home

"My New York Presepio"
Joseph Sciorra
American Oggi, December 23, 2001
(Italian version)

After years of desire, I finally did it. I built my first presepio.

Last Christmas, I created the miniature landscape of the imagined Nativity scene that is the Italian presepio. Like any tradition, it involved adhering to established and imparted precepts, while also personalizing and updating it. That's what keeps culture alive.

My love of the presepio stems from two sources: my father and my scholarly research.

My father Enrico, who hails from Carunchio (CH), Abruzzo, has assembled the family presepio for close to half a century. When I was a child in the early 1960s, our presepio was an incredible mix of disparate elements. In addition to the Holy Family, the Three Kings, and shepherds and their flock, our Brooklyn Nativity displayed an exotic menagerie including an alligator, a lion, and a zebra, as well as an Alpine skier dressed in 1950s gear and a plastic barricade from an American Western fort. A Lionel train set encircled everything.

The presepio has long mixed time periods and geographies. The classic Neapolitan presepio was a Baroque hodge-podge of ancient Bethlehem and 18th centuries Italy. So why shouldn't my father include references to America?

As a folklorist, I have been studying New York versions of the tradition for fifteen years. During that time, I discovered that my father's annual creation is not uncommon, and Italians in New York often included anachronistic figures from priests and doctors, from St. Francis of Assisi to Mickey Mouse.

Giuseppe Monfoletto, originally from Polizzi Generosa (PA) in Sicily, assembles a dizzying array of interconnected scenes that include Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Santa Claus descending a chimney, a Native American outside a teepee, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa in his two-car garage in Ridgewood, Queens.

Some people might be shocked by such a Nativity landscape, claiming that it is not "a real traditional presepio." As Italian Americans, we are sometimes burdened by the legacy of Italian high art and there are those in our community who dismiss the contemporary folk arts practiced in our homes and neighborhoods as insignificantly quaint or déclassé kitsch. I have witnessed this in my research on yard shrines, Christmas decorated houses, and even religious street feasts. This is unfortunate because it negates our culture's dynamism and our living folk artists, something that seems to happen less with other ethnic groups.

Researching presepi in Italy, it was exteremly difficult to find literature describing common, domestic presepi built by working people. Almost everything focused on the great master artists of the high Baroque period like Giuseppe Sanmartino and Saverio Vassallo. While they are without a doubt extremely important to the presepio's history and development, I, on the other hand, was intrigued by people like Antonio Vigliante of Brooklyn.

Vigliante, from Solofra (AV), Campania, has created one of the city's most stunning presepi in the basement of St. Athanasius Church in Bensonhurst. His stupendous creation is a study in pastoral repose with painted and crafted mountains set against the background from which flows a gurgling brook that runs beneath a rustic wood foot bridge and past hand-crafted Styrofoam and cardboard farm houses. In addition to 19th century Italian shepherds and peasants, Antonio's creation includes Arabs, black figures, and Mexican campesinos. "It was just what I was looking for, a presepio with different people and different languages," he told me. "It's a mix and it's good."

I took to heart what I learned from Antonio and other New York presepio builders — practitioners of a living tradition — when I endeavored to build my first presepio in 2000. I had purchased the Holy Family, the Three Kings, and two Italian bagpipers at Via San Gregorio Armeno in Naples. I filled in the scene with my children's plastic animal and human figures.

I'm not very good with my hands. My wife and children had a good laugh as I struggled to build the manger, which ended up being a simple lean-to that I steadied by attaching it to the papier-mâché mountain. My children helped shape the mountain and paint the star-lit sky. We dusted the mountain peak with sifted white flour.

My presepio was ecumenical. It included a seated Buddha, the Hindu elephant God Ganesh, and the "popular" saint Dr. Jose Gregorio Hernandez from Venezuela. In the background as if in the distance, stood the architectural landmarks the Coliseum, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, and the Twin Towers. I included these figures and objects because they were available, they were more or less to scale, and they made sense to me as a group and as part of the miniature fantasyscape.

I'm just finishing my second presepio. While I will never match the imagination, skill, and scope of Giuseppe Monfoletto and Antonio Vigliante, I'm making my humble contribution to the living tradition of the New York presepio.

home