Italian Identity Research Articles

The Italian new wave: Identity work and socialization practices in a community of new Italian immigrants in America

The majority of works on language in Italian immigrant communities in the USA concern immigrants of the 19th and 20th century migratory waves and their descendants. There is, however, a lack of studies focusing on the most recent influx of Italians who have migrated to the USA in the last 30 years. They have arrived in smaller numbers, yet in a constant stream and are adding to the ranks of the new generations of Italian Americans. The context of emigration of the two groups is notably different, as is their sociolinguistic background and their linguistic practices in the new context of arrival. The ‘new wave’ of Italians is intersecting with American society at large and with the Italian American community that preceded them, with which there is a complex relationship. This article focuses on this new wave of Italians, centering, in particular, on the symbolic practices enacted by a group of families who have recently immigrated to the USA, dealing with the language socialization of their American-born children. Drawing from interviews and ethnographic observation, it highlights new immigrants’ approach to language maintenance and transmission, and their symbolic practices relied on for identity performance. Identity is viewed through a constructivist lens, as negotiated and performed in interaction (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005, 2008), and language maintenance strategies are analyzed through the perspective of language socialization (Ochs, 1993, 1998; Scheiffelin, 1990). This study expands the discussion on Italian immigrant identity in the USA to include its most recent arrivals and simultaneously broadens the scope of Italian diasporic studies.

Nassirya: una serie italiana entre ficción y realidad histórica

The authors conduct an analysis of Nassirya, television miniseries that fictionalizes and commemorates a tragic event in history: the death of a contingent of Italian soldiers in the Iraq war. The memory of the fact becomes recreation and celebration of Italian identity, the Italianity, through a story of heroism of men whatever. Fiction transforms Italian soldiers into peacekeepers and opposes their sensitive humanity to the corruption and inhumanity of USAmericans, antagonists that take the place of an Iraqi enemy, impossible in a story of peace. The viewer is set to the time in which history is written. And in the construction of memory, reality and fiction overlap and change places.

L’Italia al di fuori dell'italia: un altro sguardo sulla viticoltura italiana e le sue ripercussioni in Brasile

The spread of wine around the world has been motivated by economical, commercial, cultural and logistical reasons. Thus, this paper focus on the “typical Brazilian” Italian vineyard, started by immigrants who arrived in southern Brazil in the nineteenth century. It is analyzed how this oriundi have played a definitive role in the consolidation of Brazilian viticulture – even if they aren’t the pioneers, how often they are called – by doing of the wine a element of stability and strengthening of Italian identity in this new territory. Some elements of Italian culture are part of the Serra Gaucha’s vineyards identity (southern Brazil) and its terroirs, through markers in the landscape (vineyards with characteristics of Etruscan origin, architecture) and in relations with the community, church and family. The new wine regions don’t have this symbolic reference with Italy, but they receive influences from migration of wineries, winemakers and professionals.

