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ELISABETTA MARINO - THE MEDITERRANEAN IN TWO ITALIAN AMERICAN WRITERS

the reader that his mother “travels in order to gather all the tablecloths of the world”
(13), and by so writing he strengthens the link between femininity and food (in another
passage of the book, Valerio points out that the tablecloths had been inherited by his
sister, after the matriarch’s death). Then, while her husband swims in the blue, clear
Mediterranean, “she goes off in search of distant relatives, who may have an old ring, an
ashtray, anything” (13). For her, the Mediterranean is not the pleasure of bathing in
beautiful waters but the “duty” of a quest for her and her family’s roots, for traditional
values she wants to preserve and transmit, for ancestral ties she does not want to sever.
The second mention of the Mediterranean Sea underlines the clash between the Ameri-
can way of life, the tall buildings, the traffic, the chaos of New York City and a possible
life in Italy, which both the mother and the writer seem to desire:

When my mother and I speak over the phone and a train passes, I ask, “Is a train passing?” We
long for silence, for the elegance of a villa overlooking the Mediterranean. I think my mother
enjoys her traveling. She has a refinement that is not obvious to the family, and this causes her
pain. I’d stand on my toes at her kitchen window and look down at the reflections of the buildings
on the wet street. (18)

As in Maggio’s Mattanza, in Valerio’s book one has the feeling that times are chang-
ing and that, one day, the Mediterranean will stop its flow through Brooklyn, thus signi-
fying the fracture between Italian Americans and their land of origin, expressed through
the death of the matriarch and the extinction of her creative, generative power often
manifested through food. Towards the end of the memoir, we read that Nana Angelina
has cancer and she is doomed to die: the writer’s question then is “After she dies, who will
make the caponata?” (89). On one of the last Christmas Eves, when Valerio’s family is
gathered around the table, set as usual, we notice that the table is divided according to
the generation: “whoever ate fish was first generation. The second generation on down
ate turkey. And then some of our cousins are marrying Irish and these also ate turkey.
Soon, we will all be eating turkey” (81). In Valerio’s narrative, however, the power of
memory proves to be stronger and the story ends with the writer’s will to remember his
mother, his father, his roots, through other Italian American families that he will meet in
his life, through the friends of his family’s and the friends of his family’s friends, all
different from one another but, at the same time, all similar, like the waves of the Medi-
terranean Sea.

Università degli Studi di Roma “Tor Vergata”

NOTES

1. Compare, for instance, with “Mediterranean,” a poem by Maria Maziotti Gillan (unpublished).

2. Personal correspondence (November 6, 2001).

3. Personal correspondence (November 8, 2001).

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