Folklore
The Development of Folklore Studies in Europe and the United States
The term folklore is a multivalent and unstable one, imbued with shifting meanings depending on historical moments and particular contexts as well as who is using the expression. One popular meaning of the word is that of an older, common yet debunked belief understood to be unverifiable or untrue. Folklore also refers to cultural practices such as storytelling that have developed over time and continue into the present in ever-changing form, especially those practices found historically among the agrarian class, i.e., the folk. In addition, the term references the actual study of said expressive culture by folklorists. In the United States, the term folkloristics has been adopted to refer specifically to the documentation and analysis of folk arts and practices in order to distinguish it from the subject of inquiry.
Early studies concentrated on oral traditions such as proverbs and tales, but over time research included material objects and visual art, and in the United States the term folklife (adopted from German scholarship) came to be used to encompass a wide range of cultural phenomena and artisanal crafts that included needlework, furniture, and architecture. There has also been increasing use (as well as criticism) of the terms vernacular culture or vernacular expressivity, and more broadly aesthetics of everyday life, in relation to folklore and folklife. Ultimately, folkloristics is an interdisciplinary study of cultural practices overlapping with other established disciplines such as literary studies and anthropology.
Folklorists and other scholars have advanced theoretical approaches addressing areas of interest such as genre and narration, tradition and creativity, and craft and commercialism. In addition, they have long turned their attention to scrutinizing the history and methodologies of folklore studies itself as it developed in Europe and the United States in order to offer self-reflective critiques applicable to ethnographic inquiry and their interactions with and interpretations of the creative individuals and communities with whom they study.
An interest in the cultural practices of the peasantry begins in the modern period with the rise of European nationalism, especially with its romantic iterations. Urban researchers turned their attention to the countryside in an attempt to locate an uncorrupted authenticity, a counter to mass-produced urban cultural production, that was interpreted as being unique and foundational to the emerging nation state.
German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder sought to locate the “soul of the nation” in language, emphasizing its origins as found in oral poetry. This essentialist view of national identity marginalized those deemed to be different from the prescribed center, such as Roma, Jews, and speakers of minority languages. The nationalist underpinnings of early folklore investigations would ultimately have particular appeal in the twentieth century to authoritative governments, in particular Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, which weaponized university departments and museum collections to skew findings in keeping with their nationalist and racist political policies. This historical fact is one of the reasons that contemporary scholars in Europe have shifted to using the term ethnology so as to move away from the word folklore’s troubled past.
Initial explorations were interested in “antiquities,” survivals from early periods that were thought to have been created by elites and that over time filtered down to the working poor who were believed to mindlessly repeat certain tales or practice certain ceremonies without any agency. The goal of these researchers was to identify the origins of a specific song or story and not to investigate how the folk artistry was practiced in situ.
Italy was an important center for folklore collection and research. Physician Giuseppe Pitrè dedicated his life to recording proverbs and folktales and promoting Sicilian folk culture in books and scholarly journals. In the first half of the twentieth century, Emma Calderini, Eleonora Gallo, and Elisa Ricci took particular interest in documenting women’s needlework and costumes. During his imprisonment by the Fascist regime, Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci wrote briefly about folklore, critiquing collectors’ focus on the “picturesque element.” Gramsci pointed out the inherent power structures involved in subjugating subaltern classes, like the peasantry, and the ways in which hegemonic forces historically imposed a dominant notion of what constitutes culture. He understood the folk as being active agents in the creation of cultural practices that operated as a counterforce within systems of power:
Folklore should be instead be studied as a “conception of the world and life” implicit to a large extent in determinate (in time and space) strata of society and in opposition (also for the most part implicit, mechanical and objective) to “official” conceptions of the world (or in a broader sense, the conceptions of the cultured parts of historically determinate societies) that have succeeded one another in the historical process. … Folklore must not be considered an eccentricity, an oddity or a picturesque element, but as something which is very serious and is to be taken seriously. (“Observations on Folklore” 1991, 189, 191)
While he valued peasant vernacular knowledge, seeing it as dynamic and changing, Gramsci understood such mindsets to be fragmentary, incoherent, and ultimately unable to fully comprehend the larger operating forces of oppression. Gramsci’s writing would go on to influence a generation of Italian scholars working after World War II, including Ernesto De Martino.
