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By Rita Giordano-

Inquirer Staff Writer
In Caterina Dawson’s Italian-language class at Glassboro High School, they don’t study the verb to whack.

There are no goodfellas, wiseguys, godfathers or dons. Conspicuously absent, too, is Tony Soprano, New Jersey’s most infamous fictional native son.

Instead, Dawson’s students talk about Italian art and architecture. They sing Italian songs. In their curriculum, they’re learning how to make pasta and do the tarantella, an Italian folk dance. The students say they’re having a blast.

“If you throw yourself into a culture, you learn so much more than watching a movie,” said Ezekiel Olumakin, a 16-year-old junior. “If you watch a movie, you hear: ‘Yo, whack that dude.’ When you look at real life, there’s so much more.”

Those words would be music to the ears of the people behind this, an Italian-heritage curriculum working its way around the state and, recently, starting to be distributed around the country.

Launched last year, the curriculum is the work of the New Jersey Italian and Italian American Heritage Commission, which was established by 2002 state legislation to promote understanding and awareness of Italian history, culture and contributions.

The legislation got support from Italian Americans who said basta – enough – to what they felt were the largely negative and often mob-related images of them in popular culture.

“The Sopranos was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Angelo Morresi, a North Jersey lawyer who drafted the legislation and found support for it especially among state leaders of Italian American descent.

The commission worked with the state Department of Education in forming the K-12 curriculum, which is available free of charge to any school or district. It is not mandatory, and its content is meant to be incorporated into existing curriculum.

“It can be infused in your world history course or any course,” said John Dougherty, state coordinator of social studies who worked on the curriculum.

People of Italian ancestry make up a sizable chunk of the Garden State – nearly a fifth of the population, according to U.S. census data.

But Dougherty said the curriculum has broad relevance.

“You don’t limit the teaching of the Renaissance to areas with a large number of Italian Americans,” he said.

The commission members hope the curriculum gets picked up far and wide.

“We want everyone to use it,” said Gilda Rorro Baldassari, head of the commission’s curriculum committee. “We just want to get the word out.”

(Baldassari, for the record, did catch a few episodes of The Sopranos when it went to reruns on A&E. She found the acting good, but the violence was not for her.)

Of the state’s 616 school districts, 111 use the curriculum, she said. Training sessions have been held in central and North Jersey. Last month the first was held in South Jersey.

It may get even broader play. In the last few months, about 500 copies of the curriculum have been distributed to teachers around the country by the National Italian American Foundation, said Serena Cantoni, education programs director, who added that she knew of no similar lessons plan.

She noted something about New Jersey’s curriculum that may surprise: “It’s not ethnocentric.”

At the recent training session at Camden County Community College, some educators said they found the curriculum strong on Italian contributions and much more.

“It shows interdependence has been happening for centuries,” said John Gamble Jr., director of instruction in the Westampton School District.

Kevin Brady, president of the American Institute of History Education and author of the curriculum, talked about lessons that cross disciplines and encourage inquiry.

One assignment he discussed was challenging students to investigate who really invented the telephone. Was it Alexander Graham Bell, or was it Elisha Gray of the United States or Antonio Meucci of Italy?

Ruth Pelfrey, a Washington Township music teacher, told how she used the curriculum to infuse her classes on Antonio Vivaldi with information about the composer’s life and times. They drew to his music.

“It was really exciting because the kids were listening to classical music and actually enjoying it,” Pelfrey said. “I got a couple letters from parents asking, ‘What did you do in class?’ The kids wanted to buy classical CDs.”

The curriculum covers a lot of ground. Kindergartners and first graders receive character education through the story of Pinocchio – the original one and the Disney version.

Fourth and fifth graders can learn about explorers like Cristoforo Colombo and today’s holiday that has become a celebration of Italian American pride. Older students may examine anti-immigrant movements.

In Glassboro, Dawson, whose family moved from Italy when she was teenager, chatted gaily with her students in Italian last week as they created mosaics inspired by those at a church she visited in Ravenna.

She’s also teaching them about the value Italians put on family. In her classroom, each table takes a family name.

At student Olumakin’s table the name is De Rossi, after Italian soccer player Daniele De Rossi. Olumakin, whose family came from Nigeria when he was 2, said he wanted to learn Italian because he’d like to play soccer in Italy.

Now, he said, he is also getting a better understanding of the people.

“There’s more,” he said, “than meets the eye.”

Contact staff writer Rita Giordano at 856-779-3841 or rgiordano@phillynews.com.

