How I Connected With My African-American Roots in Italy

A visit to the capital city made me see that Italians and African Americans have a lot more in common than I realized.

Illustration by Kadir Nelson

The feeling catches me unexpectedly; it flutters in on the synthesized melody of a Euro boy band getting down in the piazza, on drums thwacking, electric strings twanging, and the pure joy of a big sweaty crowd swaying in the muggy night air. I am too enrapt to notice what’s happening the exact moment the unburdening occurs, and that’s probably a good thing. I’ve been conditioned to grab that feeling and squash it before it takes hold. Back in the States, such weightlessness, forgetting that melanin often incites malice, can be at once seductive and deadly. But on this hot night in the Piazza di Santa Maria in Trastevere, Rome, surrounded by modern rock and ancient stone, I decide to let go.

I had arrived in Italy from the U.S. a bit tense, and eager for the typical tourist indulgences of good food, wine, and sightseeing. But until that moment in the piazza, far removed from crazed American suspicion, I had been unable to shake the images of the viral video of a Phoenix cop yelling at a pregnant black woman: “I’m gonna fucking put a cap in your fucking head!”; was still sickened from scrolling through the vile, racist, violent Facebook posts by dozens of cops in ­Philadelphia; was still haunted by images of hundreds of immigrant children warehoused in filthy cages along the South Texas border. But on the piazza, the tension faded.

I suppose, on some deeper level, black travel has always been as much about survival as recreation, a search for an antidote to the nagging or Richter-scale pain, past and present. My first transatlantic getaway, a couple decades ago, was to visit a friend in Paris, the most famous if not clichéd destination for weary black souls. In my mid-30s, the fatigue of pathological white scrutiny — at work, in stores, in my neighborhood — was already taking a toll. Walking through the City of Light, I felt an instant sense of levity and renewal reflecting on the legacy of black expats, artists, and intellectuals, from Louis Armstrong to Count Basie, from Richard Wright to James Baldwin, who had walked those same streets, free to live and ply their trade far removed from Jim Crow segregation. “Paris,” the late poet Langston Hughes had once gushed: “There you can be whatever you want to be. Totally yourself.”

But something more powerful than intellectualism and idolatry draws me to Italy, something more magnetic: a visceral connection to Italian culture and its expressiveness, a messy swirl of pop images, dialogue, and lyrics — from Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (“I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse”) to Sal, the gruff pizzeria owner in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (“You see this fucking place? I built this fucking place with my bare fucking hands”), to shopping mall melodies of Frank Sinatra, quintessential Casanova and boss. It’s a culture that has overlapped with my own. As Jay-Z raps on “Empire State of Mind”: “I’m the new Sinatra, and since I made it here, I can make it anywhere. Yeah, they love me everywhere.”

Of course, there’s also a deep wellspring of black social and political history here, dating back to at least World War II when the Tuskegee Airmen and the Buffalo Soldiers, both segregated divisions, helped bring an end to Nazi occupation in Italy — despite being second-class citizens in their home country. The connections moved beyond the battlefield: Indeed, a popular Neapolitan song from the 1940s, “Tammurriata Nera,” blushes at the affairs between Italian women and Negro soldiers. “Nunziatina! Nunziatina! / Eh, what’s up? / Look what happened! / What happened? / Dunetta Bomba-bomba has just given birth! / Eh!? / She had a child all black, just like coal!”

I suppose my connection to Italy is not so different than my late mother’s lasagna — layered, flavorful, and shamelessly cheesy. It’s also somewhat earned: African Americans have been traveling here since at least the 1850s, as slaves brought by their owners; as musicians, writers, activists, and public intellectuals; and as tourists like me hoping, perhaps vainly, to see ourselves fully or to even glimpse our humanness in mirrors foreign and undistorted. Even the abolitionist Frederick Douglass couldn’t hide his giddiness over pending travels to the Eternal City, enthusing in his 1892 memoir: “All that one has ever read, heard, felt, thought, or imagined concerning Rome comes thronging upon mind and heart and makes one eager and impatient to be there.”

