Il Bo Live, the online magazine of the University of Padua, has published a long interview with DaShoW Principal Investigator Dr. Matteo Brera, conducted by Francesca Boccaletto and published on August 14, 2026, under the title “Un secolo fa nel Sud degli Stati Uniti. Gli italiani, la ‘bianchezza’, i giornali come scuole di carta.”
The interview sets out the project’s central finding: that the Italian-language newspapers of the Gulf South worked as scuole di carta — schools of paper. Alongside articles on the teaching of Italian, these papers ran serialized fiction, columns on manners and household hygiene, and guidance on welfare and civic conduct. Taken together, in Dr. Brera’s formulation, they taught their readers “the tricks for becoming white.” He develops that argument at length in his recent article for the Rivista di Storia dell’Educazione.
Dr. Brera describes the project’s genesis during the Covid period, prompted in part by Jessica Barbata Jackson’s Dixie’s Italians. What that book left open, he explains, was the direct experience of Italians in the U.S. South as the migrants themselves recorded it — and it is the newspapers, as containers of information operating on several levels at once, that preserve that voice and that self-representation.
The project’s frame runs from 1877, the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the Jim Crow order, to 1945, when fascism and the war close and the ground shifts towards the civil rights era. That frame has since been pushed back to 1849, with the recovery of Il Monitore del Sud, an Italian-language sheet published in New Orleans by Augusto Natili, a Mazzinian exile and physician from Pisa. It appeared in the multilingual print district of Exchange Place, where presses and cabinets de lecture circulated papers in French, Italian, and Spanish. Purely racial dynamics do not yet surface in this antebellum forerunner, though Natili — aligned with the local WASP establishment — was drawn into the urban violence of 1857 that set the white, partly European, community of New Orleans against the Sicilians, more than thirty years before the better-known lynching of 1891.
Rather than stopping at Louisiana, the research follows the press across state lines into Alabama and Tennessee, taking up Stefano Luconi’s argument that Italian American history should be read regionally rather than community by community. The newspapers themselves make the case: they show the osmosis of people, ideas and news between one state and the next. Among them are Il Gladiatore of Birmingham, a twice-weekly published in Italian, English and Sicilian for the city’s Italian colony, and the Columbus-Balbo Review, a glossy magazine ideologically close to fascism issued in Birmingham between 1933 and 1938.
Two cases from the archive show what these pages were doing. In 1894, L’Italo-Americano of New Orleans reported the collapse of a mine at West Blocton, Alabama, in which Pietro Castelli died; years earlier, in Alabama, Dr. Brera had found the grave of Castelli’s wife Francesca, killed by an African American man, her headstone naming the assailant’s “race” explicitly. A death reported in the Louisiana press and a death memorialized in stone hundreds of kilometers away turn out to belong to the same story — and the New Orleans paper used Pietro Castelli’s death to warn Italians away from the Alabama mines, and away from the pull of industrialization, in the interest of holding the New Orleans community together.
The second case is harder to read and, for that reason, more important. On August 1, 1931, at the height of the fascist period, La Voce Coloniale gave its front page to praise for a young Italian American woman, Miss Baragona, who had killed an African American man attempting to rob her home. The editorial drew an explicit lesson for readers, warning “us of the White Race” to keep Black people at a distance, since what Italians had offered as humanity had been taken for equality. It is racism, plainly, and Dr. Brera notes that it is an aspect traditional Italian-American historiography has tended to pass over in favor of the immigrants’ own suffering.
The interview also covers the project’s public history work: the historical marker installed in Nashville for Primo Bartolini — musician, teacher, Italian American patriot and cultural mediator — through the collaboration between the University of Padua, DiSSGeA and Seton Hall University, with Italian consular and local authorities; and a second marker now being pursued on Decatur Street in New Orleans, in the area where a significant Sicilian community formed in exactly the years when La Voce Coloniale became the major Italian paper of the South. That work builds on oral testimony reorganized by Elena Daniele with students at Tulane University, in collaboration with the American Italian Research Center in Metairie. It would allow the Italian migrant press and the Sicilian presence in New Orleans to be memorialized together — a point of contact with Alice Gussoni’s project Sicilians dreAmIng Louisiana.
The research is carried out under the supervision of Professor Stefano Luconi at the Department of Historical and Geographic Sciences and the Ancient World (DiSSGeA) of the University of Padua, within the European Commission’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship program. The material on the informal pedagogical function of the press will form a concluding monograph.
Read the full interview (in Italian): ilbolive.unipd.it/it/news/societa/secolo-fa-sud-stati-uniti-italiani-bianchezza
