Progressive Italian American Cultural Exchange

Progressive Italian American Cultural Exchange PIACE is a social and cultural initiative reimagining Italian American identity. Join us as we redefine what it means to be Italian American—together.

Through dialogue, research, and creative exchange, we celebrate the overlooked, the evolving, and the diverse aspects of Italian heritage in contemporary America. The Progressive Italian American Cultural Exchange (PIACE) is a burgeoning organization dedicated to reintroducing and expanding Italian culture through progressive, inclusive, and creative dialogue. Founded in Brooklyn, PIACE builds br

idges between tradition and innovation by hosting lectures, exhibitions, and social gatherings that honor the multiplicity of Italian American experiences. Our mission is to cultivate a living culture—one that learns from its past while shaping a more equitable and imaginative future.

We focus on creative practice, cultural history, and critical discourse looking at how language, food, ritual, and mater...
01/28/2026

We focus on creative practice, cultural history, and critical discourse looking at how language, food, ritual, and material culture shift and persist through migration, assimilation, and reinvention.

Our goal is to build space for artists, thinkers, and community members to reflect, experiment, and reimagine what Italian American culture can mean now.

We’re a new nonprofit-in-formation with a national chapter vision, committed to critical cultural education and reimagined community events rooted in history and innovation.

Join us at an upcoming event and help build what Italian American culture can look like next.

01/06/2026

🍕🍍 Who decides what’s “authentic”? (And why are they always yelling?)

Pineapple on pizza
Matcha tiramisù.
Negroni Jell-olives (wonderful dish at )

Every food culture has traditions.
And tribunals.

“Authenticity” is rarely about history alone. It’s about authority. About who gets to claim lineage, who gets accused of dilution, and who gets excommunicated for improvising. The loudest voices often insist Italian food is timeless—while conveniently forgetting migration, poverty, substitution, assimilation, and invention.

Italian food didn’t descend from the heavens fully formed.
It moved. It mutated. It survived.

So when does adaptation become betrayal and who benefits from drawing that line?

These tensions sit at the center of our upcoming lecture with Fabio Parasecoli , whose work interrogates food, power, migration, and the policing of taste in his book “Gastronativism: Food, Identity, Politics”.

📍 Wed Jan 14th 6pm at the Calandra Italian American Institute

💵 suggested contribution: $10 (or whatever you can swing)

…

PIACE is a progressive Italian-American social club that embraces the complexity of culture through creative practice, cultural history, and critical conversation. We create space for artists, thinkers, and community members to explore and reimagine what Italian-American identity can be today, envisioning a vibrant and continuously evolving heritage.

12/29/2025

PIACE ON Italics - CUNY TV

When food becomes a political weapon, who decides what belongs?PIACE is kicking off 2025 with a public talk by Fabio Par...
12/27/2025

When food becomes a political weapon, who decides what belongs?

PIACE is kicking off 2025 with a public talk by Fabio Parasecoli, one of the sharpest thinkers working at the intersection of food, identity, and power.

📍 Wednesday, January 14 · 6PM
📍 Calandra Italian American Institute (NYC) .institute 25 W 43rd Street, 17th Floor

If you’ve ever wondered how halal tortellini can spark a national crisis, why beef becomes a battleground, or how “tradition” gets twisted into a tool of exclusion—this conversation cracks it wide open.

Fabio’s work on gastronativism exposes how food is used to draw borders:
Who belongs.
Who doesn’t.
Who gets celebrated and who gets erased.

More importantly, it asks how we can reclaim our culinary histories without falling into nationalism, nostalgia, or mythmaking.

With Italy and UNESCO making headlines, this is a great conversation for Italian Americans right now.

💵 Suggested contribution: $10 (or whatever you can swing)

…

PIACE is a progressive Italian-American social club that embraces the complexity of culture through creative practice, cultural history, and critical conversation. We create space for artists, thinkers, and community members to explore and reimagine what Italian-American identity can be today envisioning a vibrant and continuously evolving heritage.

Buona Vigilia di Natale + Buone Feste ✨ Merry Christmas Eve and Happy Holidays! Many Italian Americans celebrate Christ...
12/24/2025

Buona Vigilia di Natale + Buone Feste ✨ Merry Christmas Eve and Happy Holidays!

