Italian-American Culture

This is an extremely complex subject that I couldn't possibly hope to address in such a small space, but to give you a quick overview: one of the things that most don't know regarding the Italian they commonly hear in the United States is that Italy, its country of origin, has a variety of different dialects that are so different, some consider them to be different languages entirely. This is a point of contention among scholars of Italian language and culture.

My father's family, for example, comes from the region in Italy surrounding Napoli (Naples), where a dialect is spoken known as Neapolitan or "Napolitan." This is considered by some to be a completely separate language. It is often lumped with the collection of dialects known as "Calabrese," which are spoken in a region south of Napoli known as Calabria. This is a point of contention as well, partially because of some bad blood between the Napolitans and the Calabrese. Sicilian, spoken on the island of Sicily, is also commonly considered to be a separate language entirely.

Many of the Italians who emigrated to the United States spoke various dialects other than Standard Italian, and over the years a good deal of slang developed that is unique to the Italian-American community--due to the meshing of all of these dialects with each other and with American English. An entertaining example is the term "goomba," which is an Italian-American derivation from the Standard Italian compare, meaning "friend" or, more specifically, "godfather" (because you are the godfather of your friend's children). It has evolved from a rather rude term to describe Italian-Americans--a term that somewhat implied affiliation with the Italian-American mafia--into a good-natured term often batted around by Italian-Americans themselves to describe one another.

How on Earth did compare turn into "goomba?" Good question. In the Neapolitan dialect, compare is cumpa, and there has been a rather significant trend in the Italian-American dialect for the letter C to become the letter G, and for the letter P to evolve into the letter B. Thus, "goomba" from compare.

Interestingly, another valid point to be made about the Italian language as spoken in the United States is related to the Second World War. According to the Wikipedia article for Italian-American, the author Lawrence Distasi has stated that "the loss of spoken Italian among the Italian American population can be tied to U.S. government pressures during World War II. During World War II, in various parts of the country, the U.S. government displayed signs that read, Don't Speak the Enemy's Language. Such signs designated the languages of the Axis powers, German, Japanese, and Italian, as 'enemy languages'."

Thanks to luminaries like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin (born Dino Paul Crocetti), the concept of Italian-American music is synonymous to most people with the swing, jazz and Big Band era of the 1940s and 1950s. With the unsavory reputation that many Italian-Americans of this era found themselves trying to shed thanks to organized crime, and despite the fact that Sinatra found himself entangled with some of them (truthfully, most in the entertainment industry at that time found themselves entangled with the mafia to at least a minor degree, due to their stronghold in the industry--many major clubs and theaters such as the Copacabana were owned by mafia members, and professional boxing also had major ties) the massive popularity of Italian-American singers in the Forties and Fifties helped the community's reputation immensely. Other popular singers of the day included Bobby Vinton (born Stanley Robert Vintula, Jr.), Vic Damone (born Vito Rocco Farinola--Damone was his mother's maiden name), and Tony Bennett (born Anthony Dominick Benedetto). Such icons of popular music remain an integral part of the Italian-American identity today, and their crooning voices are heard in the more than 300 Italian-American festivals celebrated annually across the United States (appreciation to Wikipedia for the statistic).

Much like the dialect, Italian-American food is a meshing of the many different styles of cuisine throughout Italy as well as that of American culture. It has become so incredibly popular that, according to the Wikipedia article for Italian-American Cuisine, "A measure of the widespread popularity of Italian-American cuisine in the United States is this: In the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area of Minnesota, demographically dominated by Scandinavian- and German-Americans, the City Pages newspaper identified Italian-American food as the most widespread culinary style in the region, with examples ranging from the ubiquitous spaghetti dinner to fashionable restaurants."

Pizza and pasta are the foods that most immediately reference when thinking of Italian-American food, though seafood is an enormous element as well--it should be noted that the typical "red sauce" creations that the average American pictures when Italian food is mentioned are inspired by southern Italy. Northern Italian food tends to contain more butter and rice and fewer tomatoes.

It also should be noted that the origins of pizza are highly disputed. Most seem to agree that it is Italian in origin, though different regions claim to have invented different forms of the modern dish, which is said to have originated in Napoli.

Pasta creates some arguments as well with regard to its origin, as many claim that it is actually a Chinese dish brought to Italy by the explorer Marco Polo.

If you know anything about the traditional Italian-American Christmas Eve, you've probably heard of the feast of the seven fishes. I have to tell you, that's a case of Southern Italy getting all the press again--according to restaurateur Rizzi DeFabo, most Italians north of Naples have never even heard of this tradition. My paternal extended family being Napolitan, but blended, I grew up with a blended version of the tradition. In its purest form, the tradition dictates that one eat only fish on Christmas Eve, and no other meat should be consumed. When this tradition is followed, the dinner is known as pranzo delta vigilia, roughly "lunch of the vigil." However, my father's younger sister hosted for many many years, and her husband is German-American, as is my mother, so we had a much larger assortment of food, including chicken, green salad, and a baked ham. Obviously, it was a blend of several cultures, which was very educational for those of us who experienced the celebration as children.

Traditionally, a southern Italian Christmas Eve would include a fixed number of seven seafood dishes. We know that the number is fixed for superstitious reasons and is an allusion to the Bible, but there have been many theories as to the exact allusion--the seven Deadly Sins, the seven days Mary and Joseph traveled to Jerusalem, the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church, the seven days of creation--there are numerous usages of the number seven in the Bible; many interpret it as a lucky number or a number of perfection for this reason. No one is sure which, if any of these, are the true origin. Some families forgo the fixed number and celebrate with a larger, but always odd number of seafood dishes: nine, eleven or even thirteen.

Our seven fishes were usually lobster (in red sauce to be spilled over linguine), shrimp (both steamed and breaded), calamari (squid--both steamed and fried), scungilli (conch, and another genuinely Italian-American word: originally "sconcigli"), baccala (cod--in a vinegary salad with garlic and black olives, and in breaded fritters with raisins covered in powdered sugar), mussels, and clams, but other families also enjoy whitefish, salmon, snapper, eel and/or octopus. There were assorted pasta salads as well.

This enormous dinner--usually eaten early, in late afternoon (but some more religious Italian-American families choose to fast all day and break their fast with this meal following midnight mass)--is followed by the Venetian table, which is a dessert table consisting of Italian cookies and pastries. This table is often trotted out at weddings as well, and is even more elaborate. It usually includes biscotti, almond cookies, anise cookies (pizzelles), cannoli, tiramisu and zeppole. At our gathering it included some classic cakes and sugar cookies, and German bread pudding as well. You had to have a hollow leg to make it through dessert, but I usually managed pretty well!

There is always a nativity scene present in the home as well. In my Protestant house we always assembled the scene in its entirety when we first put up the Christmas decorations. However, the baby Jesus was never there during my aunt's Christmas Eve celebration, because it is Catholic tradition to wait until midnight, when it is technically Christmas Day, to place the baby in the manger, symbolizing his birth.

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