![]() ![]() America needed cheap labor, the fuel of industry. And my mom, Speranza, became Shirley.īy the time my grandfather set eyes on the Statue of Liberty for the first time in 1901, hundreds of thousands of Italian immigrants had made their way to America. But as these immigrants settled on the Lower East Side of NYC, in an effort to assimilate, their names began to change. What better name for a 4-year-old who gets on a ship bound for Ellis Island and the United States of America. If you translate that name into English, it can mean Pilgrim Mariner. The youngest of six children, he was given the most beautiful name: Pelegrino Marino. My grandfather was born in 1897 outside of Naples, Italy. But he did not change his name to soften his ethnicity. It was probably a good idea for Marion Morrison to change his name to John Wayne before climbing on his horse. And, maybe my favorite singer, Anthony Dominick Benedetto, rose to fame as Tony Bennett. An Italian named Dino Paul Crocetti became Dean Martin. Of course, these singers had role models of an earlier generation. The great Connie Francis (who recorded an album of Italian songs) was born Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero. Monicamary falcon on Don’t just say Barbera.Frankie Valli (a mildly Italian name) was Francesco Castelluccio.įreddy “Boom Boom” Cannon, who sang “Tallahassee Lassie,” was Frederick Anthony Picariello.Īnd it was not just the men who changed their names. Week in Review… on Dagan Ministero’s room w… Gianni Lovato on The bunga bunga party is over.…Ĭharles Scicolone on Gastronomic philology gets its… Sippin’ with S… on A sommelier who is “iden…Įlisa Caldwell on A better translation for… Please join our efforts to repurpose the Confederate Memorial of the Wind in Orange, Texas. But to read them in context, prefaced by his memories of growing up under fascism, gives the essay renewed meaning and relevance. Those bullet points have been frequently cited in the Trump era. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.” These features cannot be organized into a system many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. ![]() In the second part, he offers “a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. It reads like the opening sequence of a Fellini movie, replete with comedy, redemption, and salvation. In the first part, he describes what it was like to grow up during fascism in Italy (he was born in 1932). ![]() Here’s a link to read it in its entirety. That essay is where he coined not only the term “Ur-Fascism” but also “fuzzy totalitarianism,” an expression that has taken on new and urgent meaning with Italy’s shift toward the hard right. In the light of Italy’s election on Sunday, I’m not the only one who was reminded of Umberto Eco’s famous 1995 lecture at Columbia University, later published by the New York Review of Books, “Ur-Fascism” (and later translated into Italian as “Fascismo eterno” or “Eternal Fascism”). It’s as if Italy is finally having its Trump moment (many of my Italian university-era friends have called it that): the unthinkable has come to pass. ![]() Never before today - almost 100 years to the day that Mussolini marched on Rome and seized power from the monarchy - has MSI fielded a prime minister.įor Italians born during the fascist era, the thought of a seated post-fascist government is practically, well, unthinkable. For all intents and purposes, her party is the current-day expression of that political platform, worldview, and aesthetic. The moniker is also owed to a symbol - an avatar if you will - that appears in iconography for her political party, Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy, a lyric borrowed from Italy’s 1847 national anthem): the Fiamma Tricolore or Tricolor flame that was adopted by the Movimento Sociale Italiano (Itaian Socialist Movement), the post-World War II incarnation of the fascist party. The epithet is owed in part to her anti-immigrant, anti-liberal (read anti-woke), and protectionist polices - spiked with a dash of conspiracy theory, Euroscepticism, and anti-globalism (sound familiar?). Italian politician Giorgia Meloni, whose party won the lion’s share of votes in elections on Sunday and who is expected to be elected as prime minister in coming weeks, is widely being called “Italy’s first post-fascist leader” and “Italy’s first hard-right leader.” No one has ever bothered to erase a Mussolinian aphorism from the main square in Gaiole in Chianti. Above: “Chi non è pronto a morire per la sua fede non è degno di professarla - Mussolini” (“those not ready to die for their faith are not worthy of professing it”). ![]()
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