The last quarter of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of new theoretical and methodological approaches to folkloristics in the United States. American scholars shifted the focus of inquiry beyond the agrarian to document other folk groups that shared cultural practices, from family members to ethnic groups, from age cohorts to occupational associates. Attention was paid to the expressive culture of contemporary groups that shaped and reinforced their collective bond and identity.
A shift emerged in this period that moved away from merely collecting tales and songs to be packaged in books and recordings for distribution beyond the community of origin. Instead, a performance approach developed that focused on the context in which, for example, a proverb was recited or a story was told. Such an ethnographic method and analysis also studied audience members and their response, how the performances and issues of competency were evaluated and discussed afterward.
Contemporary folklore studies is attentive to the dynamic nature of cultural expressivity as old and new forms and materials are revived, recontextualized, and recycled to create emergent and hybrid forms. In ever-shifting economic, political, and technological conditions, culture or cultural forms are shown to be fluid while referencing continuities with the past. Individual creativity informs community aesthetics and vice versa. Folk groups operate in intimate face-to-face settings as well as online. It is not uncommon for folklorists and like-minded scholars of vernacular culture to research and publish on graffiti, punk music, and other forms of contemporary artistic expressions that first emerged in grassroots settings and eventually became distributed as commercial products (and studied by some as “popular culture”) in order to expand a deterritorialized sense of community. Digital folklore such as memes and urban legends shared on social media platforms have become exciting topics for folklorists’ investigations. The myriad ways in which expressive culture informs and gives shape to shared values and meanings constitute current studies in the field. A folkloristic approach to creativity and artistry in quotidian settings is attentive to ways in which skills are developed, imagination is evoked, and historic forms are reworked in concert with communal joy and transcendence.
Early Documentation and Research of Italian Immigrant Folklore
Italian ethnographers took interest in the folkways of Italian emigrants, especially those working and living in the United States. At the first Congress of Italian Ethnography in 1911, held in Rome, Amy Bernardy and other scholars presented on the conditions and practices of the developing Italian migrant communities in the United States. Bernardy, the daughter of an American father and an Italian mother, went on to write about the state of migrant women, tenement housing, and language use and changes, noting among other aspects of vernacular culture those of religious practices, foodways, and marionette theater.
American journalists and social reformers were early documentarians of Italian vernacular culture, from foodways to Catholic saint processions and street feasts. These accounts span the spectrum from depictions of picturesque curiosities to tracts highlighting the pathologies of sordid immigrant life that needed to be reformed or eradicated. These writings often served as guidebooks, so to speak, for “armchair slummers” and actual “slumming parties,” those excursions of middle-class white American Protestants seeking to be entertained by the squalid sections of cities where poor immigrants resided. Phyllis Williams’s 1938 South Italian Folkways in Europe and America served, as its subtitle states, as A Handbook for Social Workers, Visiting Nurses, School Teachers, and Physicians in which the readerlearned about customs concerning marriage, recreation, death, and other topics in Italy and how immigrants and second-generation children modified and adapted agrarian-based beliefs and practices in their encounter with urbanization, modernization, and consumerism.
An important source of documentation of immigrant folkways, including storytelling, religious beliefs, and horticulture, is found in works by second-generation Italian American writers. Sometimes these novels and memoirs underscore the tensions surrounding Southern Italian cultural practices as interpreted by American-born children. Jerre Mangione’s Mount Allegro (1942) stands out as an important source of documentation that social scientists referenced in their studies of Italian migration to the United States. Other works like Tony Ardizzone’s In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu (1999) revel in the folk knowledge of Sicilian peasants and immigrants. Louise DeSalvo and Edvige Giunta’s 2002 anthology The Milk of Almonds brings together Italian American women’s creative writing on the quintessential folklore topic of food—its preparation, presentation, and consumption—while challenging gendered tropes and stereotypes. Literary scholar Mary Jo Bona’s By the Breath of Their Mouths (2010) offers a sweeping and deep analysis of novels and poetry to highlight the connections between immigrant oral culture and folk wisdom with struggles for social justice in the American context.