Strolling amidst the stone and marble carcasses surrounding the Roman Forum on a humid afternoon — from the decayed arches of the Basilica of Maxentius, a behemoth government building, to the skeletal Ionic columns of the Temple of Saturn, one of the oldest sacred places in Rome — I snap a few pictures of the fallen dynasty while trying to ignore the peddlers and street hustlers vying for my attention. My step might be lighter here, but I am still haunted by home. I think of Detroit, where I was born and raised, itself a fallen dynasty, a crater left by the implosion of the auto industry, police brutality (take, for instance, the police raid of an after-hours bar that left 43 black patrons dead and incited the 1967 Detroit riot), white flight, and concentrated poverty. In a grotesque way, the ruins of Rome, and its subsequent scrappiness — all its pushy purveyors of bottled water and portable phone chargers and cheap tchotchkes — feel strangely familiar to me, like home separated by a couple thousand years. By the time I see the famed Colosseum, pale and hulking and hollowed out in the distance, the sight transports me, rather irrationally, back to the Americas and the horrors of the antebellum South. I imagine Rome’s gladiators, the niggers of the ancient world, bludgeoning each other for sport for the ruling class, like in Quentin Tarantino’s slave fantasy film, Django Unchained. Unlike the other tourists that surround me, there is no romance in imagining gladiators as death-defying warriors; I can only pity them as the slaves they actually were, trained to fight to the death with daggers, swords, forks, and nets, who at the behest of their masters, faced off against other slaves and criminals with as many as 50,000 people cheering them on.

I think it was my granddaddy who spoke of similar spectacles during the Jim Crow era, of so-called “battle royales” — staged black-on-black brawls at carnivals or before boxing matches, in which men and boys were paid a pittance to beat each other senseless. The New-York Tribune blithely described such a match in its August 18, 1915 paper: “Six big, husky negroes were mingling in a battle royal at the old Long Acre Club, in Twenty-­ninth Street, one night. To be more exact, five were big, but the other hadn’t flirted with a steak in weeks. It so happened that the five picked on the one, and ere long the little fellow was knocked down. He was wise, this little fellow, and, rising on all-fours, he crawled across the ring, climbed over the lower rope, and dropped to the floor. ‘Hey, you!’ yelled Mike Newman, ‘ain’t you going to fight any more?’ ‘Oh, yes Marse Newman. Ahm goin’ to fight plenty more. But no more to-night!’ replied the coon, and he kept his word.”

Standing in front of the Colosseum, I snap a couple of ­selfies. Through the ages, it seems, Italy’s black tourists are lulled easily away from protest to pleasure — which is strange given the fact that Italy has its own history with racism. (Think of the hateful rhetoric hurled at the country’s first black minister, Cécile Kyenge, when she was appointed immigration minister several years ago.) But even David Dorr, the Louisiana house slave and armchair historian who was forced to take a world tour with his owner, wrote an entire book of his travels, including a chapter on Rome, with nary a wink at the gladiators’ plight — or even his own. Modern scholars seemed more impressed by the enslaved man’s lyrical language and worldly sensibility than the text’s sly omission of sightseeing on a leash. “We wear the mask that grins and lies,” goes the Paul Laurence Dunbar poem. Some of Dorr’s lush descriptions would make Martha Stewart blush. “The way they make macaroni in Rome, is thus,” he writes, “when it is hot or warm the men stand by the aperture that squeezes into a reed-like shape, and wind it round their bodies until they are totally covered or mantled, and then they walk around in great haste until it is nearly cool, after which they walk on the aforesaid platform and unwind themselves from its cooling grasp, and there it stays until it comes totally dry, after which they box it for export.” Ultimately, though, Dorr’s tale is redemptive: Upon his return to New ­Orleans, when his owner reneges on his promise to set Dorr free, Dorr escapes on the underground railroad, fleeing to Ohio, and in 1858 self-publishes A Colored Man Round the World, perhaps the first African American–authored travelogue, years before the abolishment of slavery.

Fernando, my taxi driver, begins the trip away from Rome through the urban congestion and the honking horns. (Accelerating past a swerving sedan and merging onto the freeway, Fernando slaps his forehead in frustration, crying out in clipped English: “The mother of idiots is always pregnant!”) Finally, about an hour north of the city, the chaos gradually fades into a rolling green countryside where narrow dirt roads wind through the town of Monteleone Sabino and funnel toward an ancient villa called La Torretta. Constructed as a convent from Roman ruins around the 13th century, La Torretta was restored as a country house in 1995, and its magnificent mountain views kindle thoughts in me of how the African American–Italian affinity has, historically, cut both ways.

