Strega Nona's ethnic alchemy: magic pasta, stregheria and that amazing disappearing "n".

Introduction

The children's book illustrator and writer Tomie dePaola had already made the grandmother figure the focus of his 1972 Nana Upstairs & Nana Downstairs when, in 1975, at the height of the season of American ethnic pride, he doodled the character that would become "Strega Nona," or "Grandma Witch." Based in part on his own Italian American grandmother Concetta, and spawning a total of eight books to date, the Strega Nona series of children's picture books has become a fascinating component of Italian American identity creation in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and an example of how Italian Americans acculturate their children to this identity within the context of the children's literature genre. That dePaola has chosen this mode for ethnic expression is indicative of his position at a cultural crossroads. Children's literature--and the post-industrial childhood literacy that it assumes--is part and parcel of the affluence to which many Italian Americans now have access, but which was not part of the typically poor Southern culture of their immigrant Italian forebears. At the same time, this genre, as a mechanism of intergenerational continuity and transmission, allows writers like dePaola to perceive and preserve iconic traces of their italianita, or "Italianness."

Both as character and as text, Strega Nona/Strega Nona has much to offer the field of Italian American studies as a clear exponent of what Fred Gardaphe calls the mythic or hybrid age of Italian American literature. The title character's twin attributes of strega and non(n)a grant the title character a unique alchemic power in dynamics of Italian American identity creation by tapping into both the comfortable distance afforded by the grandparent figure and the specificity of Strega Nona's Southern Italian folk magic. (1) Within this context, this article will explore three areas in which the series carries particular interest in the realm of Italian American identity: taxonomies of Italian American literature and ethnic hybridity, the iconic figure of the grandmother and its function in ethnic identity creation, and stregheria's emerging role as a touchstone of the uniqueness of italianita.

Strega Nona as an Italian American Text

Almost from its inception, Italian American studies has been uniquely preoccupied with its own development as a field and with the elaboration of an adequate critical apparatus. Starting with Rose Basile Green's The Italian American Novel (1979), (2) critics of Italian American letters principally have been concerned with matters of self-definition: what is Italian American Literature? Why has it taken so long for the field to emerge? How can we talk about the Italian American writer in ways that are both specific and inclusive, recognizing both what s/he has taken from the host culture and shares with the culture of origin? At the heart of this existential crisis--both for the field and for the individual writer--is the question of italianita, those characteristics of Italian culture that manifest themselves as artifacts of a text's hybridity. The object of prejudice and derision for the first generations of Italian Americans, and the source of ethnic pride for more recent ones, italianita is the basic element of Italian American cultural studies, around which most critical taxonomies have been arranged.

For the earliest exponents of Italian American writing, their italianita was far more than a mere sign of cultural otherness. Insofar as a core value of this mostly Southern italianita was a profound distrust of anyone outside the restrictive family unit, the sharing of personal information in a public forum was frowned upon, even if it was in the service of the creation of a literary self. This interdiction on expressive communication was only compounded by the fact that the overwhelming majority of immigrants from Italy during the great wave of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries relied on oral modes of communication in both the private and public spheres. As Gardaphe writes,

   It has taken three generations and more than one hundred years of
   Italian presence in America to produce a literature that can be
   called Italian American. The number of autobiographies produced in
   this literature is few in comparison with the number produced by
   other major ethnic groups. The paucity of self-reflective written
   works can be attributed to a number of causes: distrust of the
   written word (an Italian proverb warns: Pensa molto, parla poco,
   e scrivi meno); the immigrant's distrust of social and educational
   institutions, which represent the ruling classes; and parents'
   failure to encourage children to pursue literary careers because
   the family needed the money each child could earn as soon as he
   or she was old enough to be employed.
  (Italian Signs 27-28)

These elements of italianita, then, were clear obstacles to literary expression and success, to which the very absence of an Italian American literary tradition can be traced. As the writer Gay Talese has commented,

   In the winter of 1955, I began writing a novel about my father,
   describing his childhood in a highly superstitious post-medieval
   mountain village in southern Italy, a village that had been
   warped by earthquakes and the sadistic rule of foreign kings
   and had been altered spiritually by the ministrations of a
   levitating fifteenth-century monk. Before the novel was half
   done, however, I decided to abandon it. I was concerned that a
   book focusing on my father's past would bring him unwanted
   attention and perhaps even ridicule from his American friends
   and neighbors in the conservative Anglo-Saxon community along
   the New Jersey shoreline, where, after 30 years of residence, he
   was accepted as an assimilated citizen of the United States.

   The instinct to protect my father should come as no surprise to the
   American-Italian writers of my generation. Not to protect the
   privacy of one's family from the potential exploitation of one's
   prose was considered unpardonable within our ethnic group, which
   was overwhelmingly of southern Italian origin and was still
   influenced, even a generation or two after our parents' or
   grandparents' arrival in America, by that Mediterranean region's
   ancient exhortations regarding prudence, family honor, and the
   safeguarding of secrets. (461)

Once writers like Constantine Panunzio, Guido D'Agostino, Pietro di Donato, John Fante, Jerre Mangione, and later, Gay Talese, were able to articulate and thus overcome this cultural divide, their italianita began to take on more textually present forms, in linguistic, imagistic, and thematic artifacts of their Italian heritage such as the oral nature of traditional Southern Italian culture, religiosity, and the centrality of the family unit. Even in this stage of the field's development, however, an Italian American literary identity only began to manifest itself slowly, over time, and in the form of lone voices of ethnic writing in a vast American literary landscape. Despite the critical and in some cases popular success of early Italian American classics like John Fante's Wait until Spring, Bandini (1938), Pietro di Donato's Christ in Concrete (1939), and Jerre Mangione's Mount Allegro (1943), until very recently the field in fact lacked cohesion and articulation, any sense that Italian American writers could claim a genealogy of their own, or were even in dialogue with each other, for that matter, textually or critically. Only in the "ethnic revival" years of the 60s (3) and 70s did the field truly begin to come into its own, paradoxically under the "Italian sign" of the mafia, and Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather texts. (4)

More recently, the search for an ethnically and culturally specific italianita (5) has come up against problems of a different sort: have these signs and the Italian Americans that deploy them become so assimilated into mainstream American (read: the "dominant") culture that there is no longer anything uniquely Italian about them? (6) "Haven't we all really just become 'Italian?'": this is the refrain of those who would claim that the Italian-immigrant Frank Capra is responsible for some of the most "American" films of the early twentieth century (7) and that as citizens of the twenty-first century, we all really want to be--or bed--Tony Soprano. (8)

In their continuing search for a usable and unique definition of italianita and its function within the text, a number of scholars have devised uncannily similar taxonomies for the analysis of Italian American literary production. Anthony Tamburri, for example, in his Semiotic of Ethnicity, shows that Daniel Aaron's three stages of the hyphenate writer share much with Gardaphe's Vichian system, which is in turn analogous to his own Peircian distinction between firstness, secondness, and thirdness in the expression of experience.

Though all of these scholars set out to develop a comprehensive categorization of the phases or modes of hyphenate writing in the US, Gardaphe's Italian Signs, American Streets, within the context of its treatment of the Vichian ages of Italian American writing--the poetic, the mythic, and the philosophic--is particularly focused on a semiotic of the unique "Italian signs" (these are the signs of his book's title) that signal these texts' italianita in specific ways. For Gardaphe, signs of italianita have functions that are unique to each mode or age of writing, taking on more poetic or pre-modern contours in the first case, mythic or modern contours in the second case, and philosophic contours in the last. Gardaphe's taxonomy will provide a critical paradigm for my attempt to situate the Strega Nona texts within an Italian American context, particularly in its sophisticated handling of the second, or mythic, category of Italian American writing and its attendant signs of italianita.

