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THE MEDITERRANEAN: MEMORY AND TRADITION IN TWO ITALIAN
AMERICAN WRITERS

ELISABETTA MARINO

Going through the pages of Italian American writers, such as Maria Mazziotti Gillan,
Phyllis Capello and Rachel Guido deVries, a reader may easily find nostalgic references
to the Mediterranean Sea, the calm, “familiar” sea from which their land of origin emerges,
embraced by warm waters.1 Sometimes it is mentally and emotionally opposed to the
alien Atlantic Ocean, which the first immigrants had to cross in order to try their adven-
ture in America, and whose roughness and dangers seemed to anticipate the difficulties
in integrating and becoming part of the “American dream,” since theirs was a “different
shade of white” in comparison to the WASP’s. Two autobiographical novels tightly link
the personal experience of the two Italian American writers to the Mediterranean: Theresa
Maggio’s Mattanza: Love and Death in the Sea of Sicily (2000), and Anthony Valerio’s The
Mediterranean Runs through Brooklyn (1982). Even though the stories and the approaches
adopted by Maggio and Valerio are thoroughly different, what binds the books together
is the association between the Mediterranean Sea, the feminine figure, and food as pri-
mary sources of physical and spiritual life, as holders of ancestral values both authors
need to recall and rely on to piece together their identity. Moreover, both writers seem to
express a deep concern for the loss of such values, scattered either by the modern pres-
sures of money-making and fast production (as in the case of Maggio’s story), or by a
thorough Americanization on the part of the Italian American immigrant, which implies
the sacrifice, the annihilation of his/her cultural roots.

Asked what the Mediterranean Sea represented to her, Theresa Maggio answered:

The Mediterranean is like a medicine to me; I must have a receptor on my skin cells for Mediter-
ranean blue. The color seeps in like nicotine from a patch and makes me glow from the inside.
Maybe the Mediterranean is hard-wired into my genes.2

As the title suggests, Mattanza is entirely focused on the ancient ritual of bluefin
tuna fishing, carried out in many Mediterranean countries and, in Italy, especially in the
Sicilian island of Favignana, where every year, around May or June, the tuna fish gather
in order to spawn. While swimming, many tuna end up in the long net cage set up by the
fishermen which, at the very end, has the “Chamber of Death.” There, the “mattanza,”
the “slaughter” (from the Spanish “matare,” “to kill”), is eventually performed, accompa-
nied by ceremonies and songs, whose tunes were “never meant for a mortal audience”
(28), as Maggio remarks.

The ancestral values conveyed and transmitted through this ritual are unveiled from
the first pages of the book when, after quoting Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth and

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