Periodicals: newspapers and magazines

Periodicals: newspapers and magazines

The collection is rich in hard to find magazines and/or newspapers like Ernesto Valentini's Zarathustra, Vincenzo Vacirca's Il Solco and La Strada, Aldino Felicani's La Controcorrente, Il Proletario, Enrico Arrigoni's Eresia, Carlo Tresca's Il Martello and Guardia Rossa, Antonino Capraro's Alba Nuova, Arturo Giovannitti's Vita, Agostino De Biasi's Il Carroccio, T. Lucidi's Il Messaggero della Salute, Guido Podrecca's and Gabriele Galantara's L'Asino (this last mostly published in Rome) and others.

As Francesco Durante rightly observed in Italoamericana, understanding the contribution of journalism among Italian Americans - almost solely in Italian at the outset - to the community life, as well as to the culture of the immigrant community, is central to understanding that community.

Virtually all of the writers whose book-length works we see and celebrate in the collection, whether political or not, began their writing careers with newspaper or magazine writing. Some even immigrated to the U.S. precisely to do just that, but those were exceptional.

The politics of the magazines and newspapers ran the gamut from left to right, and some - e.g., Il Messaggero della Salute - were not really political in that sense at all. The separation often observed between the political and the literary sections of the magazines is surprising and deserves examination all by itself: one can find the stories of Clara Vacirca, married to and sharing the political leanings of the socialist Vincenzo Vacirca, published in the right-wing Il Carroccio, and less overtly political writers like Salvatore Benanti and Federico Mennella often contributed literary pieces to leftist periodicals like La Follia di New York. For example, Mennella wrote the dialect column for La Follia for some time. The catholic nature of the magazines in the literary culture of the Italians reflected one of its strengths.

Whatever the mixture of news from Italy and from America, whether "news events," or political or cultural commentary, short stories or poems, whether from Italians still in Italy or immigrants in the U.S. or translated from German, French. English or Russian - all of which were quite prevalent - or elaborations of philosophies of living, sometimes imported but sometimes "home-grown" in the U.S., the magazines and newspapers provide a rich insight into this world.

Beyond the articles themselves were, in many cases, letters to the editors and lists of new subscribers (and the cities and towns they lived in), both of which enlarge our understanding of what parts of the immigrant community were reached and affected by the printed word. 

This, too, is a subject that deserves close examination, and has been discussed recently, for example, in a fine essay by historian Adam Quinn discussing whether the Cronaca Sovversiva of the anti-organizational anarchist Luigi Galleani was a "seditious rag" or a community newspaper - or both. Quinn clearly concludes that it was both. The same can be said for Il Martello, La Follia di New York, Il Carroccio and many of the other political magazines - they were part of the "glue" that held together the Italian community quite beyond their immediate political messages.