If the Italian American writer's focus on his native language and traditions is typical of the first age and his almost complete and natural Americanness is typical of the third, it is the second mode's particular preoccupation with the creation of a hybrid--and thus essentially new--Italian American identity that is particularly resonant with Tomie dePaola's expressions of italianita. (9) In their characteristic use of American streets (or texts) to deploy Italian signs (or markers of italianita), texts of the mythic age are uniquely given to acts of what I call ethnic alchemy that result in the creation of a new hyphenate identity; we will see that Tomie dePaola's picture book character "Strega Nona"--explicitly translated as "grandma witch"--is a fortuitous icon for both the popular Italian American identity she helps to create and the critical process in which her creator participates.

While I do not want to be reductive in my use of any single rubric in describing Tomie dePaola's work as a participant in the construction of an Italian American identity, Gardaphe's idea of hybridity is helpful in understanding Strega Nona's role as a maker of alchemic magic on many levels: the diegetical character of Strega Nona uses her magic to create limitless pasta, as well as a generation of new streghe to whom she transmits the tools and rules of traditional stregheria. Generically, Strega Nona's author takes a story from the pan-ethnic folktale tradition, the "Magic Porridge Pot," and inscribes it with that "Italian sign" of plentitude par excellence, pasta. Finally, as text, Strega Nona engages in a process of subject creation through its readers' identification with certain traditions and values: gastronomic abundance and "slow food"; savvy and quick-wittedness, or furberia; folk wisdom and healing; and the transmission of all of these values to a self-selected, culturally specific ethnic audience within a picture book genre that signals post-industrial literacy and affluence.

Strega Nona's Textual Hybridity

Tomie dePaola's "retelling" of the classic Russian folktale about the magic porridge pot was the product of converging factors: his editor's suggestion that he illustrate one of his own favorite folktales and what he calls an "obsession" with the Commedia dell' Arte figure of Punchinello, or Pulcinella, as he is known in the Italian tradition. While doodling some variations on the theme of the seventeenth-century stock character, the familiar prominent nose and chin morphed into a profile that dePaola promptly labeled "Strega Nona." When he began trying to figure out a way to retell the "Porridge Pot" story--a story that ended up being more attractive in dePaola's nostalgic childhood memory than in his adult re-reading of it--dePaola had an epiphany. As he puts it: "I re-read the story [of the Magic Porridge Pot]. But I didn't really like it. Suddenly, LIGHT BULB TIME! Maybe I could change PORRIDGE to PASTA and I could use my little Strega Nona (who was already 'telling' me who she was)" (Tomie.com).

Strega Nona's creative genesis is emblematic of the series' ethnic hybridity, a bifurcate heritage that is shared by its very reading public, Italian Americans able to look past the Russian origin of the first book's plot line to claim a connection with the book's Italian setting and its nostalgic view of the past. As Barbara Elleman writes, "For many readers, 'dear Strega Nona,' as dePaola calls her, has slipped into the realm of folklore. Some claim to have heard tales of her at their mothers' proverbial knees, while a Chicago entrepreneur named his restaurant Strega Nona, contending that the figure is so familiar that it is in the public domain" (88-89).

Tomie dePaola himself describes this phenomenon in the "Spotlight on ..." feature page of his "Tomie.com" website:

   Many people think that [Strega Nona] is a character in Italian
   folklore and I even have people telling me that they are 'so happy
   to see the Strega Nona stories out in print.'

   In fact, years ago, right after STREGA NONA was first published in
   1975, I was at a conference and I was on my way to the room where I
   would be speaking and this rather impressive woman with jet black
   hair wearing a black dress with a red flower pinned to her shoulder
   saw me. She looked like an Italian opera star--a Diva.

   'Tomie dePaola!' she bellowed (pronouncing my name correctly!)
   She ran to me, grabbed me, pressed me to her bosom (she was taller
   than me) and said, 'Thank God, someone is doing the Strega Nona
   stories again!'

   That took me by surprise. Had my Italian collective unconscious
   'channeled' Strega Nona or was she a part of my imagination? I
   thought I had 'INVENTED' her. So, I delved through as much Italian
   folk tale as I could and lo and behold NO STREGA NONA--ANYWHERE.

This account is interesting not only for what it tells us about how successful the Strega Nona books have been in inventing a collective and folklorish pan-Italian past that Italian Americans can easily claim for themselves; it is also noteworthy that the author, in describing this encounter with a reader who claims to "remember" the invented protagonist from a personal and nostalgic past, takes pains to portray her as an authoritative representative of high Italian culture. While her appearance recalls the classic diva of Italian stage, she is imagined to be a star of that most refined example--and best-known cultural export--of Italian culture, lyric opera. But even more striking is the phonetic stamp of approval that the woman is understood to have given the illustrated series in "correctly pronouncing" the author's surname, a name whose pronunciation had been distinctly Americanized for most of the author's youth. (10) "DePaola" thus comes to function as a signifier of the author's heritage, and thus his authority to tell the story. At the same time, the book's reader authenticates its value as an exponent of "true" Italian culture by claiming her own--completely invented--recollection of the story.

This process is emblematic of the way that the book's readers act in collaboration with Tomie dePaola in the establishment of a new folk tradition that paradoxically derives its authenticity as folk tradition from its "old world" trappings and from its readers' "recollections" of their own connection to an old world heritage. As is clear from the series' undeniable popularity both within and beyond the Italian American community, the Strega Nona texts function as both a vehicle for the transmission of traditions and a site where collectively-held notions about Italian culture that constitute an imagined Italian American community are simultaneously diffused by its author and projected by its readers (see Anderson). A quick visit to online booksellers and their reader feedback pages provides further evidence of this. Strega Nona is variously described as a "sweet tale of tradition," "Tomie's excellent re-telling of the classic Italian child's tale," and "a natural, must-have for Italian-American children--who frequently lack cultural ties to Italy," (11) and the series as a whole is nothing less than ubiquitous on Italian American culture sites. The "Viva books" site (www.viva-books.com) bills it as "A wonderfull [sic] way for your Children to learn and understand their Italian Heritage" while the www.italiansrus.com website's "Books" section places Tomie De Paola [sic] (together with fellow Italian American Mario Puzo) in the pantheon of Italian literary greatness with the tre corone, (12) Leopardi, Pirandello, Calvino, and Eco. Finally, no less an authority than the NIAF (National Italian American Foundation) states unequivocally in the text of its website that "It is not an exaggeration to say that for many children in the United States, Tomie De Paola's [sic] books serve as their introduction to Italian culture." (13)

Tomie dePaola's books, however, neither pretend to represent an authentic Italian past nor do they tap into a properly Italian folk tradition. (14) Indeed, the "introduction to Italian culture" to which the NIAF site refers might more accurately be called a unique introduction to Italian American culture, a textual point of entry into what it means to be an American of Italian descent. Furthermore, those elements of the Strega Nona series that at first glance seem most dissonant with its ostensibly Italian ancestry--such as the idiosyncratic spelling of the title character's name--are precisely the most interesting factors in Strega Nona's participation in the creation of a hybrid Italian American identity.

