Robert Viscusi, PhD in English and professor emeritus at Brooklyn College (CUNY), was born in Brooklyn on April 4, 1941, and died in Manhattan on January 19, 2020. The grandson of immigrants from Limatoia (Province of Benevento) and Salle (Province of Chieti), he was raised in Queens, New York City, and then moved back to Brooklyn. The grandparents from the paternal side from Campania came to the United States in 1905, while those from the maternal side, from Abruzzo, arrived in 1919, right after the war.As a descendant of Italian immigrants, Viscusi made his mark focusing on the Italian American experience in New York City and the United States. He wanted to create a space in New York for the Italian American community, which had been subject to prejudices brought on by their immigrant status. Viscusi was an advocate for education in the community, combating the stereotype that Italian Americans were anti-intellectual.After earning a BA in English from Fordham University and an MA in English from Cornell University, he started his career as an adjunct lecturer at Brooklyn College in 1968, where he later became a professor of English. Viscusi was one of the major figures of Italian American culture, in which he played various roles: pioneering Italian American writer, scholar of Italian American literature and culture, cultural theorist, literary critic, novelist, and poet.He was the Claire and Leonard Tow Professor of English, executive officer of the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities at Brooklyn College, as well as founding president of the Italian American Writers Association (IAWA).His awards include a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship; a John D. Calandra Italian American Institute Fellowship; an American Book Award; the Gladiatore d'Oro of Benevento; the Pietro di Donato and John Fante Literary Award from the Grand Lodge of the Sons of Italy, New York State; and the Premio Giuseppe Acerbi of Fondazione Giuseppe Acerbi, Castel Goffredo. He was a member of OpLePo (Opificio di Letteratura Potenziale) (Napoli), of the Grolier Club, and of the Century Association.He published numerous books, and his essays on Italian and Italian American literature and culture have appeared in many journals and collections, from Yale Italian Studies to Barrow Street. These include Dodecahedron (1966); Max Beerbohm, or the Dandy Dante: Rereading with Mirrors (1986); An Oration upon the Most Recent Death of Christopher Columbus (1993) (which he has performed in cities across the United States and in Italy); Astoria: A Novel (1995), winner of an American Book Award; De Vulgari Eloquentia: An Approach to the Language of Italian American Fiction (2000); a book of poems A New Geography of Time (2004); a critical study of Italian American literary history titled Buried Caesars and Other Secrets of Italian American Writing (2006), which won the Pietro di Donato and John Fante Literary Award; and Ellis Island (2011). His essay “Breaking the Silence: Strategic Imperatives for Italian American Culture,” which appeared in the first number of VIA: Voices in Italian Americana, became a manifesto for the IAWA.The following interview with Robert Viscusi took place on June 13, 2012, at the Wolfe Institute for the Humanities at Brooklyn College. It is part of a larger, two-phase project I carried out, the first part of which involved fifty-one subjects from the New York City community who were interviewed in depth, while the second used information gathered from young Italian Americans in the same area. I presented the findings in Sense of Origins: A Study of New York's Young Italian Americans (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2020).R.S. What memories of Italy did your family share with you?R.V. They are very much varied. My mother's family were the ones who talk about the miseria (extreme poverty). My father's family actually era discretamente benestante; erano proprietari (were reasonably well-off; they were landowners).1 The ones who are still there own a lot of land, some that I'm sure belongs to us, but I'll never find out. I asked my father's uncle when we were there the first time, I said, “I'd like to see my grandparents’ marriage certificate,” and he said “è bruciato l'archivio durante la guerra” (the archives were burned during the war). That's a common story, there were a lot of fires in the archives. So, since I had to sleep in their house, I decided I'd better not make an issue of it; I wanted to wake up in the morning. [Laughs.]R.S. Which family member handed down the memories of Italian history?R.V. My father's father, actually his stepfather. My father's parents came to Schenectady in upstate New York; they worked for General Electric. They separated and she married this other man who had been to liceo (high school), he had been a carabiniere in Italy. Why he came here, I don't know. But my absolute earliest memory is of this grandfather telling me about how Dante