The alarm about an imminent new civil war in America has been ringing for a few years now, to the point of hypothesizing an imminent end of democracy in this country. But Maria Teresa Cometto and Glauco Maggi say in their new book “Qui non è Nuova York” (This is not New York) - published by Neri Pozza and in bookstores since October 22 - that what they saw with their own eyes in the four months in which they explored “Deep America” left them “a strong impression that Americans are really not as divided, polarized and angry with each other as we see on social media and mainstream media.”

Cometto and Maggi are two Italian journalists, husband and wife, who have lived in New York for a quarter of a century. Their book is the result of two coast-to-coast trips by car as "special correspondents" of the Italian Cultural Institute in New York. The first was in 2021 from New York to Portland (Oregon) and back, on two different routes along the northern states. The other, in 2023, from New York to San Diego (California), first descending into Georgia along the Atlantic and then crossing the southern states. In all 32 thousand kilometers, 17 national parks and natural oases.

The main idea of the reportage is the discovery of the “Other America”, the furthest from the places visited by Italian tourists, but the closest to the true heart of the great nation, very different from what we usually read or see in the mainstream media.

“In our first 20 years in the USA we had already visited several states, from Alaska to Florida - explain the authors -, so we chose to explore those where we had not yet been, those less known to tourists but also to the majority of our American friends: first the states in the Great North and then those in the Deep South. With the motto in our heads “This is NOT New York”, to paraphrase Ruggero Orlando, the legendary Rai correspondent from America in the 1950s and 1970s”.

“We faced this adventure with the sensitivity of two Italians who have always been tied to their roots and traditions, but who have also adopted America as their new home, becoming US citizens in 2018,” Cometto and Maggi emphasize. “And we were helped by dozens of people who spoke to us about how they experience the Other America, the one that the elites on both sides call the Flyover Country, that is, the country that ‘very important people’ only see from the plane when they fly between Manhattan and Los Angeles. But it is also the country where many American families have moved in recent years in search of a better quality of life in terms of safety, clean air and… lower taxes.”

“We had scheduled several meetings before leaving. The most touching and inspiring was with Opal Lee, the ninety-six-year-old African-American ‘Grandma of Juneteenth’, who in Fort Worth, Texas, preaches and practices love ‘blind’ to the color of your skin. A source of pride was meeting the many new Italian immigrants who have reached the top of their field, such as the scientists at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California or the anthropologist Donatella Davanzo in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a leading expert on the legendary Route 66, engaged in a project sponsored by the American National Parks on the ethnicity of the Mother Route to celebrate its centennial in 2026”.

This book “is not intended to be a systematic social or political analysis of the country - warn the authors -. Nor a tourist guide. Rather, an impressionistic sketch with anecdotes and data collected in over a hundred days, which we hope will inspire you to follow in our footsteps. Not necessarily following the path we have taken, but our method”.

Qui non è Nuova York  - 100 giorni nell’America profonda. Maria Teresa Cometto, Glauco Maggi, Neri Pozza 2024, pp. 272, € 20,00.

This book is the original idea of Professor Fabio Finotti, Director of the Italian Cultural Institute in New York. © 2024 Neri Pozza Editore, Vicenza