Traveling in the deep America

There is an America that has nothing to do with Julia Roberts and George Clooney, with Hollywood and the endless nights of New York and Los Angeles. It is the America that is discovered by traveling coast-to-coast and that is told to us by journalists Maria Teresa Cometto and Glauco Maggi in their “Qui non è Nuova York” (Neri Pozza, 2024, pp. 272, also e-book).

In about a hundred days , Cometto and Maggi traveled 32,000 kilometers, first moving from New York to Portland (Oregon) and back, on two different routes along the northern states; then from New York to San Diego (California), first descending into Georgia along the Atlantic and crossing the southern states . The purpose of the trip: to encounter Middle America, the "Other America", the furthest from the places frequented by Italian tourists, but the closest to the true heart of the great nation. A nation very different from the one you usually read or see in the mainstream media and which will probably determine with its vote the outcome of the presidential clash on November 5 between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

In their long journey, the two journalists, husband and wife and residents of the States for a quarter of a century, have been enveloped by the charm of places suspended in time. They have crossed the forests of Washington State with pines grown on the trunks of trees sawn a century and a half ago to build the Great Northern Railroad and forgotten historical sites, such as The Lost Colony, the English colony founded in 1585 on the island of Roanoke, North Carolina, and mysteriously disappeared. In the book we also find architectural curiosities, such as the campus of the University of Texas at El Paso, designed like the temples of Bhutan, unique landscapes, such as the craters of the Moon in Idaho and unexpected beauties, such as the Crystal Bridges Museum immersed in the woods of Bentonville, Arkansas, the capital of the supermarket giant Walmart.

The book, however, is mostly made up of encounters with people, glimpses of humanity from a surprisingly multifaceted America. We then realize how the United States remains a nation that is little known and even more misunderstood in our latitudes, despite the fact that American culture and lifestyle have profoundly influenced Europe and especially Italy after the Second World War. And yet, we stop at stereotypes: Americans all armed to the teeth without perhaps knowing that half of the weapons in circulation in America are owned by three percent of the population. Or we measure the States with European parameters without realizing that it is a boundless country, sparsely populated and still wild in many of its areas and very different from the environment heavily influenced by the human presence that is typical of Europe. In short, in most cases we do not have the right tools to interpret what is happening in America, the great changes that have been affecting this nation in recent years. Maria Teresa Cometto and Glauco Maggi try to offer them to us by presenting many situations, ideas, people. Testimonies of America's darkest past, like the new Lynching Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. Glimmers of hope like the story of Opal Lee, the ninety-six-year-old African-American who marched from Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington to make the day of liberation from slavery a national holiday. And countless pieces of Italy, not to mention the many new Italian immigrants encountered everywhere, like the scientists at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, or the teachers of our language, considered cool on university campuses in the most remote cities.