Delirious Naples

Stanislao G. Pugliese (Edited By)
Stanislao G. Pugliese is Professor of Modern European History and the Queensboro Unico Distinguished Professor of Italian and Italian American Studies at Hofstra University. His most recent book is Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone, winner of the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography. He is the author of Answering Auschwitz: Primo Levi's Science and Humanism after the Fall (Fordham).
Pellegrino D'Acierno (Edited By)
Pellegrino D'Acierno is Professor of Comparative Literature and Languages at Hofstra University.

Stanislao G. Pugliese is Professor of Modern European History and the Queensboro Unico Distinguished Professor of Italian and Italian American Studies at Hofstra University. His most recent book is Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone, winner of the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography. He is the author of Answering Auschwitz: Primo Levi's Science and Humanism after the Fall (Fordham).

Theresa Aiello is Associate Professor at the New York University Silver School of Social Work. She is Director of the Advanced Practice Certificate Program and codirects the Advanced Certificate in Child and Family Treatment. Dr. Aiello is also a psychoanalyst and has written extensively on psychoanalysis, oral history, and narrativist approaches. She won the New York University Distinguished Teacher Award and was elected to the National Academy of Social Work as Distinguished Scholar and Practitioner. She is in private practice in New York City.

B. Amore is an artist, educator, and writer. She studied at Boston University, University of Rome, Accademia di Belle Arti di Carrara, and is the recipient of Massachusetts Cultural grants, a Fulbright Grant, a Mellon Fellowship, as well as a Citation of Merit Award presented by the Vermont Arts Council. She is founder of the Carving Studio and Sculpture Center in Vermont. Amore taught for many years at the Boston Museum School and has won numerous public art commissions in both the United States and Japan and is represented by SOHO 20 Gallery, New York, and Boston Sculptors Gallery. Life line—filo della vita, her multimedia exhibit, which premiered at the Ellis Island Museum, has recently been published as An Italian American Odyssey, Life line—filo della vita: Through Ellis Island and Beyond. Her art and literary reviews appear in International Sculpture Magazine and Art New England, and her creative writing and art in VIA, Italian Americana, Biancheria, and Speaking Memory, among others. Rondini di Passaggio is on view at the Museo dell’Emigrazione, Sant’Angelo dei Lombardi, Province of Avellino, Italy, and is a re- evocation of her Naples/New York exhibit created for the Delirious Naples Conference at the Hofstra University Museum.

Andrea Baldi is Professor of Italian at Rutgers University. He has published articles on sixteenth-century conduct books, a monograph on Alessandro Piccolomini (2001), and is the coeditor of Essays in Honor of Marga Cottino-Jones (2003). He has also devoted his critical attention to contemporary Italian literature, publishing articles on the relationship between literature and cinema (Luigi Pirandello, the Tavianis and Italo Calvino, Monicelli) and on women’s writing (Anna Banti and Elsa Morante). He has worked extensively on Anna Maria Ortese, editing and prefacing The Iguana (2005) and publishing a monograph on her short fiction entitled La meraviglia e il disincanto (2010). He is currently completing a manuscript on the representation of urban spaces in Ortese’s works.

Angelo Cannavacciuolo was born in Naples in 1956 and earned his degree in Arabic from the prestigious Instituto degli Studi Orientali in Naples. He has worked as an actor and director and has written for the theater, movies, and television. He wrote the libretto for the opera Il soffio delle fate (based upon his novel by the same name) that world premiered in May 2009 and the Oratorio di speranza, cantata drammatica, for theaters in Stralsund and Grünsfeld, Germany. In February 2009 he was awarded the prestigious Archita by the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici for the complexity of his literary achievements. He is currently writing his second opera with Maestro Filippo Zigante. He is the author of Guardiani delle nuvole, Acque basse, Le cose accadono, Parole in viaggio / Words in Journey, and, most recently, SacrAmerica. He created the annual international literary event Words in Journey—Parole in Viaggio, held in Campania.

Joseph Connors has taught at the Boston Latin School and in the art history departments of Chicago, Columbia, and Harvard, and was Slade Professor at Oxford in 1999. He was elected to the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca in Rome in 1993 and the American Philosophical Society in 2006. He served as director of the American Academy in Rome from 1988 to 1992 and of Villa I Tatti in Florence from 2002 to 2010. He has published on Roman urban planning and architecture; his long-term research centers on the genial Swiss-born architect of baroque Rome, Francesco Borromini (1599–1667).