In the pages that follow, I will situate the entire Strega Nona picture book series within Gardaphe's Vichian category of mythic Italian American literary production, and as a participant in the creation of a unique and hybrid Italian American literary identity precisely in the middle of a season of ethnic pride for hyphenate groups like Italian Americans. (15) The Strega Nona series is distinguishable from both mainstream American and Southern Italian cultures, the latter for its distinct signs of italianita, and the former for its participation in a literary genre, the children's picture book, that was not part of the immigrants' native experience. As such, I argue that it participates in the creation of a new Italian American identity and voice through an ethnic alchemy that is emblematized by its iconic protagonist, the "grandma witch." Furthermore, as we shall see, both the grandmother and the witch figures are uniquely able to symbolize these texts' intermediary position between the italianita of "old world" Calabria and the industrialized new world of educational opportunity and childhood literacy, embodied in the manifest textuality of the children's picture book.

An Italian "Letteratura Infantile"?

Piero Bargellini has written that "In a word, children's literature was born with bourgeois society. It was precisely in bourgeois society that childhood became a sort of fifth power. In a society in which there was such a focus--and rightly so--on individuality, freedom, and rights, childhood had its own individuality, its own freedom, some of its own rights" (84). (16) This and other historians of a "letteratura infantile" in Italy trace its emergence to late nineteenth-century northern and central Italian writers such as Carlo Collodi (ne Lorenzini), "Vamba" (ne Luigi Bertelli), Edmondo de Amicis, and Emilio Salgari.

Of course, the standout on the illustrated children's literature scene of this period was a fantastic tale originally published in serialized form from July 1881 to January 1883 in the Giornaleper i Bambini: Collodi's Le Avventure di Pinocchio. (17) By the time he authored his "story of a puppet," Collodi was already well known as a translator of Perrault's Contes de ma Mere l'Oye, educator, and vocal supporter of a unified Italian state, finally achieved in 1860. His publication of the tale (initially titled "La Storia di un Burattino," or "The Story of a Puppet") in the newly founded Giornale was part of a flurry of editorial activity, both in journal and book form, that was inexorably tied to the project of creating young Italians with a strong identification with both the nascent state and each other. (18) The story's popular success was nothing less than clamorous and immediate among children and adults alike: though Collodi actually killed off his protagonist after a mere fifteen installments, he was convinced by public and editorial outcry to resurrect him, extending the story for another eighteen issues.

However, this popularity--and the national children's literature canon that it engendered--was inaccessible to a Southern Italian audience still largely isolated by profound difference from the central and northern regions of Italy. The ambitious project of "making Italians" envisioned by early Italian statesmen like Massimo D'Azeglio met countless economic, cultural, and linguistic challenges. Not only did the Italian South lag dramatically behind central and northern regions in economic and industrial development, but linguistic unification through a standard national language was still decades away. Ultimately, a tradition of textual literacy for the very young was practically nonexistent for the mostly poor and mostly Southern Italians who emigrated during the great wave of 1870-1914. (19) For this population, rates of illiteracy were high and orally transmitted regional folktales dominated the collective imagination of adults and children alike.

If, as Gardaphe writes, "[for the typical Southern Italian immigrant,] learning how to write (more often than not for the first time) in the language of the adopted country would be synonymous with becoming American" (Italian Signs 25), then writing in the hyper-textual and -material mode of the illustrated children's book truly reveals an author's strong identification with the American valorization of formalized literacy and advanced education. Moreover, dePaola's marriage of the folktale genre with an illustrative style that evokes the central Italian landscape--with its pine-lined rolling hills, tiled roofs, and Renaissance porticos--and draws on visual culture sources such as the Tuscan Renaissance masters and the stock characters of the Commedia dell'Arte marks the passage from nineteenth-century Southern Italian orality to industrialized textuality in a way that underscores both the author's obvious mastery of Italian high culture and the montage-like, (20) pan-Italian nature of the "Italian" component of Italian American identity formation.

Strega Nona, or the "Grandma Witch"

"In a town in Calabria, a long time ago, there lived an old lady everyone called Strega Nona, which meant 'Grandma Witch.'" So begins Tomie dePaola's 1975 Caldecott Honor awardee, Strega Nona, launching a series of, to date, eight colorful, "folkloric" children's picture books. We first meet Strega Nona already in the twilight of her life, frustrated with the burdens of keeping her "little house and garden," and in the market for an assistant. Responding to her advertisement in the town square is Big Anthony, a bumbling young simpleton who we learn in a later installment (Big Anthony: His Story) is actually a northerner who had only recently performed the inverse of the stereotypical immigrant's South-North trajectory. The series' central plot tension is a simple one: Strega Nona is indeed a witch with magical powers, and Big Anthony, with only an imperfect understanding of his new boss's magic, wants nothing more than to access that magical world of power, prestige, and pasta. Pasta? Of course--it should come as no surprise that her uncanny ability to conjure up a bottomless pot of perfect pasta lies at the heart of Strega Nona's elusive mystique.

The trouble begins in the first story when Big Anthony hears Strega Nona recite her hallmark incantation:

'Bubble, bubble, pasta pot, / Boil me some pasta, nice and hot, / I'm hungry and it's time to sup, / Boil enough pasta to fill me up.' And the pasta pot bubbled and boiled and was suddenly filled with steaming hot pasta. Then Strega Nona sang: 'Enough, enough, pasta pot. / I have my pasta, nice and hot, / So simmer down my pot of clay, / Until I'm hungry another day.' 'How wonderful!' Said Big Anthony. 'That's a magic pot for sure!'

Though Strega Nona is introduced and reintroduced within each story's diegetic space as a witch who is most often called upon to perform acts of white magic and folk medicine ranging from the curing of warts and headaches to the preparation of love potions for girls who want a husband, it is the special culinary feat of producing magic pasta that is accorded the most textual and pictorial space in the series. The inaugural installment in the series goes on to focus on the terrible consequences of Big Anthony's misguided abuse of the pasta pot and its powers: he is eventually carried away on a veritable sea of pasta when he is unable to successfully complete the incantation and thus halt the pot's production of perfectly cooked pasta. In 1979's Merry Christmas, Strega Nona, Big Anthony proposes Strega Nona's magic pasta as a solution to her disastrous Christmas feast, while 2000's Strega Nona Takes a Vacation recalls the original overflowing pasta episode in Strega Nona's warning to her young helper as she leaves for her trip ("And remember ..." Bambolona and Big Anthony chimed in: "DON'T TOUCH THE PASTA POT!"). This same episode also echoes the original story when Big Anthony--again the unwitting victim of abundance--is carried away on the waves of his bubble bath run amok in frame after frame of expanding white bubble clouds.

In 1996's Strega Nona: Her Story as Told to Tomie dePaola, the title character's tongue-in-cheek biography, we discover that the pasta pot--like all of Strega Nona's magical powers--has been inherited from her own biological grandmother, Grandma Concetta:

   One day, Grandma Concetta called Nona to her. 'It's time, Nona. I
   am ready to retire. I am going to spend the rest of my days at the
   seashore, and you must take my place. You shall have my little
   house, my book of spells, my herbs, and my remedies.

   'And in the cupboard, I have left you my pasta pot with something
   inside it.' And with that Grandma Concetta said, 'From this day
   forth, you shall be known as Strega Nona!'

Grandma Concetta returns to play an important role in Strega Nona Takes a Vacation, convincing her granddaughter from the great beyond to take a break from her hectic life of potions and spells and to retreat to her own "little house by the sea" for a vacation. In her soothing, comforting presence in Strega Nona's dreams and in her status as the source of Strega Nona's magic--and magic pasta--Grandma Concetta comes to be associated with domesticity, sustenance, and the ability to nourish and provide for the family unit and the community at large. It comes as no surprise that dePaola claims that Strega Nona is "somewhat inspired by his own Italian grandmother and her endless servings of spaghetti." (21) In general, if Grandma Concetta represents the whole of family traditions that are worthy of transmission to subsequent generations, the magic that she practices and passes on to her favorite granddaughter, Strega Nona, represents that very process of transmission.