American-trained scholars of folklore operating in the late nineteenth up until the middle of the twentieth century took passing interest in Italian immigrant cultural practices. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, a period that coincided with the white ethnic revival, we begin to see the emergence of serious studies of various genres. Italian-born and US-trained folklorist Carla Bianco recorded folk music from various Italian regions as performed by immigrants living in New York City and Chicago during the early 1960s. She went on to publish a historically significant work, The Two Rosetos, comparing various aspects of folk culture from immigrants and their children who settled in a Pennsylvania town with those of their Pugliese town of origin. In 1985, Elizabeth Mathias and Richard Raspa contextualized a collection of twenty-two fairy tales and religious narratives, as well as personal experience narratives, told by Clementina Todesco (who emigrated from an Alpine village in the Veneto) and originally transcribed by her daughter Bruna in 1941 for a folklore class at Wayne State University.
Recent Developments and Studies of Italian American Folklore
From the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first, there has been a proliferation of major studies by scholars operating in various disciplines that have significantly enhanced our appreciation for Italian American vernacular expressivity. Language arts is one arena of interest that has been explored. The post–World War II immigrant poet Vincenzo Ancona (1915–2000) was steeped in the oral folk poetry of Sicily’s peasant and artisan classes. Improvisation, poetic competitions, and recitation were part of the cultural legacy Ancona brought with him when he arrived in New York City in 1956. His Sicilian verses in ottava rima composed in the United States were translated and published with accompanying recordings of his voice in an anthology that helped to disseminate Sicilian folk art to a new audience (Ancona 1990, 2010; Sciorra 2011). Another transatlantic Sicilian tradition was the teatro dei pupi, marionette plays, a prose theater form based on masterpieces of Italian literature that recounted heroic chivalric tales. Agrippino Manteo’s family theater in New York City performed serialized plays that ran for months and involved extended speeches and dialogues in standard Italian with the occasional inclusion of ottava rima verse (Cavallo 2023).
New forms of oral accounts emerged directly out of the immigrant experience itself, such as personal narrative stories relating to the transatlantic journey and coping with an estranging new environment (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1986; Stern and Cicala 1991). Several scholars (Carnevale 2009; Frasca 2016; Haller 2006) have explored comic performers’ macaronic skits mixing standard Italian, Neapolitan, and English for the immigrant stage and commercial recordings that playfully represented the changing world encountered by newcomers. Eduardo “Farfariello” Migliaccio was a compelling performer in large part because he was acutely aware of the experience of culture shock and hybrid-language formation as well as the new urban topography of modernity and heterogeneity that characterized New York City and other American cities.
Rhetoric scholar Gloria Nardini (1999) took an ethnographic approach to language when she examined the ways in which women of a Chicago social club used language to assert themselves and make their voices heard in a male-dominated environment. In this study, Nardini shows how this group of women used the politics of the spoken word to enact the cultural precept of bella figura, that is, the positive public presentation of self.
One aspect of Italian American language arts in need of further exploration has to do with accounts concerning the Civil Rights movement and the resulting white ethnic politics that emerged during the post–World War II era. Major demographic shifts and the destabilizing deindustrialization contributed to heightened racial tensions and violence in many urban communities during this time. Italian Americans (and other whites) began telling stories of fear and hatred of the Other and later of loss, victimization, and nostalgia as they moved away from their beloved neighborhoods (Maly and Dalmage 2016). Such personal narratives continue to be told decades after the fact as rationales for racial animosity and white flight.
The music culture of Italian immigrants and Italian Americans has historically been a rich and varied one, and the ways in which that culture overlaps with Italian American folklore are especially relevant. One of the most important investigations of Italian American music with a folklore approach is John Zucchi’s The Little Slaves of the Harp (1992), which documented the diasporic travels of child street performers, especially harp players from Viggiano (Potenza province), Basilicata. Recordings over the years have offered listeners the varied sounds of Italian vernacular music. Giuliana Fugazzotto’s publications with accompanying CDs of immigrant singers of the Campanian “a fronne ‘e limone” style (2026) and Sicilian string quartets (2015)—issued by US commercial companies from the first half of the twentieth century—are invaluable audio documents. Anthropologist Anna Lomax Wood (formerly Anna Chairetakis) visited social clubs and people’s homes to record the folk music of post–World War II immigrants. In Global Tarantella (2017), folklorist Incoronata Inserra examines the transatlantic journeys of practitioners of the Campanian tarantella with a close reading of New York City-based Alessandra Belloni and her influential Italian folk music revivalist workshops for Italian American women. One under-studied Italian American musical tradition is that of the serenade as practiced in South Philadelphia, in which a groom visits his fiancée’s home the night before the wedding to sing American pop tunes accompanied not by string instruments as found historically in Italy but by an amplified DJ.