Rose DeAngelis is Professor of English at Marist College. She has published articles on American and Italian-American authors and has edited a volume of essays entitled Between Anthropology and Literature: Interdisciplinary Discourse (2014). She recently published an article on The Rose Tattoo in The Tennessee Williams Annual Review and edited a special issue of Italian Americana in which her article on Louisa Ermelino’s novels appeared.

Erri de Luca, Italy’s most widely read living author, was born in Naples in 1950. In 1968, he left Naples for Rome where he became a member of Lotta Continua until 1976. He worked as a laborer in Turin, Naples, France, Milan, Catania, and Rome. He was a volunteer worker in Tanzania and ran humanitarian aide convoys during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. In the spring of 1999, he was in Belgrade to protest NATO bombing of the city. He considers aerial bombing of cities an act of terrorism. He is the author of many books, which have won numerous awards abroad, but not in Italy, where he refuses to submit his books for literary prizes. He is a mountain climber and self-taught linguist, translating the Hebrew Bible and works of Yiddish. Among his books published in English are Sea of Memory (1999), God’s Mountain (2002), Three Horses (2005), The Day before Happiness (2011), Me, You (2011), The Night Shift Belongs to the Stars (2012), The Crime of a Soldier (2013), The Story of Irene (2015), and A Dissenting Word (2015). He is the screenwriter of two films, Di là dal vetro (2011, in which he also stars) and Il turno di notte lo fanno le stelle, which was nominated for an Oscar and won an award at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2013.

John Domini often gets to Naples, where his father was born and raised, and where he still has family. He has taught, published, and served on symposia in the city. In the United States, his writing has won awards in all genres, with fiction in the Paris Review and elsewhere, nonfiction in the New York Times and elsewhere, including Italian journals. Grants include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has three books of stories, the latest MOVIEOLA!, and three novels, two of them set in Naples. One more such story is coming in 2019, completing a trilogy. In 2009, his novel Earthquake I.D., in Italian translation, was runner-up for the Domenico Rea Prize. Other books include a selection of reviews and criticism. He has taught at Harvard, Northwestern, and elsewhere.

Simona Frasca earned a doctor’s degree in History and Analysis of Musical Cultures at La Sapienza University, Rome. Her field of research is the social history of music, free jazz, the early sound reproduction era in relation to popular production and the Italian migration to the United States. She was a Fulbright Researcher at the Calandra Institute in New York City as well as a freelance music critic. Frasca is the author of Norah Jones, Piano Girl; Birds of Passage: La diaspora dei musicisti napoletani a New York, which has been translated into English. She is currently working on issues of piracy and the illegal music market in Italy.

Jonathan Galassi has translated the poetry of Eugenio Montale, Giacomo Leopardi, and Primo Levi, and is the author of three books of poems, Morning Run (1989), North Street and Other Poems (2001), and Left-Handed (2013), as well as a novel, Muse (2015). He is president and publisher of the publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux, in New York City.

Fred Gardaphe is distinguished professor of English and Italian/American studies at Queens College/CUNY and the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute. He is a Fulbright fellow (University of Salerno, 2011) and past president of the Italian American Studies Association (formerly AIHA), MELUS, and the Working Class Studies Association. His books include Italian Signs, American Streets (Duke University Press, 1996), From Wiseguys to Wise Men (Routledge, 2006), The Art of Reading Italian Americana (Bordighera, 2011), and Read ’Em and Reap (Bordighera, 2017). He is cofounder and coeditor of VIA: Voices in Italian Americana, editor of the Italian American Culture Series of SUNY Press, and associate editor of the Fra Noi.

Patrizia La Trecchia is Associate Professor at the University of South Florida where she directs the Italian Program and Associated Faculty at the USF Patel College of Global Sustainability. Her research includes film, media, literature, globalization, migration, citizenship, the Italian South, food and identity, culture of food, sustainability of diets and food consumption, and food waste. She is the author of one monograph, two textbooks, and over two dozen peer-reviewed articles. Her book Uno sguardo a Sud deals with the representation of the Italian South in a global perspective, focusing on the city of Naples in media discourse, literature, film, and music. Her articles have appeared internationally in scholarly peer reviewed journals. She is one of the faculty of the Food Studies Certificate and of the Film Studies Certificate at USF.

