(The walled city of Lucca in Tuscany)
Join Italian literary enthusiasts at the Italian Cultural Institute (601 Van Ness Ave, Suite F) next week Tuesday March 22 at 6:30 for a special talk by lucchese author Michele Cecchini as he presents his new book “Per il bene che ti voglio.” Mr. Cecchini was born in Lucca in 1972 and teaches literature in Livorno, the Italian city on the west coast of Tuscany. “Per il bene che ti voglio” is his second novel and explores the experience of lucchese emigrant who comes to California in the 1920′s in search of the limelight. Here is the abstract of the book; note the mention of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the Italian poet laureate of San Francisco.
In the late Twenties, Antonio Bevilacqua leaves the environs of Lucca in hopes of an acting career in the off-Broadway theatres of San Francisco. There he comes into contact with the art world which centres on such figures as Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Elegant and degraded, frigid and solar, welcoming and cruel, San Francisco exalts and disappoints its children and step-children – including the Dagos, Italian immigrants. For a time Antonio moves to Hollywood, where he is employed as a stand-in for Chaplin, taking his place on the set to facilitate the arrangement of the scenes. He seems, therefore, to have found his ‘Merica’ of the ‘muvinpicce’ – a term derived from the English ‘moving picture’ in the awkward yet somehow poetic half-English half-Italian pidgin used by the Dagos. In language as in life, Antonio Bevilacqua, transformed in the meantime into ‘Tony Drinkwater’ (the literal translation of his name), inhabits a no-man’s land between what he once was and what he has not yet become.
(Hollywood in the 20′s)
The event will be a great opportunity to discuss Italian American emigration in the context of California, as well as explore the burgeoning motion picture and theater industry in the Golden State in the 1920′s. Moreover, Mr. Cecchini employs a novel patois of Italian and English in his book, which could also be of interest to the linguists in the group as a topic of discussion. The event is free. You can register here.