American music making has long been a contested site where folk and emerging vernacular forms encounter commercialization and mass media, making it difficult and unserviceable to discuss notions of genre purity. One cannot talk about Italian American vernacular music without discussing race and the encounter with African American performers. American studies scholar John Gennari (2017; 2024) is particularly attuned to the sonorous affinities and dissonances between African American and Italian American jazz and jazz-inspired performers, from New Orleans trumpeter Nick LaRocca to crooner Frank Sinatra. Joseph Sciorra (2002; 2011) has noted how Italian American youths who adopted and performed Black musical styles like vocal harmony (doo wop) and rap that emerged from the streets had to negotiate their artistic personae in relationship to race, style, masculinity, and commercialism.
Foodways are perhaps the most vernacular of cultural practices associated with Italian Americans. Italian peasants endured a life of penury and food scarcity and believed the United States to be a land of plenty in keeping with the imaginary topography of Cockaigne (Del Giudice 2023). Historian Simone Cinotto’s The Italian American Table (2013) is the definitive work on this most important topic. Cinotto points out how Italian immigrants’ food preferences became a battle zone as social workers and subsequently immigrants’ American-born children came to see those choices as unhealthy and antiquated. In time, the commercialization of Italian American cuisine as an inexpensive option made family-run eateries and restaurants entertaining and picturesque settings for the general American consumer. The transnational influence of Italian American food production, significantly on the construction of a national Italian cuisine, is most noted in the development and consumption of pizza and dry pasta (pastasciutta) (LaCecla 2007; Grandi 2020). Italian Americans would go on to develop and popularize specific dishes like spaghetti and meatballs, chicken parmesan, cioppino, hero sandwiches, and rainbow cookies, which became powerful sources of ethnic identity as their culinary creations entered the American mainstream.
Much has been written about Italian Americans’ various Catholic practices, especially those dealing with the popular processions of religious statuary and street feste. Historian Robert Orsi in his work on the Our Lady of Mount Carmel devotion and feast in Harlem, New York (1985; 2010) has helped to reveal the cultural religious dynamics that informed the participants, especially women who bore the weight of gender and family expectations. The creation and maintenance of home altars and yard shrines have been pervasive expressions of Italian Americans’ religious faith offering charged spaces that connect the celestial with the terrestrial while providing points of encounter for communal relationships (Sciorra 2015; Turner 1999). In recent years Italian Americans have reimagined and modified older practices concerning witchcraft and non-standard Catholic observances in search of a spirituality in tune with their twenty-first-century lives and mindsets. One notable example of this is what has come to be referred to as neo-stregheria (Magliocco 2011).
The study of Italian American material culture has gained increasing interest in recent years. Needlework, horticulture, the luthier’s craft, and artisanal statuary carving are just some of the areas of recent study (Ruberto and Sciorra 2021–2022). Embroidery that immigrant women learned as children fueled the proletarian work they later did as part of a skilled labor force (Giunta and Sciorra 2014). Piedmontese immigrants introduced an Italian-identified architectural style in Paradise Valley, Nevada, with their design and construction of ranch houses, horse barns, and storage facilities made from sandstone and granite (Marshall 1995). Artisanal carvers of marble and granite executed the work of famous American sculptors as well as creating smaller commissions for tombstones. Italian American site-specific art creations and architectural wonders such as Sabato Rodia’s Watts Towers, along with other structures found in California, have helped fuel the debate around what is “folk art,” “self-taught art,” and “outsider art” (Del Giudice 2014).
Who constitutes the folk in the twenty-first century, and what are their means of communication? The youth group known as Guidos, with its affinity for such cultural signifiers as freestyle music and personal grooming, can certainly be studied as a folk group (Tricarico 2019). The rise in digital folklore scholarship offers exciting opportunities to consider the tropes and narratives posted online by Italian American influencers, comedians, and actors who create often stereotypical representations of their own ethnic group (Gricinella 2023; Nicholas 2023). It may seem odd for some to consider Guidos and social media denizens as constituting the folk or engaging in folklore, but a folkloristic perspective, with its interest in creativity and community, helps us to better understand the changing contours of Italian American culture and identity.