Alighieri invented the Italian language and then wrote a poem in it and so he invented Italy. This is what he believed. They all believed nella didascalia risorgimentale (in the Risorgimento narrative). It was really quite a story. Anyway, that's what I believed. That's why I conceived the idea that turned into this article that I wrote so many years later. And a lot of other things that I've done since then. So, he was the one. He used to listen to all the Italian radio—there was a lot of it in those days in New York—and to the opera. He would call me up—even when I was ten and we lived across the street—and say, “They're going to show Il barbiere di Siviglia on Channel 13 on Tuesday night and you should watch it.” I didn't, but I felt guilty. By the time I got to college, somebody got me a job as an usher at the Metropolitan Opera House, the old Metropolitan Opera House, the one before this one, so I became knowledgeable. I'm a big music lover, not especially an opera buff, but I went to a lot of operas. I was very precocious, I'd always talk a lot, I was born talking, like I said, I was born ready. He told me to be a professor, he said, “perchè un professore è un galantuomo” (because a professor is a gentleman). I didn't even know what it meant, but it sounded good [laughs], so he really had a big impact on me.R.S. How do you define your ethnic background?R.V. It's very problematic. I always think that to call yourself Italian American is a little bit like calling yourself an Olympic ice skater. You'd better be ready for what comes as a consequence. Because in my generation, or at least now, for the last twenty years, it's been pretty easy, I think, for an Italian American with a good education and a good position in the world to just forget about it. People don't even want to hear about it a lot of the time. When I was young, I always felt Italian because I grew up in a big family; my grandparents all lived until I was an adult, and they were all immigrants, every one of them. None of them spoke English particularly well, although they never spoke Italian to us; they didn't want us to know Italian. I had a very attitudine ambivalente verso questa identità (ambivalent attitude toward this identity) because it wasn't a particularly good thing when I was young. It wasn't necessarily a bad thing, but it was a cause of struggle. You had to get into fights all the time. In my neighborhood the boys—I can't say the children because girls were segregated, it was like as though we were in Damascus, the girls were kept in the house—were mostly either Italian or Irish so we would have these endless debates over whether it was better to be Italian or Irish, because we had Leonardo da Vinci, Joe DiMaggio, Phil Rizzuto, and we had pizza, spaghetti, food. They didn't have food, that was the theory. But the mayor, the governor, the police, the priests, the nuns, the liquor store owners, and the undertakers, all the important people in the world were Irish. And the teachers too. We took a lot of poor treatment, I wouldn't say bad treatment, but poor treatment from the teachers. Have you read Maria Gillan's poetry? She has a poem called “Public School # 18,” which really lays it out pretty clearly. It was a racist conversation all the time. One of my friends went out with one of the Irish girls, and her father forbade her to go out with him because, the expression he used was “He had a touch of the tar brush.” That means that he was “colored.” Nowadays, of course, you don't hear people use that expression anymore, and no one would mind anyway; people are so much more accepting of racial and ethnic diversity, at least in New York anyway, but in those days it wasn't like that.Then I majored in English and got a PhD in English, mind you. I liked the idea that when I was writing I was English, which was even better than being Irish after all, and I was a good writer, so that was an escape for me. After I grew up, maybe it had to do with getting married. I married an Irish American woman, and the first thing that she wanted to do was to go to Italy. She didn't have any problem with being Italian, I was the one with the problem, and I did not want to go to Italy. I used to hear my grandmother describe [it as] “un Abruzzo assolutamente uguale a quello descritto da Ignazio Silone in Fontamara, una miseria sempiterna, terribile” (Abruzzo exactly like the one Ignazio Silone described in Fontamara, an everlasting poverty, terrible). I didn't want any part of that, but a wife, a new wife no less, what can you do, you have to say yes. So, we went, and I was totally converted, almost immediately. We went first to Milano. I had a friend here who was also trying to persuade me to go, Luigi Ballerini, a pretty well-known poet and intellectual, and he had an apartment that he had inherited from his mother on the periphery of Milano, and he said, “You can use my apartment,” so that was good. We went there, and he said to call his stepfather, who