Mussolini’s National Project in Argentina

This book represents a welcome addition to studies of fascism and migration. The history of both southern Italian immigration to Argentina and the Italian fascists’ attempts to dominate this immigrant community have been approached by Italian historians such as Emilio Gentile, Loris Zanatta, and Eugenia Scarzanella, among many others, as well as by Argentine historians such as Fernando Devoto and María Victoria Grillo. In this context, David Aliano’s book provides a refreshing look at old sources while also bringing new primary sources to the equation, from propaganda materials to school textbooks. His questions are also different from those of his Italian predecessors. Aliano is not so much interested in the history of fascism but rather in how studying its impact on Argentina’s Italian community helps us understand the complex history of Italian ideas and projects for the nation both inside and outside Italy.Aliano is well versed in migration studies and Italian history, and he aptly combines both in examining the Argentine context, where most Italian immigrants eventually became and thought of themselves as Argentines. This was, to be sure, the most frustrating dimension of the problem for Benito Mussolini and his propaganda team. But Aliano is not that concerned with the history of this transnational failure of fascism and what it says about that political movement’s geopolitical conceptions and practices. Rather, the book’s emphasis on national conceptions among the different actors in Italy and abroad allows the author to cogently highlight limits and continuities in the broader history of Italy’s state policies of emigration. For Aliano, important traditions of national identity were continued by the fascists, who added to these their specific political identity. He argues that national projects such as Mussolini’s attempts to convert Argentina’s Italian community to fascism were substantially transformed by their contexts of reception, which posed important limitations on a “national project outside of the nation-state” (p. 2). The book presents a fine history of the Italian community in Argentina and the failed attempts by fascists to proselytize it from the 1920s to the 1940s. It explores a diversity of topics, from propaganda aimed at the immigrants and the schooling of Italian children in Argentina to fascist-antifascist debates within the Italian immigrant community. The author stresses how the Italians of Argentina formed an Italian identity different from the more authoritarian one in vogue on the peninsula. Another element in the development of this more liberal national conception that Aliano cogently highlights is the significant role of Italian antifascism in Argentina. He explains how this identitarian diversity limited the expansion of fascism within the community. Without much elaboration, he also emphasizes how Argentine democratic traditions had an impact in this regard.But how can one explain this persistent liberalism in the context of an ever-increasing consolidation of militarism, authoritarianism, and even clerico-fascism in Argentina during the 1930s and 1940s, from José Félix Uriburu’s dictatorship in 1930 to the so-called Década Infame and the military dictatorship of 1943? To be sure, Aliano criticizes an emphasis on Argentine authoritarianism that downplays the centrality of Argentina’s liberal traditions. But he does not engage as much with the intricacies of the ways in which Argentina’s liberal civil society turned its back on an increasingly authoritarian state hegemonized by the church and the military. While Aliano is very engaged with migration studies on both sides of the Atlantic, his book could have benefited from a similar engagement with Argentine historiographical discussions of nation building and the politics of immigration, from the earlier ideas of an “alluvial” society to the debates in the 1980s and 1990s over the idea of the melting pot as well as the more recent pathbreaking works by Hilda Sabato on political participation. The important scholarship of Lilia Ana Bertoni is also absent from Aliano’s discussion. The book is at its best when analyzing the Italian community in Argentina. If Argentine historians will note these absences and, more generally, the book’s schematic view of their country’s history, they will also benefit from learning about the European, American, and more specifically Italian discussions of emigration that drive the questions and answers of this subtle, challenging book.This book raises important questions for the field of migration studies in Latin America and Europe. It is highly recommended for specialists in Latin American and European migration and ethnic studies as well as historians of Italian fascism. By focusing on what Mussolini’s national project for the Italian community of Argentina reveals about the changing nature of the idea of the Italian nation, the book critically complements current historiography. Aliano provides a new conceptual look at the history of European migration in Argentina.

«The committees are two, in fact both Savonarola». Identity and political and religious tensions during the First Vatican Council

While in 1869, with the First Vatican Council, the Catholic Church attempted to affirm the vitality of the papacy and to stress the importance of the transcendent foundation of society, in Florence - the capital of the new Italian Kingdom - three committees were founded to build three different statues of Girolamo Savonarola. Through this case study and the images of the Medieval friar developed in those years, this essay offers an insight on the relationships between religion, politics and Italian identities in the few years after Unification. Debates, tensions and solutions on the role of the Catholic Church within Italian society were developed as part of a «cultural war» with a European dimension, involving values, practices, and loyalty. Since religion played a fundamental role in the Italian national-patriotic discourse, a Dominican friar became a slogan, a useful tool in the political battle, and his life was distorted according to convenience, even by anti-Catholics and anticlericals. Savonarola embodied the ambition of different political visions: a society in which Catholicism and freedom were in communication, or a society without religion and in which the papacy had lost its powers. Liberal Catholics, Freemasons, freethinkers, radicals, and Protestants were involved in these re-elaborations of Savonarola's image with different aims; but with the capture of Rome all hope for reform and renewal of the Church, as well as all hopes for a weakening of Catholicism, had faded.

Does National Identity Play a Significant Role in Determining the Way Italy is Dealing with the Current Financial Crisis? A Comparison with Other European Countries

This paper addresses the issue of to what extent the way Italy deals with the current financial crisis can be related to the specifics of Italian national identity. According to many scholars, Italians have a widespread tendency to misinterpreting both the role of and the borders that divide the private and the public sphere. Family interests or friendships are often put above what is best for the citizenship, which is, indeed, a rather weak concept within the Italian society. The explanation to this trend can be utterly comprehended after examining the construction of the Italian State and its main values: such process has, still today, a great impact on Italian politics and society.

