--Thanks to my immigrant ancestors from Naples, many Americans often have absolutely no idea what Italy really is, and that's a problem --
Ask most Americans what they think of Italy and they will tell you that it isa country of pizza, spaghetti, the mafia, perhaps 'futbol', and maybe a nice ocean or a beach. They see it as a place to vacation and many are probably interested in visiting it, briefly, but ask them if they would want to actually live there, and most Americans will give you a prompt no. Italy, they will perhaps tell you, is 'bordering on the Third World'. Italy, they will tell you, is in ruins. It is not a good place to live and perhaps, so far as they knew, never has been.
This view, many might think, is solely limited to 'regular' Americans who have no link to Italy. Oddly enough,while this is true, it is not the complete story. In fact, many people living in the USA who have the worst image of all of Italy are the very people who are connected to the bloodlines that once came hurdling out of its southern regions. They are people who now live oh so happily in the USA , but who can trace their bloodlines back to Naples, or Calabria, or Sicily. They call themselves "Italian-Americans". I myself, of course, belong to this group of people, and for many years , as I went about studying the history of not just Italy but the world, I believed many of the same things they did about Italy. I thought it was a nation of pizza and mafias and spaghetti, et cetera. I would look at a place like, say, the United Kingdom with its history of English knights and William Shakespeare and now the Beatles, and immediately think I was seeing a culture infinitely superior to Italy. In fact, to my young self, even as an "Italian-American", basically everywhere looked as though it was and had been forever superior to Italy. Italy was, to me, bordering on the Third World.
If it wasn't , why on earth had anyone left it to come here, right?
This limited perspective of mine went on pretty much until the day I finally decided to actually get to know what was going on in modern Italy and learn the language, and it was on that day that I discovered something very curious, and also very simple, that is never at all mentioned on the shores of the Great and Mighty and Infallible United States, least of all by that group of people known as 'Italian-Americans': Italy, it turns out, is such an old country by this point (literally the oldest settled country in all of Western Europe) that, referring to it as just Italy, even now in the modern age, is, in some sense, beyond ridiculous.
It is a misnomer and not a slight one but a very serious one. In fact, referring to the people who arrived here in droves in the early half of the 20th century as "Italians" is a bit of a sin, if you ask me, because the truth is that these people were not really any such thing. After all, if they were, they would have spoken Italian. But guess what? They did not speak it! They did not speak it at all, in truth! They spoke a dialect (which is not an offshoot but rather its own language entirely) called Napolitano, or Sicilianu' et cetera. In fact, I myself am probably the first person ever to speak this style of language in my family, literally in all of time! No one else spoke it before me. Not even the so-called "Italians" who immigrated here in the early 1900's. Again, they did not speak it. They spoke Napolitano....
Some people might wonder why I have a problem with this. Well, it should be simple to explain but let me put it to you lik this: When I first started to learn the Italian language in 2012, I did not realize what I was doing at the time, but I was on the beginning of a journey that, like I said, never happened for my family previously , and the theme of the journey was that I went in a direction that my great grandparents did not go in when they decided to come to the USA: Instead of going across the entirety of the Atlantic Ocean and coming to the States, like my ancestor chose to do, I instead, you could say, journeyed north from Naples, to Tuscany, and became an "Italian". In other words, I picked up the language of north Italy and Florence and Dante Alighieri, which is where the style that I now speak comes from, and is still spoken in its best and purest form, to this day. In fact, one of the first things my friend Fabrizio said to me when I began studying 'under his wing' was that "..you are lucky you have found me, who is actually from Tuscany, to teach you Italian, because I actually speak it the best way." You might think Fabrizio was being arrogant or rude. He wasn't. The truth is that Fabrizio, being a Florentine, does indeed speak the best Italian that is possible to speak. And the truth is also that many Neapolitans and Sicilians and Calabrians et cetera... do not. Many of them, actually, to this very day, just do not speak it at all.
This is not to say that they don't want to, because trust me, most of them do. Speaking Italian would mean better opportunities and a better way of life and, if they are a musician who sings, a far more serious reach into the culture.It would also mean a much wider selection of books to read, since all the books published in the peninsula are, last I heard, in Italian, and not Napolitano. Alas, they do not speak Italian many times, or often not at all, because they are not from the right place to do that sort of thing. They are instead from those *other* places that lie below what is known in Italy as the 'mezzogiorno'. It is a popular phrase known as the 'MID DAY' and it is used as a way to describe everything below Rome. In other words, above Rome there is sunshine and beauty and 'bellezza' and light... but below it... what? Below it there is night. Below it there is madness and sadness...doom and gloom.
And of course this is where all the folks who were headed for the States came from, because they wanted to escape that doom and gloom. Many Americans might not realize it (many "Italian Americans", again, often do not) but next to no one immigrated to this country from above the mezzo giorno. And this doesn't just apply to Italy in fact, because the truth about the United States and who immigrated here from Europe in specific is that, following the middle of the 1800s, traffic from Western Europe basically ceased to happen, and this trend, if you could call it that, continues to this day.
