My Two Italies by Joseph Luzzi

To my great delight My Two Italies is as good and fascinating as its premise. With much warmth and human feeling, Prof. Luzzi weaves two particular strands of Italy: the Grand Tour, Ruskin-in-hand, sprezzatura (genius) Italy and the hardscrabble, sun-scorched, Fourteen Years as Age of Consent south. His parents and older siblings were born in the mezzogiornio (midday sun south) - geographically of course the same country as the cultural trinity of Venice-Florence-Rome but somehow a universe away. When the parents escape to the States for a better economic future they are neither former Italians nor future Italian-Americans. Instead the parents remain steadfastly Calabrese.

The good side of this would be the exquisite-sounding, pre-movement Slow Food meals. Their quotidian dinners today would be the cover story on a glossy food or travel magazine.

The bad side, though, is a tough, old-school father who ostracized his daughter because she dared to want to move out and have her own place - at age 27.

Given Prof. Luzzi's ancestry it seems to surprise even him that he develops such a passion for northern Italy art and literature. Yet he reminds the reader that there's a tremendous legacy of culture in the south as well; he describes a Naples museum in which he was the only visitor in a room filled with important works of art. Memories of scrimmaging through the Uffizi make the solitude alone sounds enormously appealing.

On an early student trip to Florence he's taken aback when a northern girl says of his parents' region, "That's not Italy - that's Africa!" The (intended) putdown made me wonder what the father thought of African-Americans. Was he sympathetic to their plight as a fellow outsider, or did he believe that they should just work hard like he did and quit whining? In short, did the old man realize that no matter how poor his English or olive his skin, being not-black offered a slender strand of advantage in the United States?

The author makes self-deprecating remarks about his academic chops, claiming to lack both the work habits of the A students and the free spirits of the C students. In fact he's a wonderfully gifted writer with a lovely sprinkling of sprezzatura of his own.

Eyes on Immigration

We ate dinner out on the Fourth of July. In the booth in front of me was a family of four: a woman and a teenaged girl wearing scarves on their heads, and two boys, the older if which may have been twelve.  If I absolutely had to guess I might say they were Egyptian, but really have no idea.  

Across the aisle in another booth was a tall, lean, kind of  Dennis Weaver-looking guy with his wife.  Cowboy.  Is it racist to say he looked like he watched Fox News?  How about, I wouldn't be surprised to find out he watched Fox News?

Instead of facing his wife, the man turned ninety degrees, leg on the booth seat, and watched the "Egyptian" family in front of me. Actually he glared at them. Not sure what the thinking was there.  "If I give them dirty looks then they'll leave the restaurant?  Leave Los Angeles?  The country?"

The family seemed utterly indifferent, even unaware, of the man staring. The girl was texting, and the boys were making each other giggle by trying to mimic the waitress's way of saying "hash browns".   (Neither could quite pull it off with their (let's say) Egyptian accents.  

How did he react to their refusal to be intimidated?  The next time I looked, he had fallen asleep, leaving his poor wife to gum her scrambled eggs alone. Asleep!   Where's the vigilance, Mister?  While you were dozing these four could have imposed sharia law on the joint, condemning my BLT to the ashbin of history.