Resources
The Development of Folklore Studies in Europe and the United States
Bauman, Richard. 1984. Verbal Art as Performance. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.
Bendix, Regina. 1997. In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Blank, Trevor J., ed. 2009. Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World. Logan: Utah State University Press.
Buccitelli, Anthony Bak. Forthcoming 2026. The Internet Is Real Life: Performing Folklore Online and Off. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Burke, Peter. 1978. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. New York: Harper & Row.
Cavazza, Stefano. 2025. Folklore in camicia nera: Studi su fascismo e tradizioni popolari. Pisa: Pacini Editore.
Cirese, Alberto Mario. 2022. “Gramsci’s Observations on Folklore: Conceptions of the World, Spontaneous Philosophy and Class Instinct.” Anuac 11.1 (June), 17–48.
Cocchiara, Giuseppe. 1981. The History of Folklore in Europe. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues.
de Risi, Luca. 1999. “L’etnografia italiana all’estero.” La Ricerca Folklorica 39 (April), 135–143.
Dimpflmeier, Fabiana, ed. 2023. Folklore, razza, fascismo. Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore.
Feintuch, Burt, ed. 2003. Eight Words for the Study of Expressive Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Gencarella, Stephen Olbrys. 2010. “Gramsci, Good Sense, and Critical Folklore Studies.” Journal of Folklore Research 47.3 (September-December), 221–252.
Gramsci, Antonio. 1991. “Observations on Folklore: Giovanni Crocioni.” In Selections from Cultural Writings, edited by David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, 188–191. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
McNeill, Lynne S. 2013. Folklore Rules: A Fun, Quick, and Useful Introduction to the Field of Academic Folklore Studies. Logan: Utah State University Press.
Simeone, William E. 1978. “Fascists and Folklorists in Italy.” The Journal of American Folklore 91, no. 359 (January–March), 543–557.
Sottilotta, Elena Emma. 2025. Seekers of Wonder: Women Writing Folk and Fairy Tales in Nineteenth-Century Italy and Ireland. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Stern, Stephen, and John Allan Cicala, eds. 1991. Creative Ethnicity: Symbols and Strategies of Contemporary Ethnic Life. Logan: Utah State University Press.
Turner, Kay, and Pauline Greenhill, eds. 2012. Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
“What is Folklore?” https://whatisfolklore.org/.
Early Documentation and Research of Italian Immigrant Folklore
Bianco, Carla. 1974. The Two Rosetos. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Mathias, Elizabeth, and Richard Raspa. 1988. Italian Folktales in America: The Verbal Art of an Immigrant Woman. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Tirabassi, Maddalena. 2011. “Amy Bernardy e il primo congresso di etnografia.” Archivio Storico dell’Emigrazione Italiana. https://www.asei.eu/it/2011/10/amy-bernardy-e-il-primo-congresso-di-etnografia/
Tirabassi, Maddalena, ed. 2005. Ripensare la patria grande: Gli scritti di Amy Allemand Bernardy sulle migrazioni italiane, 1900–1930. Isernia: Cosmo Iannone Editore.
Williams, Phyllis H. 1969 [1938]. South Italian Folkways in Europe and America: A Handbook for Social Workers, Visiting Nurses, School Teachers, and Physicians. New York: Russell & Russell.
Recent Developments and Studies of Italian American Folklore
Del Giudice, Luisa, ed. 1993. Studies in Italian American Folklore. Logan: Utah State University Press.
Malpezzi, Frances M., and William M. Clements. 1992. Italian-American Folklore. Little Rock, AR: August House Publishers.
Sciorra, Joseph, ed. 2011. Italian Folk: Vernacular Culture in Italian-American Lives. New York: Fordham University Press.
Taylor, David A., and John Alexander Williams, eds. 1992. Old Ties, New Attachments: Italian-American Folklife in the West. Washington, DC: Library of Congress.
Language
Ancona, Vincenzo. 1990; 2010. Malidittu la lingua/Damned Language. Edited by Anna L. Chairetakis and Joseph Sciorra. Mineola, NY: Legas.