was Beppo Botere, and he had been the welterweight boxing champion of Italy in 1938, but he was still in forma (in shape). He didn't have a car and so he said, “Well, rent a car and tomorrow I'll take you someplace.” With my minimal Italian, I rented a car on the telephone. I wasn't even sure that I had succeeded in renting a car, I thought maybe I had bought a house. [Laughs.] But I did, I rented a car, got a Cinquecento that cost me six dollars for a day, which was pretty good even then. And he took us to Pavia, alla Certosa di Pavia, and I almost fell over. I said, “Se questa è l'Italia, io sono italiano di sicuro” (If this is Italy, then I am for sure Italian). That was it, I was converted, it didn't take much. [Laughs.]It was a great experience; we were there for three weeks, and we traveled all over Italy. My mother had a surviving aunt still in Abruzzo, and we went to see her; she was about ninety, quite a remarkable character. We had a day left, we were in Rome and we thought maybe we would go down to Campania and see if we could find any of my father's relatives. My family had lost touch with them completely. Even though after the war my father would take me to the post office every week with a big box full of clothes, food, medicine, tutto, because the Germans and the Americans and the English had picked them clean, there was nothing. Food, we actually sent food. Lots of food. We had the name of one of my father's aunts who, as it turned out, had been dead for twenty-five years, but we didn't know that. We managed to find somebody and then it came to light that instead of not having any relatives, I had 200 relatives in this town. And another 200 in another town but I didn't meet them that day. So, they paraded us around from one house to the next to the next. We only had a day because we didn't leave any time for this because we didn't think we would find anything. And we ended at the house of my father's uncle, my grandmother's youngest brother, who was only in his seventies then. I think of seventy as being young now. [Laughs.] I don't know if I thought that then. He was a very vigorous man. Everyone was there because every house that we went to we had accumulated more people; we had this retinue, what's the word for that in Italian—like a corteo, a whole crowd of people that followed us. By the time we got there, there were like forty of us and my father's aunt comes out with this big platter of steak and vegetables and I said, “Abbiamo mangiato non so quante volte” (we've already eaten I don't know how many times) because every house we went to, they fed us something, and she slapped the table with big hands and said, “Your father put the food on this table and you're going to eat.” So we ate. The next day we had to leave because we had a flight from Rome, and we drove back to Rome that morning. They gave us the branch of a tree with some fruit on it and some eggs that had just been laid, they were still warm, they had feathers on them. We hid them in the luggage, and we took them with us.My parents picked us up at about five in the afternoon at Kennedy Airport, and we went to their house in Queens and my mother made an omelet with those eggs. It was a great moment in my life, I have to tell you, in all of our lives. My mother never wanted to go either, but she went after that, the next year with my sister and my father. After that it really changed our lives. We had already been married a year by the time we did this. They said, “Vi siete sposati da un anno e niente bambini. C’è un problema?” (You've been married a year already and no kids. Is there a problem?) So, we came back, and I said, “We better have a baby.” [Laughs.] She agreed and we had a baby—a couple.Eventually, when the kids were eight and three, respectively, we went back to Italy, and we lived in Rome. We lived for a month in the north and then we lived in Rome for a year, and that's how I learned Italian and my kids also. That changed it. My wife is the one who made me an Italian. She kept saying, “Your children have Italian names, you owe it to them to do what you can to improve.” Also, on a less mysterious level, I discovered that the things that I wrote about British writers, although everybody liked them, weren't always so easy to publish. Whereas anything that I wrote about this, everybody wanted it. The first paper that I wrote was given as a seminar at NYU. It was called “De vulgaria eloquentia. An Approach to the Language of Italian American Fiction.” I invented a way of adapting Dante's Trattato to the necessity of inventing a language in English. An Italian American language within English. And I thought they were going to laugh me out of the room, but that's not what happened. In fact, after the seminar was over, this gentleman came up to me and said, “I really like your paper, we'd like to publish it in our journal.” I said, “What journal is that?” He said, “Yale Italian Studies.” Well, OK. After that was the beginning