After fifty-four years, the misspelling of Italian explorer, Giovanni da Verrazzano’s name will be corrected on the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge spanning Staten Island and Brooklyn through legislation signed by Governor Andrew Cuomo. Following Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the new world and the return of the Magellan expedition after circumnavigating the globe, Verrazzano was commissioned by the…
In 1911, the Dillingham Commission, consisting of bipartisan, U.S. House of Representatives and Senate members, produced a forty-one-volume report on immigration in the Unites States warning that the influx from Southern (overwhelmingly Italians) and Eastern Europe threatened America’s way of life and should be drastically reduced. The Commission’s conclusions provided the bases for immigration quota…
Like a modern entrepreneur, fifteenth-century explorer, Christopher Columbus, raised capital for an expedition to discover a western passage to Asia. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 placed control of the land routes to the lucrative Asian spice trade in Ottoman-Turk hands. Columbus first proposed the Atlantic Ocean route to Joao II of Portugal in 1485.…
The World is a City. Joe Giordano’s literary thriller Appointment With ISIL balances considerations of genre (characterization, pacing, mood) with a subtle but definite awareness of literary form and function. Much like his debut novel Birds of Passage, Giordano shows a penchant for sharp scenes, concise dialogue that has the bite of a Dick…
Q1: Can you give us some background on your career as a writer? How you got started, how long you’ve been at it, a bit about your publishing history? A1: One of the positions I held before I became a writer, was to run a business in Greece, Turkey, the Middle East, and North Africa…
Q: Birds of Passage has as its setting both New York and the area around Naples, specifically a small village Capodimonte. We know New York is close to your heart, but why Capodimonte? What made you choose this village as the Italian setting? What can you tell us about Capodimonte? A: My father came from…
After Italy’s 1870 consolidation, il Risorgimento, the great wave of Italian immigration began. Italy had formed a common government, but not a nation. As one statesman put it, “Italy has been made. Now we must make Italians.” The south of Italy, the Mezzogiorno, spoke different languages, had been dominated for centuries by foreign powers, and…