This is not the only example of the interest that Grandma Concetta's relationship to Strega Nona holds for students of ethnicity and its construction in the American context. A contrastive study of these two magical grandmothers will reveal that Strega Nona is a curious figure not so much for her magic as for the kind of "nonna"--or better, "nona"--she is, or is not.

When Is a Nona not a Nonna?

   'Ah,' said Grandma Concetta, looking down at the new bambina, 'she
   shall be called Nona. And she will become a strega.'

   As soon as little Nona could walk, Grandma Concetta took her along
   when she gathered herbs and weeds for her lotions and potions.
   Grandma Concetta was a strega, and all the villagers came to her for
   cures and advice on many things.

'Ah, Nonalina, here is rosmarino--rosemary. Very good for growing hair, especially on bald heads. Also excellent as furniture polish....'

As this brief passage from the beginning of Strega Nona, Her Story illustrates, the title character embodies a curious ambiguity between name and type, in stark contrast to the grandmother figure that presided over her birth and whose presence was so important that the bambina's arrival was delayed until the fabulous Grandma Concetta could arrive amid "fierce weather," a "wind" that "blew and blew" and the "cold rain" that was falling outside. Interestingly, Grandma Concetta is referred to with the English-language, and so intentionally transparent, designation of Grandma and is given a rather traditional, typically Southern Italian proper name (which also happens to be the name of Tomie dePaola's real-life grandmother). (22) Her granddaughter, however, whose destiny it is to be a strega just like Concetta ("I knew the first time I looked at you, Nona, that one day you would become a strega"), is given the name "Nona," (23) a gesture that explicitly announces her essentially grandmotherly nature, despite the fact that this very installment follows her life to old age without her ever becoming a biological grandmother. (24)

The result of this particular name game is that the name "Nona" is simultaneously associated with and distinguished from the type "nonna," or "Grandma." Considering that the oral mode is common to both the book's historically ambiguous Calabrian setting and the children's literature genre, and furthermore that this series' Anglo-American publication context means that most readers will read the text with an English accent, the two words are all but indistinguishable. DePaola, then, succeeds in painting this particular character with the broad brush of mythic archetype and thus in creating an "every grandma" figure upon which adult readers looking for confirmation of an Italian American ethnic identity and a usable ethnic past may easily project their own nostalgia--invented though it may be--and transmit it to their own children. (25) Moreover, writers from Gans to Sollors to Gardaphe have recognized the significance of the grandparent figure in processes of (re-)connection to ethnic origins. As Gardaphe writes in his chapter on "Reinventing Ethnicity through the Grandmother Figure," "Expressions of ... symbolic ethnicity [such as the grandparent figure], according to Gans, come in the forms of rituals, rites of passage, holidays, consumer goods, and ethnic characters in media. Often the symbols take shape in the re-creation of the old country, for the old country is distant enough not to 'make arduous demands on American ethnics'" (120).

Outside of the limited context of Strega Nona's relationship to her Grandma Concetta (Strega Nona: Her Story and Strega Nona Takes a Vacation), dePaola consistently elides the fact that "Nona" is, in fact, the title character's Christian name, choosing to explicitly gloss it as "Grandma Witch" in almost every other installment of the series. But the change in spelling and subtle use of the type marker--"grandma"--as a new proper name, complete with the diminutive suffix so common in Southern Italian culture, in effect signal the creation of an essentially new and hybrid grandmother figure. The gesture of ethnic alchemy in which dePaola deploys (stereo)typical signs of italianita--hyperbolically abundant pasta, the nurturing, wise grandmother, who also happens to be the figure entrusted with the transmission of culturally-specific traditions and rituals--through a mode of transmission and acculturation so associated with American educational privilege--the illustrated children's book--is a wonderful example of Gardaphe's late mythic age ethnic writing:

   While there are elements of folklore present in these narratives, the
   sense of folklore is not as dominant as it is in the poetic mode.
   There is an obvious dominance of Italian American traits over both
   Italian and American traits, yet there is a significant presence of
   Italian words and phrases. It is in this mode that we can observe the
   transition from autobiography to autobiographical fiction. The
   subjects in these narratives rebel against both Italian and American
   cultures and thus fashion the hybrid Italian American culture. (16)

Strega Nona's value as an essentialized representative of "the old-fashioned ways" of folklore is eventually marshaled--in 1993's Strega Nona Meets her Match--in the service of a critique of modern technology and capitalist divisions of labor, and in this case takes part in a more properly "third age" (or "philosophical mode") deployment of the "Italian sign" of grandmother. When Strega Nona's old friend Strega Amelia finds out about her booming business, she decides to set up shop right across town, advertising not only the "latest scientific equipment," but also "free sweets and coffee with every visit." The pictorial spread that illustrates the town's shift in loyalty from Strega Nona to Strega Amelia, interestingly, shows the lined-up townspeople as faceless a gesture toward the impersonality of Strega Amelia's mechanized magic. Just as she succeeds in taking away all of Strega Nona's business, Strega Amelia finds herself taking away her labor force, Big Anthony, as well.

What seems to be, on the surface, one of industrialization's main advantages--the business-owner's ability to take a few days off and temporarily contract out the work to trained workers--turns out to be Strega Amelia's undoing, as Big Anthony's inability to work the new-fangled machinery drives all of her clients back to Strega Nona's door, this time, in a closer-distance depiction that shows the detail of the townspeople's faces:

   When the carts came over the mountain with Strega Amelia in front,
   the townspeople were waiting at the town gate.

   'I'm sorry,' the mayor told Strega Amelia, 'but we all agree that we
   prefer the old ways. Our own Strega Nona is enough for us. We hope
   you have no hard feelings.'

The "old ways," with their stability and what Walter Benjamin calls their "aura" are only maintained when the figure of the creator or artist--here, Strega Nona, herself--retains ultimate control and the uninitiated are not allowed to interfere with the art of magic through mechanized means.

Strega Nona's nostalgic appeal for a return to such a pre-industrial system in the person of the distant yet comforting grandmother figure is in line with Gardaphe's third or philosophic mode of ethnic writing insofar as, in this age, "folkloric elements, when present, are used to deconstruct the dominant/official culture" (17), showing that there is, in fact, a great deal of overlap between Gardaphe's three modes even within any given artifact of the Italian American experience. Strega Nona's ethnic hybridity--in the graphic form of a single instead of a double "n"--is thus inscribed in a typically American literary genre where the difference between the Italian noun "nonna" and the hybrid name "Nona" is a purely textual one that, much like the very genre of the children's picture book, marks the "ethnic passage" from southern Italian orality to the literacy--and literature--of American assimilation (see Aaron).

This hybridity is also evident in the juxtaposition of Grandma Concetta, whose identity as a Calabrese "nonna" is constructed around her biologically and genealogically based roles; and Strega Nona, who, in contrast, is constructed on purely cultural grounds in terms of her powers of nurturing, witchcraft, and transmission. The lineage created by the transmission of magic and of the strega identity becomes an even more interesting point of interest when we consider not only Strega Nona's predecessor, Grandma Concetta, but also her "heir," Bambolona.