of my real career.I had these two things; I had trained very hard in this other thing, and I asked one of my colleagues here. I said, “I don't know what to do—should I go this way or this way?” and he said, “Go through the door that opens.” And that's what I did. It really was a good kind of immigrant conclusion. I decided on good capitalist grounds—make what sells. So, that made me into a kind of professional Italian American. And the overall strategy of not only what I did but some other people that I've worked with was to, above all, to improve our notion of what we had to offer. Because I think we were ashamed of ourselves. I certainly was. And other people, of course, enjoyed making us feel ashamed of ourselves. It's a part of the situation. So, what I've done is una critica militante (an activist critique), it's not really scholarship, I don't think.R.S. How do you feel about your ethnic background today?R.V. I don't like the word ethnic particularly. It's OK, you are a sociologist, so you use this word.Because ethnic, to me applies to una tribù senza storia, una tribù illetterata (a tribe with no history, an illiterate tribe), so that you have to approach them like an anthropologist and try and figure it out and write things down that were never written down. Italian is nothing like that. Everything is written down. You want to know who were the consuls in Rome in the year 325 BC? It's carved in a rock. There's a lot that's written down, an enormous record. When I lived in Italy, one of the things that really, really amazed me was how the visual world had basically been created by mathematicians. Italy is about mathematics. It's all these artificial perspectives, incredible relationships. You know the orto botanico (botanic garden) in Rome? Maybe you've seen this there. It doesn't have a name; it's on a hill; it's the bottom of the Gianicolo, and there's a stairway. The stairway has three steps, but it's built in diminishing perspective. That's remarkable, it's not convincing, it doesn't really fool the eye like that famous church in Milano near the Piazza Duomo. Bramante built it, it's a very small church, but when you walk in it looks like it's enormous. To me that's Italy. Everything is written down. If you get into a real estate dispute in Italy and you really pursue it, but the time you get finished you will have covered this table with books. Because the history of every plot of land is endless; it's one of my favorite things about Italy.There's a church in Rome called San Nicola in Carcere. No one knows it, although it's in the most obvious place, it's right across the street from the Teatro Marcello, right down by the Tiber, but it's tiny. This church has been some kind of a something for about at least 2,300 years. First it was Forum Auditorium, where they sold oil and there was a little temple to Athena or Minerva, I don't know who. It's near Porta Ottavia. It has a very long history. First it was a market, then it was a temple, then in the Middle Ages it was the stronghold of the Pierangeli and the Frangipane (I love these Roman names!), and they had a prison there. That's why it's called carcere but it became the church of San Nicola. It's almost never open; like many of the best things of Rome, it's always locked up. When I lived in Rome, I used to walk all over Rome every morning for hours, and I found it open one day and I went in. Every column, every single column, was different from the others because it's a collage made by history. Every part of it is interesting, but to me this is the cream of the joke. In the abside (apse), there's un affresco semisferico of whatever the pope was at the Council of Nicaea excommunicating Ariano, and I thought, “Wow, look at this, it's so modern.” I thought, “Wow, late Roman painting was really something.” It turned out that this painting was commissioned by Pio IX in 1870. Actually, it's a kind of a typical Roman insult sideways. It's about the Risorgimento. It doesn't say that, but when I found out I thought yes, I'm finally becoming an Italian, I understand these things. So, to call this ethnic, somehow or other, it kind of flattens it out. It's just so inaccurate because it's not an ethnic identity, it's a historical protagonism, that's how I feel.R.S. So, this is the way you define what you have inherited of your Italian heritage?R.V. Absolutely, but it's not only what I inherited, mind you, it's what I went and claimed. I didn't claim the land, because I realized that I didn't want it, or I didn't want the trouble that would be associated with it. But when I saw the Certosa di Pavia I claimed that and all the rest of it. And Milano, I love Milano. Even though as an Italian American perhaps I shouldn't love Milano, it's a complicated issue. But I love Milano, I love Torino, Genoa, all of those places. But especially Milano.R.S. But you've never visited Trieste?R.V. No, not yet, eventually I'll get there. Fiorello La Guardia was a counselor and an