Bernardino Ciambelli, transmedial author, prismatic personality. From the Italian American vaults

Hailed as the Homer of Little Italy, Bernardino Ciambelli was a prolific journalist, playwright, and novelist whose career spanned four decades from the 1890s to the 1930s. Expanded access to digitized Italian American periodical archives allows us, at last, to shed brighter light on his polymorphous creativity, and to trace the circulation of his production beyond the Italian immigrant community. Although the boundary between fiction and reportage in Ciambelli’s writing often remained fluid, his serialized novels—often published in periodicals such as La Follia di New York, L’Indipendente of New Haven, and L’Italia of Chicago— closely parallel contemporary portrayals of Italian labor struggles, as seen in Joseph Stella’s depictions of Pennsylvania miners, and later accounts by the militant anarchist Carlo Tresca on immigrant class consciousness. Focusing on its impact on the lived experiences and identity formation within the Italian diaspora and on his ability to navigate various media spheres, this presentation undertakes a first step in the much-needed broader scholarly examination of Ciambelli’s oeuvre