Ethnic Reclamation and Finding your Inner Strega

If the Italian American grandmother figures a more generalized guardianship of tradition and of the family secrets, it is in her stregheria, (26) or "witchcraft" that those family secrets--analogous in their specificity to a culturally unique italianita--find their own representation. These two facets of the Strega Nona character converge in the issue of heritage, that is, who are her biological and "magical" heirs and how are these genealogies constructed? In defining Strega Nona's own brand of stregheria, we might start with her status as "grandma witch," which is certainly complicated by her lack of biological maternity. Strega Nona's essential difference from the very type that she embodies leaves her paradoxically without the kind of clear successor that her own Nonna Concetta found in her. But though she is unwilling to allow the bumbling northerner Big Anthony access to her magical world, Strega Nona's magic does indeed make its way to the next generation of would-be streghe when she offers to take in the long-suffering baker's daughter, Bambolona, as her apprentice in 1982's Strega Nona's Magic Lessons. Diligent and industrious, Bambolona turns out to be a natural strega, just as Strega Nona herself was to her own grandmother.

But Bambolona's initiation into the ways of folk magic takes her one step farther from the biological determinism of Strega Nona's status as strega: even granting that Tomie dePaola's stregheria is consistently portrayed as a learned, and not genetically inherited trait, Strega Nona's natural inclinations did have biological (her blood tie to Grandma Concetta) and onomastic (her type-name) roots. Bambolona's status is entirely constructed by Strega Nona's realization that she needs help if her magic is to continue; in other words, it is driven by the convenient symbiosis of Bambolona's need for a new function within her family and extended community and Strega Nona's need for a sorcerer's apprentice: "'I think I know how to help you,' Strega Nona said after hearing Bambolona's sad tale. 'So many people come to me with their troubles. I could certainly use some help. Why not stay with me and I will teach you my magic.'"

Throughout Magic Lessons, dePaola uses certain visual narrative strategies to reinforce this portrayal of Bambolona as Strega Nona's heir, such as a symbolically charged spatial "blocking" (Nodelman 155) of the story's characters that culminates in Magic Lessons's final and tension-resolving frame. After Bambolona makes her initial agreement with Strega Nona, the jealous and threatened Big Anthony dresses up as a girl to have a better chance at learning the master's craft. As a result, the rest of the story sees him pitted against Bambolona in a battle to inherit Strega Nona's magical legacy, to obviously comic ends. DePaola's illustrations are central to the reader's understanding of this conflict, not least because the text never mentions that Strega Nona's newly arrived would-be apprentice is, in fact, Big Anthony in drag. It is the two-page pictorial spread that gives us this information, in addition to information about the specific relationships between Big Anthony, Strega Nona, and Bambolona.

The illustrations make it immediately clear that Bambolona will emerge the victor in the battle to be Strega Nona's heir. In a scene that depicts the interior of Strega Nona's house, a clearly cross-dressing Big Anthony (as "Antonia") appears in the center of the left-hand page of the spread, standing, and framed by Strega Nona's doorway. This is one of dePaola's two codified poses for Big Anthony, along with that showing him outside of and alongside Strega Nona's house. Unlike conventional picture book uses of doorways and other internal framing devices (Nodelman 50), this device usually functions more to convey information about Big Anthony and specifically his relationship to the other character(s) in the story, visually isolating him from Strega Nona's magical house and distinguishing him as comic and inept. In this spread, the gaze of "Antonia" then directs our attention to the right-hand page and to the very symmetrical figures of Strega Nona and Bambolona. Their similar heights and body shapes indicate their alignment, and indeed throughout the Magic Lessons story they are similarly positioned, counterbalanced in various configurations against a typically ostracized Big Anthony; because he looks or is situated away from the visual center of the image, Big Anthony's position is one of exclusion from the symmetry created by Strega Nona and Bambolona.

Also of note in this spread is the fact that Big Anthony is flanked, on the left and right, by animals that not only direct the reader's attention to Big Anthony with their own gazes and positions, but make up an interesting iconographical code throughout the Strega Nona series: a peacock, a goat, and a rabbit. Together with the omnipresent doves that populate and decorate dePaola's texts, dePaola uses these animals as emblems of love (in particular the rabbit and the doves) and alchemic magic (the doves and the peacock). The peacock, in particular, comes to emblematize both Strega Nona and her magic; it is typically perched either on Strega Nona's house or on the trees right outside of it and does not appear there until Strega Nona has inherited the house from her Nonna Concetta (Strega Nona: Her Story). (27) Interestingly, in the original Strega Nona story, the peacock conspicuously flies away across the top of the full-page frame at precisely the moment that Big Anthony's magic goes awry.

In line with what Nodelman has written about the resolution of visual tensions in picture book stories, the last frame of the Magic Lessons story described above depicts all of the story's salient visual figures--Big Anthony, Strega Nona, Bambolona, the peacock, and the rabbit--in poses that direct our gaze from left to right across the scene, allowing us to read resolution and the restoration of order into the rightmost images. The two animals, from above and below respectively, look at an awkward and still feminized Big Anthony, who stands to the left of the exterior of Strega Nona's house. Moving rightward in the sweep of our reading gaze, we then see Strega Nona and Bambolona's symmetrical figures next to each other through the window of the house: their interiority to the confined domestic space that figures both the magic and its transmission stands in stark contrast to Big Anthony's exteriority. The tensions of both the plot conflict and its visual representation are thus resolved in the story's final frame as a new family order is established firmly within Strega Nona's "little house on the hill."

Also at issue in the title character's status as strega is the importance of magic and superstition in the collective Italian American consciousness and its function as yet another marker of italianita. As anthropologist Sabina Magliocco writes in "Reclaiming the Strega: Ethnic Ambivalence in American Neopaganism,"

   The folk Catholicism of Italian American immigrants provided plenty
   of contexts for the individual to experience direct contact with the
   sacred and a personal relationship with spiritual beings, including
   the Virgin Mary and the saints. But these expressions made Italian
   Americans subjects of scorn among the dominant culture, including
   Catholic officials in America. [...] Stregheria ... provides a way
   for Italian Americans to reconnect with the spiritual practices of
   their grandparents and great-grandparents. When these traditions of
   religious ecstasy and vernacular healing have been lost or
   forgotten, Stregheria provides new traditions to replace them, and
   a new framework in which to understand them.... American Streghe can
   interpret almost any form of folklore in their families as signs
   they are heirs to an ancient, noble pagan religion. (16)

In this way, the broad recognizability of Strega Nona's magic--its familiar folk healing practices, its ability to comfortably co-exist with vernacular expressions of Catholicism, its positive spin on folk superstition--allows Italian American ethnics to accept this ideal Italian grandmother in a position of surrogacy, with the adoptive heir of Bambolona functioning as a diegetic textual model for the surrogacy process.

Though, according to Magliocco, as an institution stregheria is typically "secret, and passed on only to other family members" ("Reclaiming" 4), Bambolona's status as heir to Strega Nona's magic suggests that this particular text construes issues of transmission and legacy in perhaps non-traditional and even postmodern ways. If magic indicates the transmission of an ethnically-specific heritage and the creation of a new and hybrid Italian American identity, Strega Nona's adoption of Bambolona means that blood is not all, and that these processes can thrive even outside of the bounds of the traditionally-understood family or community unit.

Bambolona is emblematic of the shift in the transmission of identity from one that is centered on family customs to a more constructivist model where the ethnic subject is made, not born, and where legacy is learned and cultivated, not essential or inherent. This is, in fact, the situation of Tomie dePaola's readers, third-or fourth-generation ethnic Americans who create their ethnic identity through a montage-like pan-italianita based on second-and third-hand narratives and symbolic (as Gans has argued) (28) contact with an ethnicity that is more often acquired in the consumer realm than learned in an organic domestic or community setting. Indeed, this is the situation of ethnic writers like dePaola himself, open to new ways of perceiving and constructing their own italianita through literary means.