official in Trieste during World War I, before he was a sindaco di (mayor of) New York.R.S. You are also an American. So, how do your Italian identity and your American identity live together?R.V. In America, nobody's American, everybody is something else. In America the idea of un'identità spaccata è normale (a divided identity is normal). Not only that but tutti, tutti, tutti dislocated. I'm peculiar; I live in the very county where I was born. I didn't grow up here, I grew up in Queens, which is almost the same thing, but not quite. It's the same diocese, but it's not the same county. But when I came to teach at Brooklyn College, I bought a house here and I always preferred Brooklyn to Queens, it's much nicer. In that sense, I could be Italian. I know a guy in Florence who was offered a transfer to Torino and he refused to go perchè si sentiva fiorentino (because he felt like a Florentine).R.S. This is typical of Italians; they don't like much to move around, they prefer to stay in the place they like.R.V. I'm like that too. I could move to Rome, but I couldn't move to Cincinnati, I couldn't move to Texas. When I was young, it wasn't easy to get a job at a City University or anyplace in the city. But I waited and took lousy jobs until I could get one because I thought, what would be the point of becoming a professor and then living in Oklahoma? You might as well be a cowboy; it would be better. I had a very confirmed attitude about civiltà (civilization), that's what I would say if you asked me what I am. I'm a civilized person, I live in a city. I like cities. I mean, there are other cities that I could have put up with. I like Boston. Strangely enough, I like Los Angeles, a lot of New Yorkers don't, but I do. Have you ever been in Los Angeles?R.S. Yes.R.V. You don't like it?R.S. Not really. I like San Francisco.R.V. San Francisco is the European one, although you know what Arturo Toscanini said about San Francisco: “l'Italia senza l'anima” (Italy without the soul). But this was 1900. There's some anima there now, but it's all Japanese and Chinese.R.S. There is a big Little Italy there; I met many Italians, and it reminded me of my country. I felt at home there.R.V. Yes, and it's one of the few cities in the United States outside of New York where you can safely go out to a restaurant. The food is good in San Francisco. But that's not true in Chicago. You can get a good meal in Chicago, but it has to be steak. Otherwise you're taking a chance. There are other things. I was at a conference in Orlando a few years ago. It came lunchtime and I said, “Where can we eat?” And somebody who lives there said, “There's a good Applebee's.” What do you mean “a good Applebee's”? They're all the same. Talk about identità . . .R.S. Do you think there are traits that define someone as American and traits that define someone as Italian?R.V. As I get older, I'm more convinced that the real divisions among people aren't national but divisions of class. As a very well educated American, I can speak much more easily to a well-educated German or Frenchman or Milanese than I can to an ill-educated Italian American who grew up around the corner from me. I have nothing to say to them and I don't understand what they're talking about. Their whole way of life non mi tocca (has nothing to do with me), I just don't want any part of it. It took me a long time to come to this. I was raised on the Left, I wanted to be a man of the people. I think that Italian American, as an identity, has become amazingly diffuse; it's so different in so many places. Do you know a book by Bill Tonelli? It's called The Amazing Story of the Tonelli Family in America: Twelve Thousand Miles in a Buick in Search of Identity, Ethnicity, Geography, Kinship, and Home (1994). He's a very brilliant journalist; he worked for Esquire for many years, Rolling Stone, a first-rate journalist. He works for Condé Nast now. He went around the country finding every Tonelli family that he could, not his relatives, just people named Tonelli and he interviewed them. And it's very interesting how far people get in two generations. Insofar as we are Italian in America, we use whatever is at hand. It's one of the few old sayings of my grandmother I remember: tutto fa brodo (soup's made of everything). You can make being Italian out of anything. And that's what people do.When I was a kid, it was still very much like Southern Italy, maybe even Northern Italy, I don't know if it's as much in Northern Italy, but certainly in the South. The festa del santo (saint's feast) was such a big deal. The saint of my mother's hometown is named Roberto. That's why I'm named Robert. And in my family, and in that town, all the men are named Robert. Then they have some other name. In Sicily, they call that l'ingiuria, some nickname that's scurrilous, they actually called him that. And he's not even really a saint, he's a beato (blessed). It's a funny story. And that was a big feature, I think, in