Dr. Teresa Fiore Publishes Article on Foodways During WWII

Dr. Teresa Fiore, Inserra Endowed Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies (World Languages and Cultures) has been working on a multi-year project titled “Food, Hunger, Migration and the American Myth in Sicily at the Time of the WWII Allied Landing.” The project has entailed several aspects from archival work to video-interviews, conference presentations, and digitally accessible materials. The latest component of this multi-year project, which started in 2018, is the publication of an article in the Journal of Romance Studies 24:3 (Autumn 2024). Titled “The Taste of the Landing: Food, Migration, and the American Myth in Sicily at the Time of Operation Husky,” the article is part of a special issue of the journal resulting from a conference titled “The Taste of War: Values and Meanings of Food in WWII Italy and France” organized in 2019 at the School of Advanced Studies, University of London, UK.

Inspired by Leonardo Sciascia’s novella ‘The American Aunt’, this article offers a new perspective on the 1943 Allied landing in Sicily, reading it through the lens of food practices and migration. Blending literary and historical analysis with the testimonies of direct witnesses of the landing, the article explores the role of food (access, products, symbolism) during late Fascism, the actual landing, and the post-1943 and post-Second World War era. The picture that emerges is a variegated landscape of experiences, pointing to starvation among the poor but also to food access for those Sicilians who lived in the countryside away from the bombarded cities, and in a Sciascia-like ironic twist, to the Sicilians’ offer of fresh flavorful food to US soldiers weary of the military pre-packaged food. The article complicates the assumption that all Sicilians were starving at the time of the landing and waiting to be fed by the American soldiers coming from the Land of Abundance, a representation created by a mixture of one-sided perspectives of the war along with decades of emigration to the United States.

Keywords: Food, Second World War, Allied Landing, Sicily, Leonardo Sciascia, Emigration, American Dream

Article’s DOI: https://doi.org/10.3828/jrs.2024.17
Digital access to the journal’s article (by subscription only): https://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/toc/jrs/24/3