Anti-Italianism

"The mass media has consistently ignored five centuries of Italian American history, and has elevated what was never more than a minute subculture to the dominant Italian American culture."

"Anti-Italianism in sixteenth-century France undoubtedly was a specific type of ethnic antagonism.... The emergence of anti-Italianism as a national issue was closely connected to the crisis of the French Renaissance monarchy. In this context, anti-Italianism became an important political tool successively of the Huguenots, the League, and, ultimately of the Bourbon monarchy."

"The xenophobia of the Lyonnais against Italians was by no means exceptional. Much of France both north and south at that moment was in the grip of a deep wave of anti-Italian feeling."

"Even as early as 962, Bishop Liutprand of Cremona wrote: "We Lombards, Saxons, Franks, Lotharingians, Bavarians, Swabians, and Burgundians have such utter contempt for the Romans that when we try to express our indignation we can find no term with which to insult our enemies more damaging than that of Romans. This single word means for us all that is ignoble, cowardly, sordid, obscene.""

"[Italians are] "just a little worse than the Negro, being if anything filthier in [their] habits, lawless, and treacherous.""

"Monday we dined at the Camerons; various dago diplomats were present, all much wrought up by the lynching of the Italians in New Orleans. Personally I think it rather a good thing, and said so."

"These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins, who have transported to this country the lawless passions, the cut-throat practices, and the oath-bound societies of their native country, are to us a pest without mitigation. Our own rattlesnakes are as good citizens as they...Lynch law was the only course open to the people of New Orleans."