Dear Readers,
Welcome to the Winter 2023 issue of Italian Americana! In this volume, we are pleased to bring you two essays focused on Italian American literary expression. The first comes from a new contributor to the journal, Maria Rita D'Aviera, an independent scholar from Italy whose essay examining “Luigi Donato Ventura, a Trilingual Self-translator” ironically mirrors the process that she would have engaged in to write in English for an American readership. Her analysis of the linguistic development of Ventura's story “Peppino” and its respective publications in Italian, French, and English builds on Martino Marazzi's discovery of an Italian version of the work in the San Francisco public library, which established that it was in fact first written in Italian, Ventura's native language, and then subsequently translated, by the author himself, into French and finally English. D'Aviera contends that the linguistic and storyline transformations that the work undergoes...
