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• From Italy to the USA: Cleveland Italians, Their Heritage and Traditions

  110-118

  Dénes Mátyás

  Views:

  793

  One would be hard-pressed to deny the influence Italians have had on the United States of America and on the very fabric of American cultural life. Not only are metropolises like New York City and Chicago with their populations in the millions home to significant Italian communities and neighborhoods but so are cities with several hundred thousand inhabitants like Boston, Baltimore, Syracuse, St. Louis, or Cleveland. The present paper intends to focus on Italians in Cleveland, Ohio, that undoubtedly constitute an organic and significant part of the city’s population. It aims to offer an insight into the formation of the Italian neighborhoods, from the first waves of Italian immigrants in the 19th century, and the opportunities of second-, third-, or nth-generation Italians to tend to their common Italian roots as well as to preserve their customs and traditions from the old country through a wide array of Italian cultural events, the city’s Italian community hubs and memorial sites, or  the local Italian-American media

• The waves of languages between emigration and immigration: the Italian case

  160-176

  Simone Casini

  Views:

  185

  The contribution fits within the existing research on the state of health of Italian abroad. It proposes the preliminary results on the linguistic imagination of a qualitative and quantitative research carried out in Toronto in 2022 that involved 100 informants of Italian origin belonging to different migratory generations. The results of the research highlight the pluralistic value of the linguistic imagination of the informants in which Italian strongly competes with other languages within a space of communicative possibilities. They refer to the traditional Italian language space both in Italy, with dialects, and abroad, with Italiese in the Canadian research context.

• “I can't write English, not even Italian... give me any 'giobba'": the Italian emigrants in the theater of Nino Randazzo

  56-68

  Marzia Caria

  Views:

  354

  The paper examines the cultural, social and linguistic representation of Italians emigrated to Australia in the writing for the theatre of Nino Randazzo, a playwright of Aeolian origin, who emigrated to Melbourne in 1952, considered one of the most important and prolific authors in the context of the so-called “letteratura dell’emigrazione”, and more particularly the Italian-Australian literature in italian language. Of particular interest is the theme of cultural and social prejudices of Anglo-Australians towards people of Italian origin, labelled as ignorant, impossible to acculturate and to discipline, largely linked to criminal organizations, which mostly speak a mixed variety of Italian and English. Thus, in particular, in the comedy Il Sindaco d’Australia (1981), in which the stereotypical (but hilarious) image of the emigrant from the south of Italy, impulsive and ambitious, characterized on a linguistic level by the use of Italian-Australian terms; and in the comedy Victoria Market (1982), conceived by Randazzo as a protest against the tendency on the part of Anglo-Australians to build stereotypes towards Italian-Australians, in this case the one that Italian equals mafioso. Randazzo’s theatre, however, manages to distinguish itself from the works of the majority of first-generation Italian-Australian playwrights for its attempt to demystify such prejudices and clichés in an enjoyable way. It is in the choice of a popular tone of comedy, also achieved through the skilful mixing of more traditional Italian forms with Italian-Australian terms typical of the years in which the narrated events are set, that the specific aspects in this author lay.

• Italy's role in carrying out the Danube Confederation project of 1862

  146-161

  Dániel Varga

  Views:

  434

  In the autumn of 1861, a French-Italian-Greek plan was prepared to make Balkan peoples rebel. The leaders of the Hungarian emigration, expecting an upcoming war, consulted on establishing an offensive and defensive alliance between Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, and Romania. Their aim was, as opposed to in 1848-49, to make the peoples of the Danube region fight against Vienna instead of Pest, thus helping Torino acquire Venice. Ignác Helfy published the essential elements of the emigration discussions in the Alleanza newspaper, edited by himself, titled “Il programma ungherese”, which became a success in the Italian press. The Tribuno newspaper, led by Marco Antonio Canini, besides disputing Alleanza, asked the paper to reveal everything they knew. Shortly thereafter, Canini visited György Klapka and they prepared the plan of the Danubian Confederation - which Victor Emmanuel II approved as well. Canini, preparing for his diplomatic tour in the Balkan region, visited Lajos Kossuth, who thought establishing a defence alliance would be more realistic in that political situation - but Canini convinced him that a confederation had to be created between the nations involved. Kossuth’s comments on Klapka and Canini’s plan were put on paper. However, Helfy indiscreetly published them in his paper, making it impossible for Canini to conduct successful diplomatic negotiations between the countries. Finally, Victor Emmanuel II, who originally wanted one of his relatives to be the ruler of the Greek Kingdom and the leader of the Confederation, withdrew from the plans for the rebellion, due to lack of French support.