by Olindo Romeo Chiocca
Guernica's
Cities Series is dedicated to writers and their relationship to their
environment. A street, a district, a city become the main characters in
these (non)fictionalized literary documentaries
College
Street
Olindo Romeo Chiocca.
1-55071-217-9. $12 Canada - $10 USA. 2005
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College Street is a
quasi-pseudo biography of all the people, places, and events the author
took for granted as a child and teenager, but
now wishes he could revisit and replay at will.
His vivid descriptions, through the eyes of a young child and teenager, bring this once fledgling neighborhood to life.
Dominated by the Portuguese and the Italians, the area was a continual confusion of weddings, funerals, feasts, and processions.
When you include the endless
array of family events, obligation, dinners, and a required clandestine
trip to Italy, life for Bruno was a boiling cauldron of what today’s
multicultural fashionistas like to call “a cultural experience.”
About the Author - Olindo Romeo Chiocca
 |
He is also the author of Mobsters and Thugs |
Excerpt - College Street
College Street, in Toronto,
in between Grace and Clinton Streets, is a contradiction between the old
and the new. College Street is cafés, Italian shoes in windows,
skinned rabbits on hooks, the scent of garlic
and onions, and old world men and women fading from the scene. It is wind-proof
hair, all-black clothing, scattered music, pierced tongues, and an overlapping
of Italian cultures trying to blend in with the
elusive, never-quite-defined Canadian culture. The inhabitants, strollers,
and posers carry old world attitudes and hopes for their children: calloused
hands, swollen egos, large dreams, and soft gloves that grip
the steering wheel of Daddy-bought Ferraris.
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