For more on the New Jersey Italian and Italian American Heritage Commission, contact the commission at 732-932-0670 or at http://www.njitalia.nj.gov.

By Carlin Romano -Inquirer Book Critic

NEW YORK – When Italian Americans end today’s uptown parade on Fifth Avenue for Columbus Day, Joseph Scelsa hopes they’ll keep marching right down to the corner of Mulberry and Grand in Little Italy.

Little Italy, you see, is less little this week. A museum, so to speak, grows in Manhattan. After nearly 10 years devoted to what he calls his “labor of love, a passion,” Scelsa, 62, a retired sociologist and professor emeritus at Queens College, presided over the opening Wednesday of the Italian American Museum, the first of its kind in New York or the Northeast.

The new museum’s president expects plenty of foot traffic today at his shiny new institution, housed in the former Banca Stabile building near Ferrara’s, the famous bakery

cafe, even though this is the first year that New York’s Italian Americans have agreed on only one Columbus Day Parade – uptown.

“People have said to me, ‘Aren’t you afraid that people won’t come down here?’ ” remarks Scelsa, elegant in sports jacket and tie as he welcomes visitors – an Indian couple, an Italian family from Denver, an African American couple.

“The answer is no,” Scelsa replies. In other words, what are you crazy?

Scelsa points out that Little Italy is a tourist “destination in itself.”

“A tour bus stops on the corner – this very corner – every hour,” Scelsa continues. “We’re also getting classes from schools, and people finding us through the Web.”

Scelsa, born in the Bronx of parents whose roots go back to Sicily, Naples and Calabria, says the idea for the museum came in 1999 after he, as dean of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute at City University of New York, put on an exhibit at the New York Historical Society titled, “The Italians of New York.”

“It was the most successful one in modern times at the New York Historical Society,” he says proudly. “We realized something was missing. There was no Italian American Museum in New York and, from what we understood, in the Northeast.”

San Francisco, he concedes, offers the Museo Italo Americano, but it divides its agenda between Italian American history and Italian culture. New Orleans possesses an American Italian Renaissance Foundation Museum founded by businessman Joseph Maselli. Philadelphia, you might say, chips in with the Mario Lanza Museum.

Scelsa researched the title Italian American Museum and found it available. He won certification as a non-profit educational institution in 2001, then organized exhibitions through the Calandra Institute while looking for a permanent home.

The big break came when he met Jerome Stabile III, 77, a retired surgeon and great-grandson of Francesco Stabile, founder of Little Italy’s “community” bank in 1885.

Stabile still owned the old bank’s three buildings at 189, 187 and 185 Grand St. (also known as 155 Mulberry), and agreed that an Italian American Museum there made a perfect fit.

Scelsa’s board of trustees and honorary chairpersons such as Matilda Cuomo, wife of former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, helped him raise $4 million to get a mortgage on the three properties, which cost $9.4 million.

One great attraction of the Banca Stabile building was that almost all its artifacts and papers remained. Scelsa and guest curator Nancy Cataldi decided to shape the Museum’s opening exhibition accordingly, as “Banca Stabile – Cornerstone of Little Italy.”

From 1880 to 1920, the United States experienced the largest immigration of Italians in its history, some 5 million. Whereas only some 5,000 Italians lived in Little Italy in 1885, it’s believed 1 million Italian immigrants did so by the 1920s.

Banca Stabile was “integral to the community,” says Scelsa, selling steamship tickets, offering mortgages, wiring money, making loans.

He smiles when reminded that signs on nearby Centre Street announce a forthcoming “Museum of the Chinese in America.” Scelsa acknowledges that only perhaps 1,000 or so older Italians still live in the neighborhood, now overwhelmingly Chinese-American. But Little Italy, he adds, is still “structurally an Italian neighborhood” because of its institutions, chiefly “restaurants and churches.”

Sometime before next fall, Scelsa says, the museum, with a staff of five (Scelsa volunteers and takes no salary), will break through the wall of 187 Grand St. as part of continuing expansion in its three buildings.

Scelsa won’t have trouble filling the space. “We have over 3,000 artifacts in storage,” he says. “We have Matteo puppets, those life-sized marionettes – 10 of them. We have pushcarts, wine presses, shovels that dug the New York City subway system, wedding dresses.”

Expansion, he feels, will reflect the growing pride in heritage among younger Italian Americans, part of the rise, he agrees, in ethnic pride among all groups in America in recent decades. Will the museum present both positive and negative aspects of Italian American history? Scelsa understandably prefers the positive and hopes to “provide a balance.”

