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ELISABETTA MARINO - THE MEDITERRANEAN IN TWO ITALIAN AMERICAN WRITERS

the writer “like a cradle” (147) and, in other passages of the book, she is “rocked on the
breast of the sea” (215), “lull(ed) into unconsciousness” (229) waiting for the perfor-
mance of the death-rebirth cathartic ritual which is the “mattanza.”

The connection between the bluefin tuna for ancient Mediterranean people and the
buffalo for American plain Indians, both as “a giant animal they revered” and as “a reli-
able source of protein” (10), offers the writer the possibility to reflect on what the destiny
of the “mattanza” might be in future. By killing buffaloes with repeating rifles, the cow-
boys transformed “the Indian’s sacrament into a white man’s sacrilege” (11). In the same
way, modern fishing technology, aimed at maximizing the results and minimizing the
expenses, together with the pressure of tourism industry are turning the “mattanza” into
a sad show, whose final act seems to be the disappearance of this millenary tradition. This
concern is recurrent throughout the volume. In chapter 14, “The Prey,” Maggio seems to
invite a reader to establish a comparison between past and present. A paragraph in which
she quotes Ernest Hemingway’s enthusiastic words on the Spanish “mattanza,” on how,
through this ritual, one feels “purified and (…) able to enter unabashed into the presence
of the very elder gods and they will make you welcome” (140), is immediately followed
by a list of technical innovations, such as radar used to locate the schools of fish, factory
ships, and huge nets similar to monsters, which could “swallow twelve jumbo jets in a
single gulp” (140). The concept of modernity as sacrilege and deformity is restated to-
wards the end of the book, when an international television troupe, after paying each
member of the crew to stage a “fake mattanza” to be filmed and broadcast on television,
interferes when the real ceremony is being performed:

At the first verse (of the ritual song) four helicopters appeared. Like apocalyptic beasts, first they
hovered, then they circled the Chamber of Death. Cameramen leaned out the doors of two of
them. The noise was deafening, that hateful whumping; the propellers were drowning out the
song. The woman next to me joined me in giving them the Sicilian version of the finger: the Arm.
Everyone on the vascello yelled and waved until the helicopters peeled off. (229-230)

Attilio Bolzoni reported (in La Repubblica, June 3, 2001), that this year the “mattanza”
was cancelled: too many tourists, too large a business, too little tuna. But Maggio is not
abandoning her “mission” as a writer. Recently she wrote: “I am leaving for Sicily and
Naples tomorrow, and will be there for three months. My second book, The Stone Bou-
doir, Travels through the Hidden Villages of Sicily will be published in March 2002.”3

The Mediterranean Runs through Brooklyn is a series of portraits of Italian Americans
emerging from the memory of the writer, while he outlines important episodes of his life
from childhood to maturity. Through the writer’s remembrance, the geographical dis-
tance separating Italy from the US is annihilated and the two lands of Valerio’s life seem
to overlap, so that the Mediterranean can run through Brooklyn, in the same way blood
runs through his veins, molding his identity as an Italian American. His “Mediterra-
nean” is made of mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts with large breasts, sacred matriarchal

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