Sollors's description of American ethnicity as consensually constructed supports this interpretation of Bambolona's relationship to her magical ancestor. Furthermore, his ideas about the metaphorical--more than chronological--nature of generational categorizations of ethnic identities allow us to see Bambolona as a figure of Mead's universal "third-generation" brand of ethnicity, for whom the consensual link to adoptive founding-father (or mother) myths lies at the heart of the "collective kinship drama of American history" (Sollors 229) regardless of properly chronological distinctions.

Bambolona's atypical path to stregheria is in fact emblematic of dePaola's willingness (29) to transcend other traditionally-held tenets of Italian American identity--the uniqueness of regional heritages, for example--and is reflective of the way in which these texts draw upon many different sources of italianita in their creation of a pan-Italian American identity. DePaola's Strega Nona books have at times reached beyond their principally Calabrese setting to incorporate a number of other Italian regions; in Big Anthony: His Story the protagonist rehearses the same de rigueur itinerary that modern-day tourists have come to associate with the modern and unitary Italian state: Pisa, Florence, Rome, Naples. As such, the architectural and topographical icons of these various Italian regions--the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Florence's Duomo, St. Peter's Basilica, the Colosseum, and Mt. Vesuvius--come to be integrated into dePaola's overall visual style, their regional and historical specificity flattened into the same muted, multi-colored tones and rounded contours.

The same mechanism is often at work in dePaola's portrayal of Strega Nona's Calabria, which is explicitly the setting of the stories, but which is drawn with a visual style that draws heavily on the muted watercolor tones often associated with the Tuscan hillside, as well as on an iconic Central Italian visual patrimony. In this way, the vaguely Tuscan style of the pictures acts against the written text and its claim that the setting is specifically Calabrese, allowing readers to envisage dePaola's Italy as broadly Tuscan; at the same time, the images serve to concretize the text's claim to Southern specificity by showing the reader what Strega Nona's "Calabria" looks like. DePaola's creation of a pan-Italian identity thus emerges precisely from the tension between a text that locates Strega Nona's action in the Italian South, and images that depict the central Italian landscape most visually recognizable to American readers lacking a full understanding of Italy's sharp regional differences. As David Lewis writes of the picture book genre,

   the words breathe life into the image. They frame the image for the
   reader by directing attention, and offering interpretation. The
   central point, however, is that the image can only live and have
   meaning as part of the picturebook when informed--or 'limited,' as]
   Nodelman would say (221)--by the words. (36)

The books' overall pictorial style, together with DePaola's appropriation of Botticelli's Birth of Venus and da Vinci's Mona Lisa as framing devices for the main characters' back- and front-cover portraits (Figures 1 and 2), make Strega Nona's brand of italianita not unlike that constructed by the Italian American stregheria movement: a montage of disparate regional and historical elements that often have little to do with the reality of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Southern Italy to which most Italian Americans trace their origins. (30) As Magliocco comments in her analysis of the pan-Italian construction of stregheria,

   In its own way, Stregheria repeats the pattern of earlier
   generations of Italian Americans who created identities by
   emphasizing the legacy of the elite, only now, Aradia di Toscano
   and Giordano Bruno [important figures in the "invented tradition"
   of stregheria] have taken the place of Christopher Columbus and
   Leonardo Da Vinci. It also reproduces the Italian prejudice against
   southern Italy by portraying its origins as Tuscan, Etruscan and
   thus indigenous to the north or center, ignoring the very real
   magical traditions of the Italian meridione that are strongly
   represented in the cultural register of Italian American folklore.
   [...] Stregheria constructs an imagined ancient and medieval Italy
   that resembles the modern nation state, united by language and
   customs, whose culture is perceived as originating in Tuscany
   during the high middle ages. ("Reclaiming the Strega" 18)

[FIGURES 1-2 OMITTED]

But unlike the modern stregheria movement, dePaola's series does not altogether ignore the southern roots of 80% of the US's Italian immigrants. Instead, Calabria becomes a synecdoche for all of Southern Italy, a geographically-specific setting that many readers associate with immigration and thus with their own past. At the same time, however, this is a Calabria evacuated of all of its historical specificity. Despite the fact, for example, that Strega Nona: Her Story is subtitled "as told to Tomie dePaola," this story does not bear any textual trace of immigration or narrative transmission from Calabria to the United States. Indeed, the depiction of a facetious book-signing event that adorns the back jacket (Figure 3) of this story of Strega Nona's biographical beginnings (31) clearly takes place on Calabrese soil, leaving a conspicuous void where one might expect some gesture of transmission (or at least transition) to an American narrative context. This expectation is stoked by a number of textual and graphic factors that point to the story's contemporary transmission: the story's subtitle, As told to Tomie dePaola; the depiction of a scribe--ostensibly dePaola himself--on the book's title page; and the narrator's reference on the book's first page to Calabria's location in "a country now known as Italy."

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

Just as Strega Nona's Calabria represents a recognizable and verisimilar aspect of the Italian American heritage onto which Italian Americans can then project a constructed and pan-Italian vision of their identity, Magliocco argues that stregheria is an attractive site of reclamation because the zone of overlap between stregheria and southern folkways allows Italian Americans to recognize their own family customs in the constructed stregheria tradition. In much the same way, conventional Catholicism and Strega Nona's magic happily co-exist in Tomie dePaola's books, as nuns and priests line up with the rest of the townspeople to eat the magic pasta in the original tale, and as Strega Nona declares a Christmas moratorium on magic (Merry Christmas, Strega Nona) because, after all, "Christmas has a magic of its own." (32) Ultimately, even stereotypical grandmotherly common sense comes to be incorporated into dePaola's code of stregheria when the young strega in training Nonalina (in Her Story) uses not magic but olive oil (33) to reverse Amelia's poorly-conceived spell:

'Watch the goat!' She opened her notebook and chanted some strange words: capra--goat; tetto--roof; and presto! With a bang and a cloud of smoke, Grandma's goat was on the roof! [...]

'Very good, Amelia. Now will you get my goat down?' Grandma Concetta asked. Amelia looked through her notebook. She looked and looked. 'I must have gone shopping that day,' she said.

'Maybe Nona can do it,' Grandma Concetta said.

Nona looked up at the roof. Then she ran into the house and came back with a bottle of olive oil. She climbed up the tree next to the little house and poured some oil on the roof. The goat slipped and slid right off!

Nona's recourse to "cleverness" instead of stregheria not only makes her an endearing character, but allows the reader to attribute to her a characteristic or perhaps stereotypical grandmotherly common sense, even as a young woman. The field of areas in which the Strega Nona character is developed in essential terms thus grows. Not only is she essentially a grandmother and essentially a strega, but now her uncommon common sense is essentialized, too. Italian American ethnics, drawn to the text by its explicitly Calabrese setting and its "old ways" Italian values, can thus recognize and confirm yet another aspect of their own nostalgically conceived past in the Strega Nona text.

Conclusions

Strega Nona's constituent elements--the transmissive role of the grandparent, magic as a figure of generational continuity, and the very genre of children's literature, chosen by the parental authority and read to children as an instrument of cultural formation (34)--all reveal a profound preoccupation with the issue of cultural transmission. Indeed, the representation of this trope occurs en abyme, as Strega Nona is simultaneously the recipient and bestower of her magical legacy just as the text itself participates in the same kind of dynamic process between Italian and American zones of culture.