Bona, Mary Jo. 2010. By the Breath of Their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian America. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Carnevale, Nancy C. 2009. A New Language, A New World: Italian Immigrants in the United States, 1890–1945. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Del Giudice, Luisa, ed. 2009. Oral History, Oral Culture, and Italian Americans. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ets, Marie Hall. 1970. Rosa: The Life of an Italian Immigrant. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Haller, Hermann W. 2006. Tra Napoli e New York: Le macchiette italo-americane di Eduardo Migliaccio. Rome: Bulzoni Editore.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1986. “Studying Immigrant and Ethnic Folklore.” In Handbook of American Folklore, edited by Richard M. Dorson, 39–47. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Nardini, Gloria. 1999. Che Bella Figura! The Power of Performance in an Italian Ladies’ Club in Chicago. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Sciorra, Joseph. 2011. “Locating Memory: Longing, Place, and Autobiography in Vincenzo Ancona’s Sicilian Poetry.” In Italian Folk: Vernacular Culture in Italian-American Lives, edited by Joseph Sciorra, 107–131. New York: Fordham University Press.
Music
Cavallo, Jo Ann. 2025. “Glimpses of Italian Immigrant Musical Culture: Anna Lomax Wood Reflects on her Experiences Documenting and Showcasing Italian American Musical Traditions.” Italian American Collective. https://iac.lib.miamioh.edu/2025/07/01/glimpses-of-italian-immigrant-musical-culture/
Chairetakis, Anna L. 1979. Calabria Bella, Dove T'hai Lasciate?: Italian Folk Music Collected in New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island, Volume Two. Recording. Folkways FE 34042. https://folkways.si.edu/calabria-bella-dove-thai-lasciate-italian-folk-music-collected-in-new-york-new-jersey-and-rhode-island-vol-2/american-folk-world/music/album/smithsonian
Chairetakis, Anna L. 1979. In Mezz’una Strada Trovai una Pianta di Rosa: Italian Folk Music Collected in New York and New Jersey, Volume One. Recording. Folkways FE 34041. https://folkways.si.edu/in-mezzuna-strada-trovai-una-pianta-di-rosa-italian-folk-music-collected-in-new-york-and-new-jersey-vol-1/american-folk-world/music/album/smithsonian
Chairetakis, Anna L. 1986. La Baronessa Di Carini: Sicilian Traditional Songs and Music. Recording. Global Village GVM 676/677.
Chairetakis, Anna L. 1986. Cantate Con Noi [Sing with Us]: Choral Songs from Istria and the Alps and Vintage Popular Music from South-Central Italy. Recording. Global Village GVM 678.
Chairetakis, Anna L. 1986. E La Voci Ca Canuscite [This is the Voice Your Know]: Southern Italian Mountain Music from Calabria, Campania, Basilicata and Abruzzi. Recording. Global Village GVM 675.
Chairetakis, Anna L. 1993. “Tears of Blood: The Calabrian Villanella and Immigrant Epiphanies.” In Studies in Italian American Folklore, edited by Luisa Del Giudice, 11–51. Logan: Utah State University Press.
Frasca, Simona. 2014. Italian Birds of Passage: The Diaspora of Neapolitan Musicians in New York. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fugazzotto, Giuliana. 2015. I quattro siciliani: La straordinaria vicenda di Rosario Catalano e del suo quartetto nell'America degli anni Venti. Udine: Nota.
Fugazzotto, Giuliana. 2024. Fronne americane: I canti a fronne ‘e limone nella produzione discografica etnica americana a 78 giri (1909–1930). Udine: Nota.
Gennari, John. 2017. Flavor and Soul: Italian America at Its African American Edge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gennari, John. 2019. “‘Touching at a Distance’: A Meditation on Italian American Soulfulness.” Italian American Review 9.1 (Winter), 10–25.
I Giullari di Piazza. 1995. Earth, Sun & Moon. CD. Lyrichord LYRCD 7427.
Inserra, Incoronata. 2017. Global Tarantella: Reinventing Southern Italian Folk Music and Dances. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Lomax, Alan, and Carla Bianco, eds. 1965. Canti Popolari: Ballads and Folksongs from the Italian American communities of New York and Chicago. Recording. Folkways FE 4010. https://folkways.si.edu/italian-folk-songs/world/music/album/smithsonian
Musolino, Michela. 2022. La Notti Triunfanti. CD. Self-released.