Looking out over lush valleys and vineyards, I think about how Italians once drew strength from African Americans’ epic fight for freedom, and how nourishing it is when other ethnicities affirm our cultural contributions unsolicited — how it feels to unabashedly trumpet our intelligence, creativity, humanity … anything other than the trope of our genius with a ball or dance beat. After the Second World War, black writers such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright became all the rage among prominent Italian ­intellectuals who, in their own opposition to Italian ­fascism, viewed African American artists as kindred spirits. The Italian journalist and writer Italo Calvino argued that Richard Wright’s Black Boy, an autobiography that recounts the hardships of growing up in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee, represented “a cultural weapon of defense and of conquest.” The Italian novelist Elio Vittorini suggested Italians find inspiration in W.E.B. Du Bois’s poem “A Litany of Atlanta,” which refers to the city’s historic massacre of blacks in 1906. “Poetry is poetry for this reason; it does not remain bound to the circumstances from which it has arisen and, if it is born from pain, it can refer to all pain,” Vittorini wrote. “If for no other reasons than hunger, cold, and disappointment, could not millions of Europeans today unite their voices to this old Negro song?”

The Italian lyricist Gian Carlo Testoni characterized this movement of a common cause between postwar Italians and African Americans “the Negro moment” (“l’ora negra”). The following year, the Italian literary critic Leone Piccioni declared in an essay that, within American life, “the greatest originality, the greatest innovation in the relationship between men, is to be found in the participation of the Negroes.” The Italian writer Giovanni Battista Angioletti offered that “the social condition of the American Negroes is, you might say, one of the rallying cries of postwar engaged literature.” More recently, Charles Leavitt, a professor of romance languages at Notre Dame, has dubbed this cross-cultural exchange impegno nero.

The history only emboldens my sense of belonging. Back in grade school, when my language arts teachers drilled into us the importance of Harlem Renaissance writers, it was lost on us that these artists’ words had fueled fights for freedom this far away from home. But now, as I nibble fresh prosciutto on the patio and watch a fluorescent orange sun descend on the horizon, it stands to reason how one of my favorite Langston Hughes poems, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” which I recited once in class during a Black History program, would touch fascism-fighting Italians as powerfully as it had touched me, a black kid already conditioned to fear white law and governance. “I’ve known rivers: / I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. / My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

Over lunch in Rome, between bites of fresh tomato and ­mozzarella — calorie counting in Italy? Senza senso! — the historian and jazz scholar John Gennari is sharing a story about how Ralph Ellison, after publishing Invisible Man in 1952 and winning the National Book Award, took residence with his wife, Fannie, at the American Academy in Rome, which, Gennari notes, is located just minutes away from the hotel restaurant where we are sitting. Ellison never fell in love with Rome. Homesick for Harlem and the overall energy of New York City, he groused in a letter to a colleague: “This place has little of the creative tension so typical of New York. You can see more art, hear more and better rendered music, and heaven help us, find more interesting writing there in a day than you can in months here.”

Considering Ellison’s distaste for Rome, it begs the question why he stayed a second year, or, by contrast, why other African American writers such as William Demby so cherished the place. In fact, it was Gennari who introduced me to the mercurial and undercelebrated Demby, a Pittsburgh native and World War II veteran. After the war, Demby returned to Italy and made Tuscany his second home, living with his wife, the Italian writer Lucia Drudi, in a sumptuous countryside villa that she had inherited. While in Italy, he translated the screenplays of big-time Italian directors like Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, and Roberto Rossellini and wrote his own well-regarded novels such as Beetlecreek and The Catacombs, an experimental hybrid of fiction and nonfiction. Living in Italy, Demby’s books were often at odds with a black American literary establishment intent on writing about race and Jim Crow oppression. But Demby didn’t feel an onus to write exclusively about African American ­experience. “Our commitment to what is happening now is not only a commitment to America. This is the beauty of the age we are living in. Our commitment now is to humanity.”

