An American in Italy
by Herbert Kubly
Summary
American in Italy is a travel book with a memoirist's heart, the record of the eighteen months Herbert Kubly spent in Italy on a Fulbright grant in 1950 and 1951. Kubly was raised on a farm in New Glarus, Wisconsin, a Swiss immigrant community, and he arrived in postwar Italy as that rarest of travelers, one more interested in people than in monuments. The book he brought back is a portrait of a country climbing out of the ruins of war and fascism into the argument between communism and the Church that defined Italian life at midcentury. Kubly goes everywhere and talks to everyone: Neapolitan families living in caves and tenements, Sicilian villagers, Roman aristocrats, students, priests, and party organizers, fishermen and opera lovers. He has a playwright's ear for talk and a farm boy's eye for work, and he records the theatrical generosity of Italian life without sentimentalizing the poverty underneath it. What gives the book its lasting interest is the doubleness of its view. Kubly keeps measuring Italy against America, warmth against efficiency, fatalism against optimism, and lets the comparison cut both ways, so the book becomes a portrait of the American abroad as much as of the Italians at home. It won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1956, a remarkable prize for a first book by a Wisconsin journalist, and it stands with the best American writing about postwar Europe: a record of a vanished Italy, poor, vivid, and on the edge of the economic miracle that would transform it within a decade.
Historical Context & Significance
Kubly's Italy was a front line of the Cold War. The 1948 Italian election, fought between the Christian Democrats and the largest communist party in Western Europe, had drawn open American intervention, and Marshall Plan aid was rebuilding the country Kubly traveled through. The Fulbright program that sent him was itself new, part of the same American effort to bind Europe closer. His winning the 1956 National Book Award put a travel narrative beside history and biography at the awards, and his hometown paper in Monroe, Wisconsin, records that his friend, then Senator John F. Kennedy, presented it. Kubly kept writing about Italy and Switzerland through a long career as a journalist and professor, but his first book remained his most celebrated, and it reads now as a time capsule of Italy in the last years before television and the boom.