Ilaria Marchesi is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Hofstra University, where she directs the Classics Program. In 2008, she published The Art of Pliny’s Letters: A Poetics of Allusion in the Private Correspondence, a monograph on intertextuality in the letters of Pliny the Younger for which she won an NEH grant. She also edited and contributed to the book Pliny the Book-Maker: Betting on Posterity in the Epistles (2015). Besides epistolography, her research interests include Latin satirical poetry and the ancient novel; she has published articles on Horace, Petronius, and the reception of classical authors in Petrarch. Most recently, she has published Live in Pompei (2016), an essay in narrative form on the cultural value of the archeological past for the young generation, written with her husband, Simone Marchesi.

Simone Marchesi is an associate professor of Italian at Princeton University.

J. Nicholas Napoli earned his Ph.D. at Princeton and specializes in baroque art and architecture in Europe and the Americas. He has taught art history and expository writing at Pratt University, Rutgers University, the University of York (UK), the University of Virginia, and Bard College. Napoli has contributed articles to Napoli Nobilissima, Art History, and Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome. He is currently writing a book on the Carthusian monastery in Naples, the Certosa di San Martino.

Salvatore Napolitano was educated in Naples and Paris and has been Research Fellow and Lecturer at the Warburg Institute, London; the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, Paris; the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Washington; the Bayeriche Akademie der Wissenschaften, Munich; the Kunst Historische Institut, Florence; Université de Paris-Sorbonne IV, France; University of Malta, Malta; University of Warsaw, Poland; Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa; Italian Institute of Historical Studies “Benedetto Croce,” Naples; and the CNR-Italian Research Council, Rome. He is currently full professor of Humanities (Classics and Italian) at La Scuola d’Italia “Guglielmo Marconi,” New York City, while lecturing at New York University as Visiting Scholar in the Classics Department. His interests are focused on the relationship between visual evidence and written texts; the role of monuments in the transmission of cultural memory and identity; and the reception of the classical past in European modern scholarship. He is the author of the forthcoming “Cold Genius”: Luigi Lanzi’s “History of Painting in Italy.” Art Historiography, Antiquarian Studies, and Philosophy of History in the European Enlightenment.

Jason Pine is professor of anthropology and media studies at Purchase College, State University of New York. He is author of The Art of Making Do in Naples (Minnesota, 2012).

Joseph Rescigno has served as Artistic Advisor and Principal Conductor of the Florentine Opera Company (Milwaukee) since 1981 and became Music Director of La Musica Lirica festival in Italy in 2005. In these and other positions as well as guest engagements, he has conducted music from across the repertory for such companies as the Montreal Symphony and the New York City Opera. From 1996 to 2000, he also served as music director of L’Orchestre Métropolitain in Montreal, where he made five studio recordings: Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Mozart, and Verismo. In addition, he conducts the live recordings of Jōruri and Río de Sangre, two operatic world premieres. Rescigno comes from a long line of musicians on both sides of his family and holds a Master of Music (piano) from the Manhattan School of Music. His home is New York City where he is also working on his first book.

Gabriella Romani is an associate professor of Italian at Seton Hall University.

Gioia Timpanelli is one of the founders of the worldwide revival of storytelling. She is one of the handful of artists who significantly changed the way our culture views narrative and the oral tradition. Often called the “Dean of American Storytelling,” she is today considered one of the world’s foremost storytellers—widely respected as both a master and scholar of the ageless art. She won two Emmy Awards (Citations of Merit) for Tales from Viet Nam and for her series of thirty programs on storytelling, Stories from My House, on educational television, where she created, wrote, produced, and appeared in eight series of literature programs shown on PBS stations throughout the United States. She has also received the prestigious Women’s National Book Association Award for bringing the oral tradition to the American public and the Maharishi Award. She has performed her improvisational telling of ancient and modern stories and given talks in collaboration with respected masters of other art forms, especially in the world of poetry and letters throughout the United States and in other countries. She is one of the founding members of the New York Storytelling Center in New York City. Her most recent book is What Makes a Child Lucky.

Terrence Ward is a writer, documentary producer, and cultural consultant who has worked in the Middle East and the United States. He also participated in humanitarian missions for the Open Society to Burma and the United Nations in East Timor. His first book, Searching for Hassan: A Journey to the Heart of Iran (2003), has become a cult classic in America, a best seller in Iran, and is being developed as the first American Iranian coproduction for a feature film to be shot in Iran since the Revolution. His book The Guardian of Mercy (2016), is a moving narrative that interweaves Caravaggio’s life story with those of people in contemporary Naples whose lives are transformed by the power of art—and mercy. Ward and his wife, Idanna Pucci, are International Trustees of the World Conference of Religions for Peace—the world’s largest interfaith organization.