maintaining identification. Robert Orsi (1988) talks about this in his book The Madonna of 115th Street, and a lot of other people talk about it too, but that has faded. There aren't many feasts left and like all this Italian stuff they've become tourist attractions. Little Italy is a sideshow. It's OK; the food is terrible. [Laughs.]R.S. Yes, many places you go, they say Italian food is not Italian.R.V. It depends; there are some real Italian restaurants. In Manhattan we have good Italian restaurants, and you can always go to Eataly if you're really desperate. É una lotta mangiare lì (it's a battle eating there). It's chaos. It's not Italian in the same sense that it would be in any town in Italy. People use food or people use organizations or some people study things, people write histories of their family, there's an awful lot of that going on. People use the Internet. How deep all of that runs, I don't know.R.S. How did your Italian origins affect your choice of education?R.V. It's hard to know. I went to a Jesuit high school and a Jesuit college, only because they were supposed to be the best schools. The public schools that I went to always treated me like a freak. They called my mother in one day when I was in the fourth or fifth grade and they said, “We're worried about your son.” And she said, “Why?” They said, “Well, we gave him an IQ test and he scored twenty points higher than anyone ever scored in this school.” And she said, “What's the problem?” And they said, “We think he must have cheated.” And she said, “From whom?” [Laughs.] She was good. It made them uncomfortable. One of the teachers said, “He thinks he's smarter than I am.” My mother said, “Well, what do you think?” I don't remember thinking that, but who knows? I was an arrogant kid probably. I was very unhappy with all of that. So, at the Jesuit school that I went to, which was a school for smart boys—it's called Regis High School, it's still there, in Manhattan on 84th Street; it was great, it was wonderful, I felt like I was at home at long last—I was with people like me. Then I went to Fordham College. I don't know, I think it might have affected my choice of a profession. When we were freshmen at Regis, I was thirteen, we had to choose between two paths, one of them included German and a lot of math, if you were going to be a scientist, and the other included Greek and French and that was if you were going to be a humanist. And I had already decided that I was going to be a poet, so I picked that one and my father said to me, “Why did you pick that one?” And I told him, “Because I'm going to be a poet.” And he said, “Are you crazy? You're going to starve to death.” And he fought with me about it every day for the rest of his life. And he lived another fifty years. I was sixty-three when my father died, he was almost ninety-seven and he was still arguing with me about it. I think it was more that my allegiance had shifted to my grandfather instead of my father.I think that's probably what happened, psychoanalytically. It was my grandfather first telling me about Dante, that's what ruined me. I've never recovered from it. I've written an epic about it. It's coming out in a few months. You can't escape it. I don't even think it's any good, but I did it anyway. I spent a lot of time on it. I mean, some people like it, but I'm not happy with it. That doesn't mean it's no good. I have to keep reminding myself that. Virgil wanted to burn The Aeneid; did you know that? He left instructions that he wanted it burned.R.S. How did your Italian American background shape your career and profession?R.V. Since I decided to basically write about being Italian American, it had a big impact. But I didn't write only about Italian Americans, I wrote about Italian things which aren't necessarily Italian American. My notion of what it is to be Italian is more ample than some people's. I wrote an essay about this years ago and said that people use the expression Italian American as if the one term divided the other, so you get something smaller than either one of them. But it could just as easily be Italians times Americans, in which case we get something very big. That's the one that I picked. So, for me, before I wrote this epic, aside from what I had done in prep school, I spent twenty years studying Virgil, Homer, Milton, Ariosto, and Tasso and the whole epic tradition because I thought if I was going to presume to write one of these things, I ought to know what other people had done. It's certainly influenced by the fact that I think that if I didn't have this connection with being Italian, I wouldn't have had the confidence to do this. So, I would say that much anyway. But it wasn't like I could say this or that Italian American writer inspired me to do this because none of them did this. There's a lot of great people who have done a lot of great things and I don't mean to diminish their contributions. But it always seemed to me that it was connected to a