America 1957, a sentimental journey

In 1957, after a six-day sea voyage with his friend Giovanni Urbani (future director of the Institute of Restoration in Rome), Raffaele La Capria arrived in McCarthy’s America with a grant to study at Harvard where the rector was Henry Kissinger. Young and inquisitive he was struck by post-war American society: drive-ins, vast spaces and funeral homes that spoke of a country and its new myths. An endless network of freeways made its people “nomads”, Coca-Cola and hotdogs anticipated junk food and the out of tune voice of a transistor radio accompanied the trip with the hybrid rhythms of jazz and rock. With the irony and lightness of his Neapolitan spirit, in these five memoirs Raffaele La Capria tells of the birth of a cultural hegemony, of a system of values ready to cross the Atlantic to an old world still marked by the Second World War and incapable of building up a new balance.