Italy Revisited

Drawing out her mother's childhood memories of life in southern Italy at the dawn of the twentieth century, Mary Melfi takes an unconventional approach to autobiographical writing. Italy Revisited serves as a double memoir, told in dialogue between a mother and a daughter. The conversation takes the reader to a medieval town high up in the mountains where time is told by the shadow the sun casts, where wheat and olive oil are the currency of choice (barter is in use), and where marriage is as much about property as it is about love. As they re-create that vanished world, the pair finds greater understanding of the tumultuous relationships that sometimes exist between immigrant mothers and their children.

A significant part of Troy’s history, and that of its neighborhood, is the immigration of diverse ethnic groups. By 1900, the US Census reported 465 Italian-born residents in Troy, and in 1930, there were 2,000 Italian immigrants. From 1900 to the 1950s, Little Italy, bordering the central business district from Ferry Street to the Poestenkill and from Fourth Street to Prospect Park, was predominately an Italian or Italian American neighborhood. Among the close-knit families of Troy’s Little Italy were import stores, 60 mom-and-pop shops, churches, schools, a community center, and a veterans’ post, all of which were found within a 20-block radius. America’s Little Italy neighborhoods became centers of ethnic culture and heritage. In the 1960s, urban renewal challenged Troy and other cities with mixed results. Today, there is resurgence in Troy, with plans to expand the city’s central historic district to include most of Little Italy. In the meantime, empty nesters, artists, and young professionals are moving into the neighborhood as valuable community partners continue to support the efforts of the neighborhood group Troy Little Italy.

Bringing together the work of a ground-breaking group of scholars working on the Italian Risorgimento to consider how modern Italian national identity was first conceived and constructed politically, the book makes a timely contribution to current discussions about the role of patriotism and the nature of nationalism in present-day Italy.

Neorealism emerged as a cultural exchange and a field of discourse that served to shift the confines of creativity and revise the terms of artistic expression not only in Italy but worldwide. If neorealism was thus a global phenomenon, it is because of its revolutionary portrayal of a transformative moment in the local, regional, and national histories of Italy. At once guiding and guided by that transformative moment, neorealist texts took up, reflected, and performed the contentious conditions of their creation, not just at the level of narrative content but also in their form, language, and structure. Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History demonstrates how they did so through a series of representative case studies. Recounting the history of a generation of artists, this study offers fundamental insights into one of the most innovative and influential cultural moments of the twentieth century.