IN New Jersey, to consider
oneself Italian is to be in good company. More census respondents in the state " 1.6 million, in the latest count " tick off
Italian as their heritage than any other single group. But if the home-grown
Italian-American Tony Soprano is more familiar to most New Jersey residents than the legendary and
thoroughly Italian filmmaker Federico
Fellini, not everyone is comfortable with that.
Count a cluster
of Montclair
State University faculty members among them. A program that started
Jan. 8 at the university and will run into early May aims to be a corrective to
years of cultural corrosion. "An Italian Sense of Place: Land and
Identity," organized by the university but touching down in spots across
Montclair, is drawing on theater, film, photography, literature, history,
music, architecture, painting and cooking to present a view of Italian life as
it is actually lived.
In scope and
tone, the festival is meant to be as far from Little Italy as Milan,
Venice or the northern Italian city where the
festival took root: Parma.
Since 2003,
weve had a lot of coming and going to Parma at Montclair
State" artists,
musicians. Many wonderful relationships developed...[There
has been] a sort of informal cultural exchange program between [Parma] and the university
community....
This is the
second such semester-long cultural exploration for the university. (by the) Montclair States Global Education
Center, who put together
the Italian program, also arranged the first one, a Hungarian Festival in 2006,
and said the Italian festival would dwarf the earlier effort.
The Italian
population is very big in New Jersey,
and we knew we could get the community involved," she said.
Watchung Booksellers, a local
shop, will sponsor a Feb. 16 poetry panel at the Montclair Public Library with
Wallis Wilde-Menozzi, an American living in Parma. The towns
Whole Foods market will pitch in, too, with donations to each of three cooking
demonstrations: Northern Italian, Jewish Italian and Italian-American. (Dates,
times and locations can be seen at www.montclair.edu.)
The idea of an
Italian sense of identity "We have people
who identify themselves as Italian" - one-third of Montclair State
students do so,....but theyre very different than Italians. Its a
subject many people want to learn about..
A total of 16
artists and scholars will touch down in Montclair
from points across Italy
for the festival, some staying as long as two weeks to lecture and attend
seminars, concerts and exhibitions by their countrymen. With the exception of
"Hey Girl!" a theater piece on Feb. 7 to 10 directed by the avant-gardist Romeo Castellucci,
for which tickets are $15, the more than 25 events are free and open to the
public.
Such
accessibility should help level the cultural divide, one of the goals set by
Marco Bonini, an actor and producer whose film "Billo,
Le Grand Dakhaar", about immigration in modern Italy, will have its United States
premiere at the university on April 8.
Americans
can understand Italian culture better and better according to how much Italians
are willing to make the effort to explain it to them," he said in a
telephone interview from his home in Rome. -Thats why Im coming.
What I like
about this festival is the theme - what is a sense of place today? The
world seems to be working to erase a sense of place," he said.
Not that stale
stereotypes should be allowed to stand, he added.
Claudia Cavatorta, a Parma-based archivist who will speak at a Jan.
29 symposium at the university on photography and cinema in postwar Italy, agreed.
"Of course we are happy about the fact that Italy is often associated, in
American imaginations, to beauty, craftsmanship, geniality, style, respect of
tradition and love for fun," she said. But there is much of modern Italy, she
added, that could be understood better.
Even,
perhaps, the food.
People
dont understand that theres no such thing as Italian food," said
Louise DeSalvo of Montclair,
a cook and author whose "Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and
Forgiveness in an Italian American Family"(Bloomsbury USA) was
published in 2004, and who will present a lecture and demonstration on
Italian-American cuisine on Feb. 27.
Italian food
differs from region to region, town to town", she said. "And in Italy, people
are fairly intolerant of new things. They like what theyre used to."
So do Americans,
according to Umberto Squarcia, an architect based in Manhattan and Parma who
will present a lecture, "An Italian Architect in America: Architecture in Italy and Its
Relationship to Landscape". on Feb. 5. Which is why the festival, with its focus on awakening a sense of
the real Italy,
could prove useful.
Americans
have their ideas about Italy,
but its all the same images - still images," he said. "We want
to go deep, to give you a feel of whats been done in the past and
whats going on now. We want to move forward."