicily and Southern Italy),[Greater Greece, as opposed to Lesser Greece,
composed of independent City-States at constant war] when the greatest
minds left the unrest on the Hellenic peninsula and flowered in Sicily, 8th-4th
Centuries BC, and then were absorbed by the Romans. Archimedes was
in
By 903, all of
In 1061, a
In 1198,
Frederick II von Hohenstaufen, a descendant of the last Norman King of
So,
As Wolfgang J. Goethe wrote in 1786: "Without
March 21, 2007
Dr. Gaetano Cipolla lives and
breathes
A full-time
faculty member in the Languages and Literature Department of St. Johns
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, where he teaches Italian and Italian
civilization to both graduate and undergraduate students, Cipolla
is also recognized internationally as an authority on the subject of Sicily.
Most recently, he
facilitated and signed an agreement with the Region of
Translator,
Editor and Publisher
Cipolla--a multi-tasker par excellence--is also a translator, an editor and
a publisher. His published works include seven bilingual volumes of Sicilian
poetry and more than a dozen volumes of Siciliana
Studies. His Siciliana: Studies on the Sicilian Ethos,
which contains his essays on
The Sicilian
scholar is also President of Arba Sicula,
an international organization of about 2500 members (nearly 1300 in the
tri-state region) founded in 1979 to promote the language and culture of his
island birthplace. He edits its bilingual Arba Sicula Journal
of Sicilian Folklore and Literature and its newsletter Sicilia Parra,
which reports on the groups activities but also
includes articles on Sicilian art and poetry (Poets, he says,
are the best ambassadors of culture.).
Seats on the
annual Arba Sicilia tour of
The editor of the
most comprehensive Sicilian grammar text in existence in the
Coached
Al Pacino for The Godfather, Part III
So great
are his knowledge and command of the language, he was chosen as actor Al Pacinos dialect coach during the dubbing of the film
The Godfather, Part III. Although he spent a considerable amount of time
working with the famous film star, he remains disappointed that Pacino mispronounced much of the Sicilian he spoke in the
final minutes of the movie.
Next up is a PBS
documentary, based on a collection of his essays entitled, What Makes a
Sicilian? Supported by a $15,000 grant from the late
Forty
percent of the 22 million Italian-Americans in the
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