ABSTRACT
Worldviews emerge, as much as they do from religious traditions, out of the ephemera of everyday life: material culture and foodways, crafts and verbal arts. It hardly seems worth mentioning, so well known is it that the Italian Ameri-can yard doubled as a garden. One Italian genre of folktale that had a longer life than usual in America was the fairy tale, perhaps because it was found so entertaining by children. There was also a recurrent playing with language that the intermingling of Italian, English, and Neapolitan inspired. Two other genres of folk narrative that underwent similar transformations are saints’ and bandits’ lives. Just as a saint’s life could be reconfigured as a tale of spiritual awakening, a bandit’s life, in Italy the inverse of the saint’s life, could be reconfigured as a gangster tale. The story, whether the Italian bandit’s life or the American gangster tale, would finally end with the protagonist’s violent death.