In that spirit, next year’s big exhibition will be on “Italian Americans and Law Enforcement,” marking a century since New York Police Lieutenant Giuseppe Petrosino, who went to Sicily in 1909 to investigate the Black Hand, was killed in Palermo.

“I recently met Frank Serpico,” says Scelsa, referring to the New York “good” cop portrayed by Al Pacino. “He has become a big supporter. He’s going to be giving us some of his memorabilia-his firearms, his badge, and his uniform.”

“The museum’s mission,” Scelsa promises, “is to present the whole story, the true story, whatever that story is. When you say negative – unfortunately, there is some negative. But there’s so little of it that it shouldn’t overshadow everything else.”

If You Go

The Italian American Museum is at 155 Mulberry St. (near the corner of Grand Street), New York, N.Y. 10013. It is open Wednesdays through Sundays, 11 a.m. to 6.p.m., and to 8 p.m. Fridays. Admission is free (though the suggested donation is $5). For more information, call 212-965-9000 or visit ItalianAmericanMuseum.org.

From the beginning of U.S. history, Italians have supported American independence.

Three Italian regiments, totaling some 1,500 men, fought for American independence: the Third Piemonte, the 13th Du Perche, and the Royal Italian.

Filippo Mazzei, a Tuscan physician, fought alongside Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry during the American Revolution. Mazzei drew up a plan to capture the British in New York by cutting off their sea escape, and convinced France to help the American colonists financially and militarily in their struggle against British rule. He also inspired the Jeffersonian phrase: “All men are created equal” when he wrote “All men are by nature equally free and independent.”

Italian officers in the American Revolution include: Captain Cosimo de Medici of the North Carolina Light Dragoons; Lieutenant James Bracco, 7th Maryland Regiment, killed at the Battle of White Plains; Captain B. Tagliaferro, second in command of the Second Virginia Regiment, a direct subaltern of General George Washington; 2nd Lieutenant Nicola Talliaferro of the 2nd Virginia Regiment; and Colonel Richard Talliaferro, who fell at the Battle of Guilford. Other Italian officers, most from Massachusetts, are on regimental rolls of the Continental Army.

Major John Belli was the Quartermaster General of the U.S. Army from 1792 to 1794. The first settler in Scioto County, Ohio, he lived there until his death in 1809.

Three of the first five warships commissioned by the Continental Congress of the new American government, were named Christopher Columbus, John Cabot and Andrea Doria. Doria was a 16th century navy admiral from Genoa who was still fighting the Barbary pirates in his mid 80s.

Francesco Vigo (1747-1836), is believed the first Italian to become an American citizen. A successful fur trader on the western frontier (today the mid-western states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio), Vigo served as a colonel, spy, and financier during the American Revolution. He died a pauper, but in 1876 the U.S. government gave his heirs about $50,000 to repay them for Vigo’s financial support of the Revolutionary War. Along with George Rogers Clark, he helped settle the Northwest territory.

Prepared by: The National Italian American Foundation
The NIAF thanks military historian Rudy A. D’Angelo for his assistance with this fact sheet.

An immediate cancellation and permanent retirement of “Fuggeddaboudit.”
• Inclusion of Italian Americans in any of Rotolo School’s diversity day programs and ceremonies, stressing the many contributions that Italian Americans, the nation’s fifth largest ethnic group, have made to this nation.
• The showing of a 30-minute documentary, Anti-Italianism created by Seton Hall University that outlines how Italian Americans have been stereotyped and discriminated against.

The CSJ requests that the documentary be shown at a full faculty meeting of the Rotolo School as well as to the students and will provide the school with a copy. “We find this play offensive,” says Anthony Baratta, president of the Grand Lodge of Illinois, OSIA’s state chapter. “And we intend to give our full support to the parents and students who object to it. We will not give up until these performances are cancelled,” Baratta says. Want to add your voice to ours? Email Superintendent of schools in Batavia, Dr. Jack Barshinger jack.barshinger@bps101.net . Email Rotolo school principal, Dr. Donald McKinney at don.mckinney@bps101.net . The Commission for Social Justice is the anti- defamation arm of the Order Sons of Italy in America (OSIA), the largest and oldest national organization in the U.S. for men and women of Italian heritage. Founded in 1905, today OSIA has a network of more than 700 lodges or chapters coast to coast.

Website: http://www.osia.org