We have seen that Tomie dePaola's Strega Nona series, in its alchemic amalgamation of various signs of italianita--the comfortably distant grandparent, a folklorish and familiar stregheria--and the overtly textual illustrated literature mode, is an ethnically hybrid text, participating in the creation of an essentially new ethnic identity on American soil. But the series' reframing of transmissive issues in ethnic life has yet another effect: in addition to merely deploying signs of cultural belonging, the character and the texts that bring it to life have clearly become a sign of the imagined community of Italian Americana, a rallying point around which Italian Americans can easily recognize and confirm their own sense of what it means to be an American of Italian descent. In a field that has searched so long for its own object of study, perhaps this is Strega Nona's greatest feat.

Permission to reproduce images from Strega Nona: Her Story as Told to Tomie dePaola, Strega Nona Takes a Vacation, and Big Anthony: His Story has been graciously granted by G.P. Putnam's Sons, A Division of Penguin Young Readers Group. I wish to express my sincere thanks to Tomie dePaola, Samuel Patti, Maria Fama, Sabina Magliocco, Veronica Makowsky, the anonymous readers of MELUS, and Allison Fox Kurtz for their invaluable input and assistance during various stages of this article's preparation. This article is dedicated to Alex, who always pays attention.

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Notes

(1.) Moe outlines the processes by which an orientalized Southern Italy came to synecdocally represent not only the backwardness and social ills of all of Italy, but all of Europe, as well. Moe draws on literary sources from de Stael to Stendhal in examining these processes, but literary evidence for a Southern specificity with regard to supernatural practices might best be found in the fantastic works of French writers like Theophile Gautier, for whom Naples is a privileged setting and the Neopolitan jettatura a favorite fantastic character.

(2.) Though Green's book is widely acknowledged to be the first comprehensive critical study of the Italian American novel, at least two precursors are worthy of note. Peragallo's bibliographic dissertation was published in 1949. Peragallo's work annotates the literary contributions of 59 second- and third-generation Italian Americans without, however, placing their production in any critical framework or subjecting it to any critical analysis. Of equal import is the selection of the Italian American novel as the theme of the American Italian Historical Association's second annual conference (1969). Speaking at the one-day conference were Rose Basile Green, Frank Rosengarten, and Rudolf Vecoli. While all three speakers addressed the paucity of Italian American writing, as did the participants in the conference's concluding panel discussion on "The History and the Future of the Italian-American Novel," the conference format was obviously not meant to propose a single or coherent approach to the Italian American novel, nor was it intended to categorize this production in any systematic way.

(3.) It is not a coincidence that the American Italian Historical Association (AIHA) was founded in 1966 (with Prof. Rudolf Vecoli as its founding president) and began having yearly conferences two years later, in 1968.

(4.) The field's nascent and tentative state, even at this point, allowed Aaron to write in 1983 that a truly hybrid Italian American (or "hyphenate Italian," as he puts it) didn't exist because "with a few notable exceptions, recent Italian American writers seem to have sloughed off the hyphen and disappeared into the American community without extracting all that they might have from their inheritance" (26). I would argue that Tomie dePaola's 1975 Strega Nona was precisely the kind of text whose dearth Aaron was lamenting, and that Aaron's analysis is perhaps reflective of overly restrictive generic parameters in the Italian Studies field's search for hybrid texts.

(5.) In his Beyond Ethnicity, Sollors decries the myopia of ethnic essentialism within ethnically specific fields of study, arguing that ethnic groups have more in common with each other than with their homeland cousins. Despite the validity of Sollors's pan-ethnic view of the hyphenate literary landscape, I argue that the search for a usable italianita is an essential element not only of Italian American cultural criticism, but of creative expression, as well. The collective and usable past around which most Italian Americans build their identity as Italian Americans is not one of immigration narratives and the struggles of assimilation, but rather might be identified as a more properly Italian past, complete with a value system that is associated with (real and constructed) traditional Italian food and folkways and the "old world" way of doing things. As such, the appeal of the most commonly accepted Italian American expressions of ethnicity lies precisely in their specificity within an--albeit constructed and historically dubious Tuscan-centered pan-Italian context.

(6.) "It is, ironically, because Americans take so much for granted among themselves that they can dramatize their differences comfortably. Ethnicity is thus constantly being invented anew in contemporary America. [...] [T]he very assertion of the ethnic dimensions of American culture can be understood as part of the rites and rituals of this land, as an expression of a persistent conflict between consent and descent in America. Whether they know it or not, writers and literary historians participate in the delineation of this conflict. And the rhetoric in which this conflict is experienced and expressed may well be the 'connecting link' that Tocqueville was looking for: the symbolic construction of American kinship has helped to weld Americans of diverse origins into one people, even if the code at times requires the exaggeration of differences" (Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity 14, 15).

(7.) On this point, see Paolicelli's personal interview with Fred Gardaphe in the "It's a Wonderful Life" chapter of his Under the Southern Sun, especially pages 175-76. See also Gardaphe, "Italian American Literature and Culture," and Cavallero.

(8.) On The Sopranos' appeal to non-Italian Americans, see in particular Tonelli's much debated essay. For the view that The Sopranos is a "cultural Rorschach test" in which every facet of contemporary American society can see itself and its own problems, see especially Showalter, who coined the phrase, and Willis. On Tony Soprano's physicality and his appeal as a sex symbol within the gangster subgenre of the crime drama, see Nochimson; see Santo for an extended discussion of the interplay between corporeality and masculinity in The Sopranos.

(9.) We should note, at this point, that Gardaphe's tripartite framework of modes or ages of writing is not meant to reflect the sociological imposition of unique generational characteristics on immigrants, their children, and their grandchildren, respectively. This distinction is especially important to maintain in the context of Marcus Lee Hansen's now infamous statement (known as Hansen's Law) that "what the son wishes to forget, the grandson wishes to remember." In other words, the mythic age of writing is in no way analogous to the second generation's alleged reluctance to embrace its ethnic heritage, but rather aims to describe a particular sort of ethnic hybridity that is more assimilated to American culture than the first age, but less so than the third.

(10.) Telephone conversation with the author, 19 May 2005.

(11.) From www.amazon.com's reader feedback pages, accessed 6 April 2005.

(12.) Literally, the "three crowns" of Italian literature, upon whose works the standard Tuscan literary language was based: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.

(13.) http://www.niaf.org/milestones/year_1965.asp, accessed 23 May 2005. As Gans writes, echoing Anderson's Imagined Communities: "Symbolic ethnicity ... does not require functioning groups or networks; feelings of identity can be developed by allegiances to symbolic groups that never meet, or to collectivities that meet only occasionally.... By the same token, symbolic ethnicity does not need a practiced culture, even if the symbols are borrowed from it" (440-41).

(14.) As per my telephone conversation with the author of 19 May 2005, Strega Nona's setting is "not historical; it's a made-up Renaissance."

(15.) Implicit in Sollors's argument for a theory of consent in American ethnic studies (to counterbalance prevailing theories of descent) is the idea that the ethnic pride movements were inspired to emulate the energy and the tactics of the African American movement of the late 1960's (Beyond Ethnicity, Introduction). In a similar vein, but on the specific topic of the then newly acquired symbolic value of the Holocaust for American Jews and in a more top-down process of identity creation, Gans wrote in 1979 that "the 1978 NBC miniseries 'The Holocaust' may be both an effect of rising interest in the tragedy and a cause of further interest, even if NBC commissioned the series in the hope of duplicating the earlier success of [ABC's] 'Roots'" (439). The release of Mario Puzo's and Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather in various media points to a very similar, if not identical, process in the Italian American community. Puzo's novel was released in 1969, to be quickly adapted by Coppola in The Godfather (1972) and its sequel, The Godfather: Part lit (1974). The two films were reedited to create a more linear, chronological narrative of Puzo's story and broadcast, not coincidentally, on NBC in November of 1977. Tomie dePaola, when asked of his familiarity with Italian American literature, immediately cited both Puzo's novel and Coppola's first film, joking about the essential (and noncriminal) similarities between the Corleone family and his own (telephone interview of 19 May 2005).

