In 1961 the italian writer Goffredo Parise (1929 - 1986) went to America for the first time. He wasn't yet the author of "Abecedary" (along with its continuation, "Solitudes", a wonderful set of "poetry in prose", featuring stories and memories from Italy as much poetic as curt and exposed -- read also our previous review about it) and of captivating travel accounts from all over the world (in the following years he covered USSR, China,Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Biafra, Japan... etc).
He was 31, but already a successful writer of novels (the first one he wrote at 18 years old) and always moving along with his piercing, never indulgent, enthusiast lively look over things, so easily bored and constantly renewed.
"The smell of America" (after his death republished as "New York") is a collection of articles and notes from two major travels he did in the States. He didn't write that much then and the book is short and mostly about New York.
In NY he fell literally in love with Harlem, and Black people's lifestyle; in his letters there are detailed accounts of his walks till night up to Harlem, his affair with a girl from there ("Anne"), descriptions of packed dance places, people in the streets, food, music, enchantments.

After NY he traveled coast to coast and had a stop in New Orleans.
During his first walk across NO downtown, he noticed how no black person was visible around. Everyone was white, hookers were everywhere in and out phony striptease bars where they "throw themselves at you like horseflies".
All the business was ran by italian mafiosi he met and described in the book.

Finally he made it to the black neighborhood. What follows is an excerpt of few lines he wrote about it¹, in 1961. It's a brief smell of past America from one of our great italian writers, and our today's homage to New Orleans, Louisiana.

Sunday afternoon: hot sun, red, orange... and an immense expanse of small wooden houses and narrow streets under rows of trees, spring canophilla trees, fragrant, dense with fragrance and light.
The streets, in this neighborhood, inhabited only by black people, are called: Magnolia Street, Thersicore Street, Melpomene Street, Canophilla Street and so forth. Houses are built in wood, always colonial style, but with running balconies, turning balusters, woody marquetries hanging as laces from the roofs, interiors with fireplaces, Madonnas and saints, small porcelain dogs, flowers and fake flowers of all colors, the most beautiful small houses in America. (...) white and tobacco-colored, with those small balconies 3 feet up the road, where on rocking chairs, deckchairs and small seesaws families dangle ...

The look of black people from here is different from the one in New York, and their faces, their bodies are different: these are eyes, bodies, faces of slaves... Segregation in absolute: they cannot hang around whites' places, not even publicly talk with withes. Police comes and disperse them. So the suspicion and sometimes hate in their looks as we passed by was more than justified.
We entered in a bar to drink a Coke, and the waitress told us she would give us the coke but we have to drink it outside...

They love these dear old houses, they fit into them... multicolored families of cyclamen pink dressed little girls, jade green, small nylon dresses, yellow gauze bonnets, red, vinyl purses, orange black shoes...

There were two italian stores in this area. One treated us coldly for the idiot racist shame of being the only white among negroes, the other one instead, manager of a very frequented bar, offered us a drink, affected... All the bystanders gathered around us with praises for the manager (Mr. Coniglio) whom they love as a Brother or a Father ... Why don't you come back to Italy? In Italy? To do what, here I have all my friends, who love me... I could never leave them².

In that neighborhood of Muses' streets, in Melpomene Street I really left my heart. They are the happening future, healthy people...
What envy and sadness yesterday evening, leaving that Canophilla Street of the sweet fragrances, with the sun skimming the old wooden houses, darkened by the screen doors and by the inner void, where were hanging already, at that hour, the ghosts of many imaginations and readings... what pictures of fresh obscured bodies in faint walking among thousands and thousands of small bottles of fake flowers, odorous magnolia crowns, brass beds...
afternoons spent inside, listening to the noise of the mosquitoes against the rusty thin iron veil, or the dull walk of the canophilles falling from the trees along with very small yellow-pink petals, and walking across the room with the sabers of the sun increasingly degrading towards twilight, and, towards the night more thick of any other, the smell of the St Anthony lilies, that here have a certain smell of magnolia and jasmine...

<sub>1.Translation is mine, so be patient! Next posts I could write my personal experience with New Orleans, and make things worse
2. I know, italians tend to see themselves as this caricature of loved-by-all. But, aren't you reminded here of something in the Spike Lee department?</sub>