The Taste of the Landing: Food and the American Myth in Sicily at the Time of Operation Husky – with Teresa Fiore (Montclair State University, USA)

Blending excerpts from video-interviews with direct witnesses of the 1943 Allied Landing in Sicily and from Leonardo Sciascia’s 1958 novella “The American Aunt,” the presentation reads a largely forgotten pivotal historical event for WWII through the lens of foodways. It investigates the eating habits of Sicilians before and after the landing in connection with both the myth of the Land of Abundance incarnated by the U.S. military forces and the image of a destitute Sicily that the Americans embraced as part of the liberation campaign.

The conference will be held at 5 p.m. in Aula Magna.

*Teresa Fiore is Professor of Italian and Inserra Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies at Montclair State University, New Jersey, USA. The recipient of several fellowships (De Bosis, Rockefeller, Fulbright), she has held Visiting positions at Harvard, Yale, NYU, and Rutgers University. She is the author of the pluri-awarded book Pre-Occupied Spaces: Remapping Italy’s Transnational Migrations and Colonial Legacies (Fordham UP, 2017, and Mondadori/Le Monnier, 2021 in Italian). Her numerous articles on migration to/from Italy and (post-)colonialism linked to 20th- and 21st-century Italian literature, theater, music and cinema have appeared in Italian, English, and Spanish both in journals and edited collections, including Postcolonial Italy, The Routledge History of Italian Americans, and Transnational Italian Studies. Her current project is titled: “Food, Hunger, Migration and the American Myth in Sicily at the Time of the WWII Allied Landing.”.