(16.) Translation from the original Italian is mine.

(17.) For Pinocchio's publication history and its socio-cultural context, see in particular Perella, West, and Wunderlich. As this essay goes to press, an MLA Approaches to Teaching Worm Literature volume on Le Avventure di Pinocchio is forthcoming.

(18.) West writes, however, "There were many programs initiated after unification with the goal of 'making the Italian people Italian,' but in spite of his interest in pedagogical writing, Collodi was highly suspicious of them because he saw them as a threat to individuality and personal freedom" ("The Persistent Puppet," Session II).

(19.) See Perella for a discussion of the other great work of Italian children's literature, Edmondo de Amicis's Cuore, whose "main setting is an elementary school classroom and its main character a third-grader whose diary records the events of the school year" and "tak[ing] for [its] protagonists children from Italy's various regions and classes" (10-11). Despite this assertion of Cuore's unifying function, the protagonist's gaze is a privileged one, from economic and class standpoints, that attempts to educate the Italian middle class to the plight of the poor, but does not try to integrate lower economic strata into the newly unified nation.

(20.) My use of the word "montage" is derived both from Rose's discussion of the term and the OED's definition of "the process of making a mixture, blend, or medley of various elements; a pastiche; a sequence, miscellany," and has been chosen in favor of the more charged and specific pastiche (which connotes imitation for comic ends). I use the term to convey the process by which an artist such as Tomie dePaola assembles regionally, culturally, and historically disparate markers of italianita in the service of an ostensibly unitary national Italian profile.

(21.) As cited in www.Epinions.com, and confirmed in my telephone conversation with the author on 19 May 2005. DePaola added that, for him, in addition to its iconic value as a marker of Italian foodways, the pasta in Strega Nona also carries with it "scary" connotations of overabundance. Evidence of this lies in what may be considered a failed precursor to the first Strega Nona book, the proposed and rejected The Pischetti Book. In this book, dePaola tells the autobiographical story of a young boy who is subjected to his Italian grandmother's "volcanos" of pasta and required to finish his plate. After mentally going through a number of scenarios in which he creatively eliminates the pasta, the young boy feeds it to the dog and gets a second helping as a reward. This anecdote reveals how the stereotypically Southern Italian preoccupation with providing for the family in the midst of scarcity might have a difficult transfer to American soil, where well provided-for third- and fourth-generation Americans might see this plentitude as threatening, or at the very least, unfamiliar. DePaola's preoccupation with overabundance in the Strega Nona series is supported in visual terms by the recurrence of episodes in which Big Anthony is overcome and carried away by various products of his ineptitude (pasta, dough, bubble bath). The result is a pictorial thread that runs through the series: frames that are increasingly filled up with a white space that eventually obscures Big Anthony's bewildered face, even as it directs the reader's attention to it.

(22.) For an excellent exploration of the grandparent figure in ethnic literature, see Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, Chapter 7.

(23.) We also see in this same passage that Grandma Concetta typically refers to her favorite granddaughter and protegee with the diminutive Nonalina, reinforcing the notion that Nona is, in fact, a proper name that can--in line with onomastic conventions--sustain a diminutive ending.

(24.) "'Why,' many Italians and Italian-Americans ask me, 'is NONA spelled with one N instead of two?' (The Italian word for GRANDMOTHER is NONNA.)

"Strega Nona is Calabrese, like my ancestors. Calabria is in the toe of the boot of Italy. As far as my relatives told me, NONA is a slang spelling for 'Granny' or 'Grandma' which after all is spelled differently than 'Grandmother.'

"And, on top of it all, NONA is her NAME. I settled that in STREGA NONA, HER STORY. I hope" (Tomie.com; Spotlight on ... Strega Nona).

(25.) Though Boelhower and Gardaphe both comment on the first age's use of archetype, Tomie dePaola's Strega Nona's use of type--in the service of a figure so simultaneously broad and specific as to create a screen for readers' projections of their own ethnicity--is self-conscious enough to warrant its placement on the borderline between the second and third ages.

(26.) Though stregoneria and stregheria are both acceptable Italian words for witchcraft, the former term is the more common. In Magliocco's use of the latter term in her work, she makes a clear distinction between Italian folk magic traditions (stregoneria) and various Italian American reclamation phenomena (stregheria). In my attempt to link Strega Nona's appeal to processes of ethnic reclamation, I will use stregheria to describe dePaola's character.

(27.) Peacocks have various associations with the supernatural world, including their associations with immortality (stemming from the erroneous belief that their flesh did not decompose), with the "evil eye" and the stars (both allusions to the designs on their feathers), and most notably, in this context, as an emblem of the alchemic process (which has a phase called "the peacock's tail," probably because of the multi-colored sheen taken on by metals during this part of the alchemic transformation to gold) (Shepherd and Shepherd).

(28.) As Gans wrote in 1979, for the third generation of American ethnics and beyond, "[symbolic ethnicity] ... is characterized by a nostalgic allegiance to the culture of the immigrant generation, or that of the old country; a love for and a pride in a tradition that can be felt without having to be incorporated into everyday behavior" (436). In this sense, despite Gans's assertion to the contrary (435), these nostalgic links to the past are myths in the Barthesian sense of "cultural practices" that have been "'abstracted' from that culture and pulled out of [their] original moorings, so to speak" (435).

(29.) It is my contention that dePaola is not idiosyncratic in this, and that this montage approach to representing and thus constructing Italian American identity is indeed typical of the current trend toward an essentially pan italianita. For a succinct discussion of the elements of this movement, see Williams. For a broader and more comprehensive development of this phenomenon in Italian American self-identification, see Paolicelli.

(30.) Cultural products such as the paintings of Tuscan Renaissance masters Botticelli and da Vinci have become some of the symbols around which late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Italian American ethnicity has been created, as the imagined community of Italian Americana becomes not only symbolic, but based on a culturally constructed idea of a uniform and monolithic italianita that often ignores southern immigration genealogies. As Nodelman writes, "Styles identified with specific individuals, or with whole periods or cultures, can evoke not just what they might have meant for their original viewers, but also, what those individuals or periods or cultures have come to mean to us" ("Decoding the Images" 78).

(31.) Big Anthony: His Story boasts an almost identical back jacket.

(32.) When a school district in California threatened to ban the Strega Nona series because of its supernatural content, Tomie dePaola was forced to defend his protagonist to a local journalist by telling her that not only was she an invented character, but that she was Catholic (telephone conversation with the author, 19 May 2005).

(33.) It is not a coincidence that olive oil is almost universally cited as an ingredient in Southern Italian folk healing rituals, most notably incantations to diagnose and cure the malocchio (see Malpezzi and Clements; Magliocco ["Spells, Saints and Streghe"]; and Vecoli). It is also worth noting that Tomie dePaola cites his own Nana Concetta's knowledge of an incantation to cure headaches with olive oil as an integral part of her mystique.

(34.) As Moebius writes, "I wonder how many who enjoy picturebooks today discovered them not in the arcadia of childhood, but in the straits of early parenthood. The formation of our taste then would depend on a joint enterprise between parent and child, and not on our own preferences alone. We could speak of 'households of taste'" (144-5; note 1).

Lina Insana

University of Pittsburgh