We presented the first issue of Good Morning Italy, the new English-language magazine of the New York network, with an event at the Italian American Museum in Little Italy, in New York. We chose the Italian American Museum because the museum, founded by Dr. Joseph Scelsa, has been working for years on the preservation of the history of Italians in the United States, in one of the districts that more than others have contributed to construct the imagination of Italian emigration in New York, and present here a new magazine dedicated to contemporary Italy and to the Italian American community meant to put together the memory of a historical presence and the attempt to tell Italian boundaries.
The evening was moderated by the founder of the Davide Ippolito network and Premium Pete, podcaster and figure very much in view of the New York scene. We talked about roots, family, immigration, ambition, membership, but also about the way Italian identity is reworked by those who live and work in international contexts. It is an important point, because the risk, when speaking of Italianity abroad, is to remain firm to a nostalgic or purely celebratory representation, made of pasta, sea, sun, a tower or a very large amphitheatre, and little more. The Good Morning Italy project tries to go in another direction: to tell people, paths and communities, without reducing them to symbols.
Among the interventions of the evening was Dr. Joseph Scelsa, who recalled the role of the museum as a place of conservation but also of generational passage. The idea is that Italian American history is not only something to protect in archival form, but a material that the new generations can reread and use to better understand their place in American society. On a different level, tenor Christopher Macchio spoke of Italian music as an emotional and cultural language, capable of keeping together family memory and public recognition. There was also the model Elena Azzaro, who contributed with a speech towards fashion and entertainment, explaining how the Italian image continues to circulate in very competitive areas, where elegance and identity often risk to become empty formulas if they are not supported by a path.
The presentation also included Armand Assante, an American actor of Italian origins, who linked the theme of identity to that of discipline and construction of a career. During the event, a video message by Fabrizio Brienza, Italian actor, model and influencer in New York was also screened. The cover story tells its path between Italy, entertainment and New York nightlife: a trajectory built out of the most predictable routes, which we used in the magazine to talk about Italian identity in a less conventional form.
The first issue of Good Morning Italy collects interviews and conversations with different figures, including Riccardo Silva, Kathrine Narducci, Gianluca Passi, Francesco Facchinetti and the aforementioned Premium Pete, Christopher Macchio, Elena Azzaro and Armand Assante. The thread that holds these names together is not only personal success, but the relationship with Italy as origin, cultural reference or symbolic space to reinterpret. After the presentation, the evening continued with a reception at Ferrara Bakery, hosted by Ernest Lepore and the Lepore family, always in the heart of Little Italy. This choice also had a precise sense: closing the launch in one of the historical addresses of the Italian presence in the neighborhood.
L’articolo We presented the first issue of Good Morning Italy proviene da IlNewyorkese.
