Word: ussia
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...certainly won't be able to replace Italy, where every stone has a history," Ussia says. "We'll mainly be catering to the new generation--they're just discovering new heroes." For example, Ussia describes a youngster who has just learned about opera tenor Enrico Caruso: "He'll be able to go to the audio room, check out a tape, and listen to tapes of Caruso's operas...
...Ussia also hopes the Dante center can eradicate the mass media's negative stereotyping of Italian-Americans. "We're bombarded by the adverse publicity of the Mafia and other criminal elements as if that's the only prerogative of Italian-Americans. The press is after sensationalism in news, and good deeds don't get any play," he says...
Protesting that Italians are almost invariably stereotyped as wine drinkers and spaghetti eaters, Ussia says, "Sure, I love ravioli, and I can kill a bottle of wine, but I'm also part of the intellectual and civic community, both among Italian-Americans and the community at large...
...cited Pietro Belluschi, consulting architect for the center, and Salvatore Luria, winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology and director of the MIT Cancer Research Center, as examples of Italian-Americans making important contributions to Americans society. Ussia says, "Nobody knows about these people, but we certainly know about the others...
Born in 1923 in Hannibal, Mo. to a first-generation Italian immigrant, Ussia returned to Italy at the age of ten to receive an Italian education. He learned philosophy, literature, geography and history by studying the classics. There he says he adopted the "contemplative, studious, and intellectual qualities of southern Italians...