Sciorra, Joseph. 2002; 2015. “Who Put the Wop in Doo-Wop?: Some Thoughts on Italian Americans and Early Rock and Roll.” Voices in Italian Americana 13.1, 16–22; reprinted in 26.1, 183–188.
Sciorra, Joseph. 2011. “The Mediascape of Hip-Wop: Alterity and Authenticity in Italian American Rap.” In Global Media, Culture, and Identity: Theory, Cases, and Approaches, edited by Rohit Chopra and Radhika Gajjala, 33–51. New York: Routledge.
Zucchi, John E. 1992. The Little Slaves of the Harp: Italian Child Street Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Paris, London, and New York. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Foodways
Cinotto, Simone. 2013. The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Cinotto, Simone. 2012. Soft Soil, Black Grapes: The Birth of Italian Winemaking in California. New York: New York University Press.
Del Giudice, Luisa. 2023. In Search of Abundance: Mountains of Cheese, Rivers of Wine, and Other Gastronomic Utopias. New York: Bordighera Press.
Grandi, Alberto. 2020. Denominazione di origine inventata: Le bugie del marketing sui prodotti tipici italiani. Milan: Mondadori.
The Italian American Garden Project. https://www.theitaliangardenproject.com/
La Cecla, Franco. 2007. Pasta and Pizza. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Pinna, Pietro. 2023. La valle del vino: Un secolo di presenza italiana in California (1850-1950). Rome: Viella.
Religion
Ferraiuolo, Augusto. 2009. Religious Festive Practices in Boston’s North End: Ephemeral Identities in an Italian American Community. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Magliocco, Sabina. 2011. “Imagining the Strega: Folklore Reclamation and the Construction of Italian American Witchcraft.” In Italian Folk: Vernacular Culture in Italian-American Lives. Joseph Sciorra, ed. New York: Fordham University Press, 197–214.
Maldonado-Estrada, Alyssa. 2020. Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. New York: New York University Press.
Orsi, Robert A. 1985; 2010. The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Sciorra, Joseph. 2015. Built with Faith: Italian American Imagination and Catholic Material Culture in New York City. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Sturm, Circe, and Randolph Lewis, dirs. 2007. Texas Tavola: A Taste of Sicily in the Lone Star State. 34 min. https://www.folkstreams.net/films/texas-tavola.
Turner, Kay. 1999. Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars. New York: Thames & Hudson.
Material Culture
Del Giudice, Luisa, ed. 2014. Sabato Rodia’s Towers in Watts: Art, Migration, Development. New York: Fordham University Press.
Dobney, Jayson Kerr. 2011. Guitar Heroes: Legendary Craftsman from Italy to New York. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Giunta, Edvige, and Joseph Sciorra, eds. 2014. Embroidered Stories: Interpreting Women’s Domestic Needlework from the Italian Diaspora. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Hunt, Marjorie. 1999. The Stone Carvers: Master Craftsmen of Washington National Cathedral. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Landler, Edward and Brad Byer, dirs. 2005. I Build the Tower, 87 min.
Marshall, Howard Wight. 1995. Paradise Valley, Nevada: The People and Buildings of an American Place. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Noyes, Dorothy. 1989. Uses of Tradition: Arts of Italian American in Philadelphia. Philadelphia Folklore Project/Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial.
Ruberto, Laura E. and Joseph Sciorra. 2018. “Migrating Objects: Italian American Museums and the Creation of Collective Identity.” Altreitalie 56 (January-June), 131–156.
Ruberto, Laura E., and Joseph Sciorra. 2021–2022. “Italian American Stuff: A Survey of Material Culture, Migration, and Ethnicity.” SOAR: The Society of Americanists Review 3, 1–82. https://journals.psu.edu/soar/article/view/62731/62214
Ruberto, Laura E. and Joseph Sciorra. 2022. “Disrupted and Unsettled: An Introduction to Monuments, Memorials, and Italian Migrations,” Italian American Review (special issue on “Monuments, Memorials, and Italian Migrations”) 12.1 (Winter), 1–35.
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