Gennari, an English and race studies professor at the University of Vermont, revels in stories about pioneering black ­figures — the “Afro-stocracy,” as he affectionately calls them — race leaders whose works and views have so indelibly shaped global culture. Our similarities may end there. Gennari hails from a lily-white enclave in western Massachusetts. He was born to working-class Italian immigrants: His father was a welder, his mother a seamstress. His interest in African American culture started in the ’70s as a kid watching Soul Train. It was nurtured at Harvard by a worldly African American dormie from a prominent Washington, D.C., family, and it ultimately blossomed into what would become Gennari’s life’s work.

As he says of his longtime roommate and pal, J. Lorand Matory, now a professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University: “Randy left the womb and the only question was whether he was going to Harvard or Yale. Me? My parents didn’t know anything about college, or how we would pay for it. At Harvard, though, we were both outsiders; Randy racially, and me by class.”

Since those days, Gennari has devoted his life to exploring both Italian American and African American cultures and the nexus between them (He’s also married to an African American woman, the author Emily Bernard, and they share adopted twin daughters from Ethiopia.) In his view, the cultures share a wonderfully complex and often rocky relationship, creating a kind of Afro-Italian sensibility marked by “mutual emulation and suspicion, a joyous cultural meeting sometimes darkened by violent collision.” A couple years ago, Gennari published his research and musings on the topic in Flavor and Soul: Italian America at Its African American Edge, a fascinating exploration of the affinity and fault lines between the two cultures through film, music, sports, and food, and how the relationship coalesces and collapses around urban space and often-parallel histories of discrimination and suffering in America.

My lunch with Gennari is nothing less than fortuitous: Back in the States, while reading his book, I had emailed him some praise. Upon learning that we both had plans to visit Italy, I eagerly asked for a meeting. After all, page after page of Flavor and Soul affirmed the swirl of feelings and thoughts I have about the two cultures — his paean to Sinatra and his signature brand of masculinity, his ambivalent praise of Spike Lee’s crude portrayal of Italians in such films as Jungle Fever and Do the Right Thing, his insight into the colorful interplay between African American hoopers and Italian American coaches and broadcasters and how it profits the sport, his cataloging of the gross similarities in dehumanizing caricatures of both cultures in mainstream media.

“In the American popular imagination, an Italian man was a bootblack, a ditchdigger, a dago, a wop, a stiletto wielding bandit. Or a lover like Rudolph Valentino, whose film roles as a fantasy Mediterranean lover made him Hollywood’s first male sex symbol.” Gennari goes on: “Italian men, like black men, were feared, reviled, denigrated, and subjected to ritual violence.”

But the words in Gennari’s book that hit me the hardest were not his own but those of jazz critic Albert Murray, who may best sum up my affection for Italy: “Long before there were southerners in the U.S.A., there were southerners in Italy, and it meant a certain climate, a certain hospitality, a certain musicality in the language, and sometimes even a certain kind of violence and tendency to vendetta…. The European vision of the Italian Southerner is much like that of anyone who understands the American South; the feeling created is that of an easeful relationship to culture and a spontaneity that says, deep down, the point of learning to cook all this food, and talk this way, and wear these fine clothes, is to have a good goddamn time, man!”

My good goddamn time abruptly ends when I check my email for my flight information home, and my Twitter feed flashes. I open the app to find a brewing racial controversy, this time over news that Disney has cast a young African American actress in the starring role of Ariel in the live-action remake of its classic film The Little Mermaid. Inside the protests of a fictional mermaid being played by a real live black girl, I notice that a new hashtag, #notmyariel, has been born, and I scroll — partly due to curiosity, but mostly as a reflex to locate my peoples’ pain. “Nooo way!!!! Ariel is shining bright white from Denmark!” “This is NOT about racism, we just want an Ariel that looks like the Ariel we love. Disney, stop being lazy and create new stories if you want more black representation.”

I have not quite left Italy, but I am home again already.

About the author: Ron Stodghill, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Missouri, writes frequently about African American history and culture. He is the author of Where Everybody Looks Likes Me: At the Crossroads of America’s Black Colleges and Culture, and Redbone: Money, Malice and Murder in Atlanta.