Social Memory and Identity in the Central Apennines under Augustus

This essay addresses the topic of the oblivion of Samnite identity that transpired around the end of the first century BCE and beginning of the first century CE. By placing the discussion of the end of the Samnites within a context of memory and monuments, it can be shown that the dissolution of the Samnites as a nation was effected by different processes of forgetting, one active (in which new monumental landscapes were imposed over older ones) and one passive (in which older monuments were left to neglect). These processes are all the more striking because they occurred in the context of the Augustan period, when it is generally held that places and individuals of traditional or historical importance saw renewed attention. The oblivion of a living Samnite identity was necessary not only for the creation of a new Italian identity supported by the ideals of pax and concordia, but also for the successful incorporation into the imperial system of Samnite elites, who were ultimately responsible for the oblivion of their past.

L'Italiano Negro

I discuss the complicated process of the early twentieth-century construction of the multifaceted, certainly controversial and mostly unspoken, Italian idea of whiteness. In order to capture the wide range of representations and self-representations that converged in unified Italy's racialized identity politics, I analyse the intertwined and continuous rearticulation of the processes of altero- and auto-referential racialization (as articulated by Colette Guillaumin in 1972), that occurred in a span of time that covers Liberal Italy and early Fascism (1870s–1936). In particular, I pay attention to continuities and discontinuities between the two historical phases in order to grasp the very peculiarities of a long-term construction of Italianness in terms of ‘unspoken whiteness’. The ‘unspoken’ character of this major version of ‘Italianità’ derives from the altero-referential nature of both Liberal and Fascist Italy's racialization. With altero-referential racism I refer to a system of racialization that is centred on the Other. In both Liberal Italy and Fascism, the assignment of a precise colour (from a darker nuance than white, to black) to the internal/colonial Other implicitly produces the racial identity of the Self. This ‘continuity’ between Liberal and Fascist racializations highlights the existing discontinuity between that period and late Fascism (1936–45). In line with scholars like Barbara Sòrgoni, Giulia Barrera, Roberto Maiocchi, Aaron Gillette and Olindo de Napoli, I consider the first period as sharply distinguished from the one following, which was characterized by that claim of Aryanness (1936–45) that would be at the core of Fascist discourse on race from 1936 to 1937. This second phase would be characterized by a decidedly auto-referential racialization that claimed racial purity and self-consistency as the mark of the incommensurability between Italian racial identity and inferior racialized groups.

High fashion in film: Italian identity and global anxiety in Valentino: The Last Emperor and Gomorrah

Abstract The intersection between the Italian high-fashion industry and its relationship to national identity is explored in two 2008 films, Valentino: The Last Emperor (Tyrnauer, 2008) and Gomorrah (Garrone, 2008). The decline of high fashion problematizes Italy’s projection on a global stage of a national identity closely linked to its ‘Made in Italy’ brands and superiority in design. Both films conceptualize fashion as a salient cultural institution that is at the apex of pressing social, political and economic issues facing Italy as the country re-evaluates its construction of national identity. By visually exploiting the tension between the perfect exterior presentation of the fashion industry and the less appealing underlying realities, the directors challenge cinematically the boundaries between fiction and reality in identity construction at both national and global levels. The films showcase the performative creation of national symbols and in both the illusory quality of narratives of national identity emerges in the directors’ generically divergent yet topically convergent emphasis on the fiction of the constructed image.

The Muslim world and the Italian identity: New directions for historical research

Is it possible to write a history of the relationship between Islam and Italian identity? This paper refuses the possibility of a history progressing uninterrupted from the Middle Ages to the present day. In order to verify other possible approaches, the author proposes to consider the history of Italy and Islam by identifying specific subjects, or thematic spaces: war and politics, diplomatic relationships, trading history; but also an analysis of the contacts between groups and individuals (for example slaves and renegades) and other cultural exchanges. Finally, the article considers the contemporary problems posed by imperialism and orientalism in the 19th and 20th centuries and by the recent migratory movements which have led to a new Muslim presence within Italian territory.

