Tag: Italian immigrants

Calandra Chosen as NYC Launch Site for Italea Initiative

Posted on by Sian Gibby

On Thursday, October 10, a slew of Italian dignitaries gathered at the Calandra Institute to toast a roots-travel initiative by Italea. From the Italea website:

Italea is the program to promote roots tourism, launched by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation within the NRRP project and financed by NextGenerationEU.

The project aims to attract Italians abroad and Italian descendants intending to discover the places and traditions of their origins, providing a set of services to facilitate travel in Italy, thanks also to the widespread organization of 20 groups, one in each Italian region, who will take care of informing, welcoming and assisting travelers from their roots.

Italea is a project dedicated both to those who already know their Italian origins and want to organize a trip to discover and rediscover the places, customs and culture of their ancestors, and to those who need to identify them, and who will be able to make use of a network of reliable genealogists.

The name Italea derives from “talea,” a practice by which a plant is allowed to propagate. By cutting a part of it and replanting it, it can be given new life, making new roots grow: just as happens with migrations. This program represents gratitude to the “mother plant” for its flowering in the world.

Photograph of Calandra Dean Anthony Julian Tamburri and Cons. Amb. Giovanni Maria de Vita courtesy of Catalina Santamaria

Calandra Institute’s Dr. Joseph Sciorra Wins Bishir Prize

Posted on by Sian Gibby

The Vernacular Architecture Forum has awarded Joseph Sciorra its 2024 Catherine W. Bishir Prize for his article “‘The Strange Artistic Genius of This People’: The Ephemeral Art and Impermanent Architecture of Italian Immigrant Catholic Feste,” published in the Fall/Spring 2023 issue of Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum.

Sciorra looks at late nineteenth and early twentieth-century mobile shrines and street chapels—Baroque confections as tall as sixty feet or as wide as buildings, shaped like altars, towers, or even land-faring boats. Italian American craftsmen created these for their immigrant community feste, or—as Sciorra calls them—“cultural-religious extravaganzas.” He shows the reader these works through the eyes of their intended audiences, as well as those of outsiders—photographers, journalists, visual artists—whose potential biases he carefully considers. Sciorra examines, “how these transient objects of devotion … enacted and proclaimed a diasporic community of believers that challenged hegemonic notions of artistry, religion, the built environment, and the public sphere.” He further expands his gaze to contextualize his hand-crafted sources of study as, in his words, “part of the Progressive era’s xenophobic climate and, in particular, the picturesque gaze that racialized and othered Italian immigrants.”

An online copy of the article is accessible here.