Imaginative literature of the great migration: Fiction, poetry, drama, music, and art in books, magazines, and other works on paper

While the amount of political literature (anarchist, socialist, fascist) in the collection suggests its prevalence in the Italian American community, it might well be the great survival rate of those materials that's responsible. 

The non-political imaginative literature created in Italian by the Italian community in the U.S., richer in wildly varying qualities, philosophies and interests than the political literature perhaps, provide a three-dimensional view of the Italian community.

During this period fiction, poetry and drama ranged from the sensational urban “mysteries” of Bernardino Ciambelli (never translated into English) to the arguably more literary and certainly more political fiction of Ezio Taddei. Unlike most of the others, Taddei enjoyed a significant, however brief, success in American intellectual circles, with English translations of most of his American works. Illustrations, such as those by Costantino Nivola (the first non-American admitted to the American Academy of Arts and Letters) in Parole Colletive, matched the sophistication of Taddei’s writing. Poetry was written largely in dialect rather than the standard Italian used by the novelists, could be found in the poetry, of Calicchiu Pucciu, or Francesco Sisca. Drama, more than the other genres, was largely though not exclusively devoted to political education, and was often the central entertainment of May Day picnics of Italian leftists consisting of performances of the plays of Gigi Damiani or other dramatists, discussed in Section VII.

Italian American theatre began in New York in the 1870s. Theatre filled important emotional needs -- entertainment, a support system and social intercourse, supported by a network of fraternal and benevolent associations. Italian and European writers were introduced to immigrant audiences, whether in Italian, Neapolitan, Sicilian or other dialects. The Italian American experience furnished the subject matter for original plays written by Italian immigrant playwrights.

Among them, Eduardo Migliaccio, known as Farfariello, who appears in one of the playbills advertising his performance here, made the Italian American immigrant the hero of his dramatic creations. Riccardo Cordiferro, several of whose play scripts appear here, concerned himself in his plays, as in his philosophical writings, with the social conditions of the Italian immigrant, and was less action-oriented than, say, the hard-core work of the sovversivi. Women in the theatre, like Ria Rosa, whose playbills appear here, enjoyed freedom and an outlet for creativity not available to women who played out their lives in traditional domestic roles. Antonio Maiori introduced Shakespeare to his immigrant audiences in his southern Italian dialect productions.

Guglielmo Ricciardi, whose later memoirs appear in the collection, originated Italian American theatre in Brooklyn, and went on to a successful career in American theatre and cinema. Magazines reflected the politics of the publishers to a greater or lesser extent, whether of the nationalist (and later Fascist) Il Carroccio, or Arturo Giovannitti’s literary but also politically leftist Vita, Vincenzo Vacirca’s Il Solco, Ernesto Vallentini’s socialist Zarathustra, or Enrico Arrigoni’s anarchist-individualist Eresia, all of which are reflected in the collection.

The generically (and gently) leftist and anti-clerical La Follia di New York was was one of the earliest, in the 1890s, begun by the Sisca family (of whom Alessandro, pen name Riccardo Cordiferro, was the most celebrated), and was perhaps the single longest-lived magazine published in Italian in the U.S.

Cordiferro’s brother, Marziale Sisca, packaged the caricatures of the charismatic Enrico Caruso that adorned the pages of La Follia into a book that went through many editions, beginning in 1908 and continuing with an edition as late as 1965, which suggests that it financially sustained La Follia.

Evidence of widespread cultural influence may be found in publications which included letters from enthusiastic readers or reviewers preceding or following the work itself, much like today’s review blurbs, and also lists of subscribers from around the entire country.