Italy from without: An introduction

There is no doubt that current debates on Italian national identity, and on the meaning of Italian history, are very lively; of late, these discussions have been very effective in questioning the many cliches and established paradigms concerning nationalism and nation-building. But it is equally true that reflections on Italian national identity have, over time, been mired in a narrow internalist perspective that has neglected the larger historical and geopolitical processes which shaped the emergence of the nation before and during the first 150 years of its existence. It is only recently that scholars interested in the many aspects of Italian nationalism have begun to account for the international dimensions of Italy’s creation. Indeed, if our idea of the Italian nation is ‘a cultural artifact of a particular kind,’ as Benedict Anderson defines it (encouraging us to look at the concept of national identity not as an inherited or inevitable happenstance, but as a deliberate and artificial creation linked to the emergence of a new ruling elite), we need to expand our critical field to ask how such a cultural artifact has been created from both inside and outside the geographical and conceptual borders of the nation. However, attention to the European – indeed global – aspects of the Italian nation has not always been central to nationalist expressions, celebrations, histories and historical reconstructions of the Risorgimento, which have generally focused on the fight for unification and the figure of proverbial and quintessentially Italian heroes, Garibaldi above all. This is perhaps hardly surprising, since the process of Italian unification was, in significant part, a battle against attempts by competing external interests to intervene in and control the peninsula. The history of the Italian Risorgimento has consequently been constructed as fundamentally a history from within, one founded on a myth of an essential Italianita, that binds together the diverse communities of the region to produce an integral national whole. This belief in the existence of an ancient Italianita, understood as a historical entity shaped by the native populations of the peninsula through successive generations, was the presupposition shared by all the patriots of the Risorgimento; it served to affirm the right of Italians to a unified state that was independent, sovereign

Monumental Italians: Machiavelli, Risorgimento and nation-building in Chile

‘Thus, one should not let this opportunity pass, for Italy, after so much time, to see her redeemer. I cannot express with what love he would be received in all those provinces that have suffered from these floods from outside’ (Machiavelli and Mansfield, 1998: 105). Using the theories of Niccolò Machiavelli, I study in this article, from a transatlantic perspective, Italians who helped build the Chilean nation. Italians did not emigrate to Chile on a grand scale; however, the success of those immigrants is a study in fortuna and virtù. Those honored by Chile with ‘monuments,’ or those who built edifices of their own, such as Pastene, Rondizzoni and Toesca, among others, can be called ‘monuments of Italian identity’ in Chile. In this context, Machiavelli's oeuvre serves as a rhetorical framework for understanding the actions of Italians who fought for and helped shape the Chilean nation.

Italy in the Balance. Electrons and Bourbons. Thinking of the recent past in order to understand the present and to plan the future

The aim of the paper is try to make a dynamic picture of the modern (or post-modern) Italian identity, from a political, social and cultural point of view. The status of this country is in the balance, between a fast industrialization without an analogous industrial culture and a lumbering memory where the traditional rules are still strong. The analysis will be carried out through an historical and sociological excursus both in Italian ascent memories and in political processes and events after the Second World War.

‘Let's not talk about Italian sex’: the reception of the Kinsey reports in Italy

This article analyses of the reception of Alfred Kinsey's two reports – Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948, trans. 1950) and Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female (1953, trans. 1955) – in a range of magazines and newspapers in 1950s Italy. It offers an insight into Italian attitudes towards sexuality at a time when such matters were rarely the subject of public discourse. It reveals a deep ambiguity in those attitudes, showing them to be closely enmeshed with notions of Italian, European or Latin identity, and characterized by certain perceptions of gender roles and of the place of emotion in Italian society and by an assertion of the ‘otherness’ of America. Rejecting the reports as morally dangerous, or, by contrast, as offering nothing new to a wise, old Europe, responses to Kinsey in the 1950s attempted to suppress further public discussion of Italian sexuality, yet were themselves part of the very process that, by the end of the decade, saw Italians begin to turn the spotlight on themselves.

Transnational Neomelodica Music and Alternative Economic Cultures

In the 1980s, another popular Neapolitan vocal music scene emerged that today thrives in a position of ambiguous alterity to the once-dominant “traditional” music industry that thrived in the decades before and after the turn of the 20th century. La canzone neomelodica, or neo-melodic song, is produced, distributed, performed and consumed in an alternative political economic culture, where the so-called formal, informal and illicit economies overlap. The neomelodica music scene constitutes an alternative music industry that encompasses a range of affective-aesthetic sensibilities and economic practices that cause friction with dominant attitudes in Naples regarding “Neapolitan culture” and dominant aesthetic and economic norms performed by the mainstream Italian music industry and its publics. Unlike classic Neapolitan song, neomelodica song has enjoyed national and transnational success largely limited to circulation among southern Italians living throughout Italy, in parts of Europe, and in North America. We describe the neomelodica music scene from an aesthetic and moral/political economic perspective. We analyze how the unique ethico-aesthetic qualities of the neomelodico milieu and neomelodica song’s relationship to other Neapolitan and Italian music genres have conditioned neomelodica song’s national and transnational articulations while at the same time transforming transnational neomelodica music into a unitary and fragmenting repertoire of southern Italian identity.