Robert Zweig is a professor of English at Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York. He teaches courses in Literature, Writing, Modern Poetry, and for many years was the Intensive Writing Coordinator for the college. He has a doctorate in English Literature from the City University of New York. Zweig has numerous peer-reviewed publications in journals, encyclopedias, and books. He is also coauthor of Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing, a best-selling work. His memoir, Return to Naples: My Italian Bar Mitzvah and other Discoveries was translated and published in Italy under the title Ritorno a Napoli in 2008, when he was invited by the mayor of Naples to a reception for his book in the City Hall of Naples. He has received several scholarships and awards, including a Mellon Fellowship and the Phi Beta Kappa award for “Outstanding Teaching Skills” as one of the Top Ten Professors at Manhattan Community College.

Valerio Caprara has been professor of film history and criticism in the faculty of Lettere e Filosofia at the Università Degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale” since 2011 and currently teaches at the Università Degli Studi di Napoli “Suor Orsola Benincasa.” He has been film critic of the Neapolitan daily newspaper Il Mattino since 1979. From 1983 until 2000 he was the artistic director of “Incontri Internazionali del Cinema” in Sorrento, and since 2010 has been President of the Film Commission for the Campania Region. In 2011, Caprara was named to the commission for cinematography in the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali.

Francesco Durante born in Anacapri, teaches the Culture and Literature of Italian Americans at the Università Suor Orsola Benincasa in Naples. As one of Italy’s foremost journalists and literary critics, he has written for various Italian newspapers and journals. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including the groundbreaking Italoamericana. Storia e letteratura degli italiani negli Stati Uniti, 1776–1943, in two volumes (the second was published with the same title by Fordham University Press in 2014); Figli di due mondi. Fante, DiDonato & C: narratori italoamericani degli anni Trenta e Quaranta; Scuorno (vergogna); I napoletani; and, together with the late Rudolph J. Vecoli, Oh Capitano! La vita favolosa di Celso Cesare Moreno in quattro continenti. He has edited two volumes of Mondadori’s prestigious Meridiani series on John Fante and Domenico Rea. In addition to various editions of mannerist and baroque poets and American writers, he has translated seven volumes of John Fante, two by Bret Easton Ellis, and other writers such as William Somerset Maugham, George Arnold, and William Dean Howells. Durante is the artistic director of the annual Salerno Literary Festival. His latest book is La letteratura italoamericana (2017).

Gregory Pell is a Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Hofstra University, where he teaches courses on language, cinema, literature, and translation theory. His critical articles examine such poets as Dante, Paolo Ruffilli, Mario Luzi, Davide Rondoni, Tommaso Lisa, Mario Tobino, and Eugenio Montale, the latter of which is the subject of his full-length monograph, Memorial Space, Poetic Time: Memory in Eugenio Montale (2005). On cinema he has published pieces on Mihaileanu, Kore-Eda, Sergio Rubini, Vicenzo Marra, Mohsen Melliti, and Matteo Garrone. He is coeditor of At Whom Are We Laughing? Humor in Romance Language Literatures (2013). His ongoing research projects focus on Vitaliano Trevisan and the Northeast, the prose and poetry of Goffredo Parise, and the narrative works of Angelo Cannavacciuolo, whose latest unpublished novel he is in the process of translating. His newest book is Davide Rondoni: Art in the Movement of Creation.

Charles Sant'Elia heads Enotria Translations, a boutique translations firm in Manhattan. He studied political science and Italian literature at New York University and political science at the University of Florence before studying law at Pace University. He formerly resided in Naples and Florence and is a member of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York and is a consultant for UNESCO. Sant’Elia is a knight of the Sacro Militare Ordine Costantiniano di San Giorgio. Since 2007 he has served as delegate of the Comitati Due Sicilie of the Associazione Culturale Neoborbonica in the United States and is a member of the Real Circolo delle Famiglie Nobili e Notabili delle Due Sicilie. Sant’Elia has been writing poetry in Neapolitan for twenty-five years and he has translated the scholarly works of linguist Mario Alinei, musicologist Simona Frasca, and Neapolitan poet and songwriter Luciano Somma, among others.