Many Italian Americans celebrate Christmas Eve with the “Feast of Seven Fishes” - though the quantity of fishes served varies. The tradition has origins in America with the large diaspora of Italians to America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - stemming from the Catholic practice of abstaining from meat on Christmas Eve. A variety of other Italian American Christmas contributions followed: from Dominick the Donkey, the Lights of Dyker Heights, Rows of Panettone lining market shelves, to individualized and artistic Presepe/Nativity scenes around the city.

As culture and tradition shift throughout the years, so have celebrations around the holidays. What traditions have you kept, changed, or individualized throughout the years?

Italian American identity throughout the years has often been shaped and constrained to reductive stereotypes. These nar...
12/19/2025

Italian American identity throughout the years has often been shaped and constrained to reductive stereotypes. These narratives have failed to capture the complexity and diversity of Italian American culture and the Italian history and culture that informs it.

Our mission is to center these overlooked narratives, challenge reductive representations, and embrace the complexity of contemporary Italian American identity.

As our community continues to grow, how would you like to see the narrative around Italian American identity shift and evolve? The future is not written, let’s transform it.

12/17/2025

Tradition isn’t fixed, it’s carried.

Italian Catholic processions have long been a public spectacle within Italian and Italian American life. Ornate and theatrical, grounded in belief and veneration, they are also feats of coordination, endurance, and collective strength. These rituals make faith visible. They turn streets into stages and communities into moving monuments.

What’s often forgotten is that many of these traditions sit atop older, local, pre-Christian practices—rituals that were layered into Catholic observance as the Church expanded its reach. What we recognize today as “tradition” is already a process of adaptation, translation, and survival.
So what happens now?

The Italian diaspora is no longer singular. It is multi-ethnic, multiracial, and shaped by migration, intermarriage, and cultural exchange. If tradition has always evolved, how do we allow these rituals to evolve again? How do we reimagine procession—not as nostalgia or spectacle alone, but as a living form that reflects who we are now?

This is the kind of question PIACE exists to ask. And more importantly, to put into motion.

🔥 ANNOUNCEMENT 🔥PIACE is kicking off 2025 with a bang.Join us Wednesday, January 14th at 6PM at the Calandra Italian Ame...
12/11/2025

🔥 ANNOUNCEMENT 🔥
PIACE is kicking off 2025 with a bang.

Join us Wednesday, January 14th at 6PM at the Calandra Italian American Institute .institute as we welcome Fabio Parasecoli, one of the sharpest minds in food politics and Italian identity.

If you’ve ever wondered how halal tortellini can spark a national crisis, why beef becomes a battleground, or how “tradition” gets twisted into a weapon . This talk is going to crack that wide open.

Fabio’s groundbreaking work on gastronativism exposes how food gets used to draw borders:
Who belongs. Who doesn’t.
Who gets celebrated. Who gets erased.

And more importantly how we can reclaim our culinary histories without falling into the traps of nationalism, nostalgia, or exclusion.

This is the conversation Italian America needs right now.
The one that pulls the curtain back on how our foodways have been politicized and how we can build something more honest, more complex, and more future-facing.

Suggested contribution: $10 (or whatever you can swing).

See you at the Calandra.

Introducing the New PIACE Logo 🌺✨We’re proud to debut the new visual identity for PIACE. It has been thoughtfully design...
12/09/2025

Introducing the New PIACE Logo 🌺✨

We’re proud to debut the new visual identity for PIACE. It has been thoughtfully designed by our volunteer designer and member, Marisa Sparacio, whose vision beautifully translates our mission into form.(Thank you, Marisa, for your tremendous care and creativity.)

At the heart of the design are symbols that speak to who we are and what we stand for:

🌿 The Cornicello: a rooted emblem of Italian and Italian-American life. Traditionally a sign of protection and good fortune, here it becomes the grounding point from which new cultural growth emerges.

🌺 The Poppies: symbols of Italy’s long history of resistance, anti-fascism, and progressive struggle. Growing directly from the cornicello, they embody our commitment to cultivating the overlooked, the radical, and the transformative in our shared heritage.

⭐ The Stars: referencing the American flag, but also representing the five core values that guide PIACE:
Progress, Solidarity, Creativity, Critical Inquiry, and Community Care.

These stars anchor us both to the American landscape we inhabit and to the principles that shape our collective work.
Even the typography nods to the visual language of New York’s Italian American storefronts and restaurants; a reminder that our culture is not only inherited but actively lived, questioned, and reimagined here in the city.

It is a symbol of our evolving identity, rooted in history and blooming toward possibility.

Welcome to the new face of PIACE.

And thank you again, Marisa, for giving visual life to our mission.

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