Coming from a completely Italian family, I could really relate to the reading this week in the sense of the idea of the domus. Ever since I was born, my family has been one of the most important things to me. I was raised being around my family all the time–this includes parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc. To NOT be with them is a very strange thing to imagine. Some of my best memories took place while I was with my family, and I can safely say that we are a very tightly-knit unit. Although the domus is not taken to the extremes that it was for the Italians of East Harlem, it is still a prevalent factor in my life.
As I read of how the Italian children were expected to show respect to their elders and things of the like, it just struck me as a natural thing because, like Praveena and Silky said, I was raised in this same manner. I could not even imagine talking back to my parents, cursing, or speaking rudely around them! The whole idea of rispetto rings true with my family and me, and I understood what some of the Italians meant when they said that rispetto was a sort of respect-fear. However, this does not mean that there is no love. I think that the love between each member of my family and I is only strengthened because of the respect-fear we have for one another.
What I was surprised to read, however, was the lifestyle expected to be maintained by the women of the domus. I thought it was very nice that the older, married women were looked up to and regarded so highly, but I felt very sorry for the young women! They had such high expectations to live up to, and risked losing a chance for creating their own domus in the future if they failed to live up to these expectations. The amount that they had to worry about their reputations was ridiculous. I mean, for myself, I would want my parents and family to meet a boy that I was dating, and I would want their approval, but I would hate to be judged for the rest of my life if my family did not like the boy! To have everyone in the neighborhood watching every move I made to make sure I didn’t overstep the boundaries of the domus would be pure torture. But many young Italian women sacrificed their own desires for the sake of the domus. Now this, I can relate to. Family came first for these Italians, as it does for me even today. They just wanted to make sure that their future generations had the same upbringing that they themselves had.
Like William, I think that the tightly-bound communities of Italian Harlem is what makes the Italians look back on their neighborhoods with nostalgia. Living in Italian Harlem during the “age of the domus” was probably a lot better than living in cramped tenements among people that did not know, or like, each other. I thought it was really cool how the Italians had their own families, but then extended this familial bond to other “comari” of the neighborhood. It kind of reminded me of my own neighborhood as I was growing up; all of the families on my block were very close, always playing outside together or having dinner with one another. It is because of this that I now look back upon my childhood neighborhood with the same sort of nostalgia I believe the Italians have when speaking of Italian Harlem.
