January 31, 2018. 06:00 pm - 08:00 pm. John D Calandra Italian American Institute - 25 W 43rd St #17, New York, NY 10036, USA. Book Presentation: Il dio di New York, by Luigi Fontanella

In 1910, at the age of sixteen, Pasquale D'Angelo emigrated to the United States from Abruzzo, Italy, looking for a better life in New York. He experienced significant trauma associated with Italian emigration of that time: "endless tribulation and misery, anguish and mortification." But he confronted it all with a will of iron, and in his struggle to learn a new language, he discovered both the ability and inspiration to set aside the pick and shovel and began to write ... to write poetry "as he had read in the works of the beloved Shelley and Keats in the New York Public Library."

Il dio di New York reconstructs the trying environs of Pascal D'Angelo's life, starting with the small villages of Abruzzo and continuing to his challenges with the toughest American reality of the time: the city of New York with its imposing "god" that governs it. It tells how Pasquale, almost illiterate, becomes an inestimable symbol of Italian immigration at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Respondents:
Alessandro Vettori
Professor of Italian, Rutgers University

Giuseppe Gazzola
Associate Professor of Italian, Stony Brook University

Moderator:
Anthony Julian Tamburri
Dean, John D. Calandra Italian American Institute

The presentation will be in English.