Beyond Memory: Italian Protestants in Italy and America Thursday, March 2, 2017

The Philip V. Cannistraro Seminar Series in Italian American Studies

Beyond Memory: Italian Protestants in Italy and America
Dennis Barone, University of Saint Joseph

In Beyond Memory (SUNY Press, 2016), Dennis Barone uncovers the richness and diversity of the Italian Protestant experience and places it in the context of migration and political and social life in Italy and the United States. Using church records, manuscripts, and literary sources, Barone introduces such forgotten voices as those of Baptist Antonio Mangano, Methodist Antonio Arrighi, and his own great-grandfather Alfredo Barone, a Baptist minister to congregations in Italy and Massachusetts. Examining the complex histories of these and other Italian Protestants, Barone argues that Protestantism served as a means to negotiate between old and new, even as it resulted in the double alienation of rejection by Roman Catholic immigrants and condescension by Anglo-Protestants.