Country Life à la Carte in Pupi Avati’s The Story of Boys and Girls

Country Life à la Carte in Pupi Avati’s The Story of Boys and Girls Rosetta Giuliani Caponetto The nostalgia for rustic life in the countryside that is suggestively portrayed in the commercials produced by Mulino bianco, the prominent Italian company best known for its breakfast products, is one of the most fascinating topics addressed in John Dickie’s Delizia: The Epic History of the Italians and Their Food. In his volume, the historian discusses how, starting in the late 1980s, the company’s episodic advertisements often focused on family life at the kitchen table and portrayed the modern Italian family’s abandonment of urban life in favor of a healthier lifestyle. For Dickie, Mulino bianco’s snapshots of pastoral life weave a powerful myth around the dream of a rural home or vacation farmhouse for millions of Italian urban consumers (2).The idyllic landscape evoked in the commercials has been effective enough to draw Italian tourists to the small Tuscan town of Chiusdino in search of the original mulino bianco, the literal ‘white mill’ where the advertisements were initially shot (Dickie 3). Pupi Avati’s 1989 film, The Story of Boys and Girls (Storia di ragazzi e di ragazze), released during this time period, draws viewers into a similarly bucolic setting that begs a comparison between the glorified traditions of the Italian past and the rapid cultural changes which took place in the Fascist era. Set in the 1930s in the countryside of the northern Italian region of Emilia Romagna (the same region in which Mulino bianco’s headquarters would eventually be located), the film takes place during a period in which Mussolini’s regime attempted to control the perceptions of its citizens and persuade them of the desirability of a simple country lifestyle. The Fascist cultural movement known as Strapaese (super-country), concentrated mainly in Tuscany and Emilia [End Page 273] Romagna, praised citizens of the countryside for their larger families and provincial, genuine values, while accusing the urban bourgeoisie of being driven by egotism and of causing a drop in birthrates that threatened the nation’s well-being. In this context, Avati’s film makes use of the twofold meaning of the Italian word storia, as signifying both ‘story’ and ‘history,’ to offer a universal, almost allegorical account of two Italian families of diverse social classes that come together to celebrate the engagement of Angelo and Silvia. The Story of Boys and Girls particularly highlights the Strapaese sentiment of Italian Fascism that scorned cosmopolitanism while associating the nation’s moral health with a more simple, rustic lifestyle. The engagement of the young protagonists serves as the pretext for comparing Silvia’s working-class family to Angelo’s much wealthier, urban family. As Angelo’s family leaves behind their upscale apartment in the city and travels to the countryside, they also unwittingly move towards regaining a sense of true Italian identity and kinship.1 The film’s rural setting underscores the failure of Angelo’s family to correspond to Fascist ideals, and presents the independent, childless women of the upper class as the foils of the consummate Italian female. The integral scene of the engagement dinner explicitly reveals the metonymical relationship between the meal itself and the landscape and society that provided its basic elements. As a symbol of the work ethic required to nourish and maintain the ideals of family life, food becomes the palliative element that rehabilitates the cultural waywardness of Angelo’s family. While taking for granted Fascism’s gender roles, ideals of tradition, and exaltation of Italy’s provincial roots, Avati’s film unfolds in a series of comic near-disasters while also providing a patently ironic social commentary. To begin with, Silvia’s family prepares an abundant and varied banquet in order to welcome Angelo’s family and impress them, yet the ability of a lower class rural family, such as that of Silvia, to host such an extravagant feast is entirely unrealistic. As Dickie and other scholars have noted, peasant eating habits were such that a rich banquet like that served by Silvia’s family would not have been accessible in the countryside. [End Page 274] Rural masses of the time had very...

Mulheres brasileiras pelos olhos de viajantes italianos

Ao lermos as descrições dos viajantes europeus sobre o Brasil, durante o século XIX, percebemos que estereótipos anteriores são reafirmados pelos saberes científicos, partindo da hipótese da excelência da sua cultura e a confirmação de um modelo do que seria realmente o humano e a civilização. Para se ter uma ideia mais aproximada de como esse processo foi efetivado, partiremos de alguns trabalhos que estudaram a italianidade, nas suas diversas manifestações, recortando a descrição feita pelos viajantes italianos sobre um elemento específico, já abordado por diversas pesquisas – a mulher. O tempo é o século XIX; o espaço é o Brasil inteiro. Serão enfocados os relatos, entre outros, do médico italiano Alfonso Lommonaco, “Al Brasile”, publicada em Milão, no ano de 1889, do naturalista Ermano Stradelli e de Francesco Ammannati “Um viaggio ai confini del mondo, 1865-1868. Acreditamos que os relatos desses viajantes são também reveladores das atitudes que nos levam a perceber melhor a sociedade e o papel da mulher nela.

