Abstract
The chapter discusses the movie Tarantella by Helen De Michiel as a reflection on the persistence of Italian culture in second- and third-generation Italian Americans, in particular Italian American women. Diana, the protagonist of the movie, is a strong, independent woman who chose to distance herself from her Italian heritage and, in particular, from a traditional concept of womanhood that denies women individuality and freedom of expression. It is only after the death of her mother that Diana starts—thanks to the help of a family friend that represents a substitute for the mother figure—a painful but necessary process of reconciliation of her internal conflicts. Only after she has acknowledged the strength and the resilience of her mother and grandmother Diana is able to reconnect with her origins. From this point of view, the movie Tarantella represents a deep and heartfelt analysis of the discomfort of fully assimilated Italian Americans who desire to reconnect with their ethnicity, maintaining that part of their tradition that is still alive and useful for them.
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Notes
- 1.
Not everyone agreed with Park. In the mid-1920s Horace Kallen, in his book Culture and Democracy in the United States, viewed assimilation as an absorption in an undignified and vacuous modern mass (Kallen, 84).
- 2.
A comprehensive analysis of recent sociological and linguistic studies focused on Italian American culture can be found in Richard Alba’s “Italian Americans and Assimilation”, Rosemary Serra’s “Contemporary Italian American Identities”, and Nancy C. Carnevale’s “The Languages of Italian Americans”. All these contributions are in the book edited by William J. Connell and Stanislao Pugliese The Routledge History of Italian Americans. New York: Routledge, 2018.
- 3.
In this last category, Nancy Carnevale notices that, since the 1980s, there has been a drop of 55% of Italian as a second language spoken at home, the fastest decline of any foreign language in the U.S. (Carnevale, 248).
- 4.
See Mangione and Morreale (1992, 460).
- 5.
See https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/2017/october/italian-american.html (accessed April 12, 2023).
- 6.
- 7.
In a conversation that I had with the director, De Michiel said that the neighborhood is purposefully non-specified. The scenes were filmed in a location in New Jersey.
- 8.
The painting, made in 1620, is now on display in the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence.
- 9.
https://www.britannica.com/art/tarantella (accessed April 12, 2023).
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Films and TV Series Cited
My Big Fat Greek Wedding (Joel Zwick, 2002).
The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972).
The Sopranos (TV Series, 1999–2007).
Tarantella (Helen De Michiel, 1995).
Uncle Nino (Robert Shallcross, 2004).
Working Girl (Mike Nichols, 1988).
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Fioretti, D. (2024). A Sting from the Past: Assimilation and Healing Rituals in Helen de Michiel’s Tarantella (1995). In: Fioretti, D., Orsitto, F. (eds) Italian Americans in Film and Other Media. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47211-4_5
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