Even if it's just a little thing, something like a song, there's still that sort of common language, that common denominator that we can all relate to.
When I was growing up, hip-hop music existed as American thing. If you listened to it you were listening to an American subculture, whereas now you're just listening to pop music that everyone shares. I think that's big.
When the Romani people came and settled in Gioia Tauro in the '60s and the '70s, they took over a neighborhood much like Africans are doing now that became like their "ghetto". Obviously, there are immense differences in Romani culture - there is more of a distrust of the outside and less willingness to integrate that stopped it from happening. The illiteracy rate is still very high, and they are still very much keeping themselves sectioned off from the rest of the community. I don't think that's going to happen with the African community.
When you have a small town where all of a sudden there's 3,000 black people living in a neighborhood where there were never black people before, that's a dramatic change. I'm not sure how much the people in the north are acknowledging that this is a permanent phenomenon, that it is going to change the social fabric.
Sicilians, Calabrians, Neapolitans - there were real differences between them, and then all of a sudden they're all living in the US, and then they're all Italians.
Pop stars exist in a different space, one not necessarily tied to a patriotism. So Rihanna is everyone's. She doesn't just belong to America, even though she's a creation of America.
One of the biggest dishes in Sicily is couscous, and there's always been a North African influence on Italian culture, culinary culture there.