Edmondo De Amicis na América do Sul:Pátria e Identidade Italiana Fora dos Limites Nacionais

Redescoberto nos últimos anos pela crítica literária, pela sua vasta produção de literatura de viagem, Edmondo De Amicis continua sendo um escritor pouco estudado, sobretudo lembrado como escritor “dos lânguidos”, como o definiu Carducci. O sentimentalismo de De Amicis, no entanto, não constituiu apenas uma estratégia comercial para as vendas de seus livros, mas foi decorrente de um projeto idealizado, de uma pedagogia cívica bem precisa, visando a constituição da “unidade cultural do país, recém-unificado, e que ainda muito precisava fazer em termos de identidade italiana. Em 1884, De Amicis escreveu Sull’Oceano, um romance que narra a viagem imaginada a bordo do navio “North America” levou a Argentina para uma série de conferências. O tema da viagem não é novidade para De Amicis, que já havia escrito de várias contas de viagens realizados nos anos 70, como Espanha, Holanda, Marrocos e Constantinopla, a novidade do oceano é que, como o título sugere, a “ênfase aqui não é o ponto de chegada, ao país anfitrião, mas a viagem em si, o momento de transição, a expectativa da transição, dando voz à experiência de imigrantes italianos, assim como de todos os italianos que viveram durante o período pós-unificação. Com esse estudo apresenta-se nova análise do romance Sull’Oceano, à luz das questões identitárias italianas do período de pós-unificação e dos debates realizados com outros intelectuais da época, como Paolo Mantegazza, que também viajou para a América do Sul.

L'imperialismo spirituale negli esordi della rivista 'Augustea' (1925-1927)

Spiritual Imperialism at the Base of AugusteaThe study of Fascism’s program of ‘cultural expansion abroad’ (‘espansione culturale all’estero’) must acknowledge the fundamental role played by the journal Augustea, founded in 1925 by Franco Ciarlantini, a prominent editor of the Fascist PNF. Working on the project were, among others, Massimo Bontempelli, Emilio Bodrero, and Arrigo Solmi. The journal combined ‘politics, economics, art’, and advocated the unity and power of an Italy that would finally be cohesive, and, as such, able to impose itself on the world stage. Power meant expansion in many senses: economically, politically, in regards to the military, but especially in terms of the ideal, artistic, and spiritual. According to the magazine, one needed to replace Italy as a leader of nations by highlighting its cultural supremacy, which dated back to Rome and its empire, and that had been preserved in the following centuries. The Italian cultural hegemony, at the service of foreign policy, was in fact seen as the path to empire, which was seen to require the support of intellectuals, artists, and journalists. The agenda in this way bound itself to the totalitarian project of Fascism; on the one hand there was an internal conquest, a Fascistization, of the new Italian identity designed by Mussolini, and on the other hand an external conquest consisting of a spiritual imperialism, positing Italian society as the natural leader among nations. Culture, in this way, was seen as the medium of both aspects of the conquest.

Sport and the Italian American Quest for Whiteness

More than 4,000,000 Italians migrated to the United States in search of better opportunities; but their poverty, lack of education, Catholic religion and ethnic lifestyles denied them full inclusion in the mainstream American society dominated by middle class, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. This study examines the Italians' development of an Italian national identity in the United States, the transition to an American identity and the Italians' quest for inclusion within the mainstream society. Disdainful of education as contrary to the peasant familial value system, the Italian reliance on physicality marked a particular working-class habitus that transferred well to the labour gangs that built the American infrastructure, but their physical prowess allowed for greater recognition as Italian youth adopted American sport forms. Physical prominence led to university athletic scholarships and participation on US Olympic teams; while others pursued fame and fortune as professional boxers and in the American national game of baseball. In the inter-war years sport provided a primary vehicle for assimilation, acceptance and recognition as athletes such as Joe DiMaggio and Rocky Marciano became American icons of popular culture and fostered a golden age for Italian assimilation in the 1950s. A third generation, however, experienced a resurgence of ethnicity that resulted in a segmented assimilation in which Italians selectively adopted to the mainstream culture while retaining particular ancestral values and practices. Stereotypical depictions of Italians as gangsters and an adherence to past lifestyles suggest that full assimilation is not yet complete.