There are not many stories in the States of huge swathes of folks coming from Western Europe after the mid 1800s. Why would they? They were all comfortably situated above the "mezzogiorno", and they had no reason to come here. They were living nice lives and they are continuing to live those nice lives to this day, considering the fact that Western Europe is a decidedly nicer, and most definitely easier place to live, than the United States, and has been for quite some time. Once you exclude the United Kingdom (comprised of England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland) there is literally not a single West Euro country who has any reason to be even slightly envious of anything you or I are doing in the US. If anything, they have reason to be frightened for us: our quality of life and our suicide rates are often insanely higher. To a Western Euro, the United States looks like Naples looks to my friends from Tuscany: it looks a bit like the THIRD WORLD.
But again, this is a very strange perspective for many citizens here in God's Country, where we are told we are living in the greatest nation that has ever been and where our immigrants never cease to back this claim up, either. This point of course is what brings us back to my Neapolitan ancestors and just how they are a bit responsible for fogging up the view we Americans have of Europe. Essentially what is happening, and what has been happening for quite some time in the States now, is that many of us are taking the opinions of people who came from destroyed places like Naples and Poland (which is east europe) and beyond, and we are often using those opinions to shape our view of West Europe as a whole, because, not knowing any geography and also being quite removed from it all, we think of them as being totally connected and the same ,et cetera. They are not the same, of course, they are not the same at all. They are wildly different places and they vary widely in terms of economics and health and wealth et cetera.
In fact, the best way that I can think of to describe it to an American is to say that judging Italy, for example, by Naples, would be like judging all of the USA, by the horror story that is known as the inner-city Bronx. Most Americans would be absolutely appalled, I imagine, if I tried to say that what is happening in the inner city Bronx or Chicago (where Donald is now sending federal agents to investigate) were places that reflected "all of America". They would desperately try to explain to me about some beautfiul little town in the middle of no where in Kansas or Missouri, and they would tell me that I ought to see the majesty of Maine, or the beautiful cities of Florida, yadayada, in order to show me that the dangers of the Bronx and southside "Chi Raq" are not 'the real America'.
And yet, when it comes to Europe, from which so many Americans have hailed, most Americans are using the Napolitano brush, even without realizing it oftentimes, to paint over the entire western part of the continent. They automatically assume, you will often find, that Europeans simply "must be backwards" and "behind the times", and the reason they assume this is obvious: west Europe is seen as just one of the many god awful hellhole places in the world that we all abandoned in order to reach the Greatest Country Ever Created Since Time Immemorial, the USA. Yet... again...it cannot be stressed enough that the actual "cultural makeup" of the USA is, in truth, hardly made up of western Europe DNA cells. The truth is that most people here seem to come from a few select places and they are as follows: the British Isles (which are not continental west europe), Eastern europe (which has long been in ruins), or of course that little spot below the mezzo giorno, in Europes "dirty south". In other words, we don't really, at the end of the day, have much in common with the 'real' continental Europeans who did all that great stuff like create Beethoven and Mozart and Michelangelo, et cetera....
This is completely visible in our modern day politics of course, if you know how to look at least, and to differentiate between the various European spheres, once you realize that we, of course, sided with the British when it came to Brexit, and we also have people with decidedly Russian names like Ivanka in our story. We are, as a people, somewhat standing in opposition to Western Europe just like we all know Russia is ,and one could perhaps argue that we have good reason to be: When they were throwing the greatest party of all time, we were not invited.
Just take a closer look at all the so-called "whites" who immigrated here and you'll often see that most of them have quite a strange amount in common with my Neapolitans from Italy's "night region": They all seem to suffer from what I call the 'close but not quite a cigar' disease, which means to say that they always seem to be coming from places that were literally right around the corner from the great West Euro party of high culture and splendid paintings and palaces, but they're never quite there either. Take the Irish, for instance. They have white skin, and so the average American thinks of them as a "bonafide European", but when you look closer, you see of course that the Irish were not even invited to English tea time (and of course tea time in England hardly compared to the majesties of tea time in Venice, Italy, in 1605). Or of course take again the Polish or the Germans who lived in the east all those years ago, like Trumps grandaddy Friedrich Drumpf, born in what was then 'the Kingdom of Bavaria': They look, to American eyes, to be people who are smack dab in the midst of some great West Euro party of innovation and palaces and great wealth and knowledge, but they were actually just on the outskirts of it, living rather cluelessly in want and lack, probably not even knowing how to read. They were not, in other words, in the real "cradle" of progress. They were not in a fancy city like Venice, or Rome, or Berlin, or Paris, et cetera. They were somewhere no good...sort of wild.
And of course in our own time what happened except that they have completely rewritten, from their angry and left out eyes, the manner in which we see and interpret West Europe. They have made us believe, erroneously, that it was just as shitty as the place from which they came, even though it was not, and still is not. They have tricked us into believing that it was just another place in a long line of places that failed us and so we had to flee, even when this is not true, since again...no one fled that place..... the only people who really fled were the ones living outside of it ...and, oddly enough, what are they doing now but often preaching "exclusionary" politics that sound exactly like the ones that have made places like East Europe and its Dirty South and the UK such disaster zones in the first place! For the truth is that we are , many of us at least, finally at a point in history where we could create our own kind and generous and "high class" West Europe, but we are actively choosing not to. We are instead choosing to sit and obsess over "Frontier" politics that are dangerous, over strongmen dictators, not implementing national help to people in need etc. We are still, to this day in America, on the Republican side of the fence, looking at everything through a RURAL, LEFT OUT lens rather than an urban one...
And a big part of the reason for this, I cannot say it enough, is directly because of how much we just still do not understand about the real Europeans, who never came here at all....
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