In 1948, Arthur Miller, one of the greatest American playwrights of the 20th century, undertook a trip to southern Italy, to a Mezzogiorno still scarred by the wounds of World War II. Accompanied by his Italian-American friend Vincent Longhi, Miller visited Monte Sant’Angelo. From this experience came the short story “Monte Sant’Angelo,” published in 1951 in Harper’s Magazine.
The tale is a work dense with introspection and symbolism, in which Miller, in the guise of the character Bernstein, explores the theme of Jewish identity and diasporic memory. The trip to southern Italy becomes a pretext for reflecting on one’s origins, sense of belonging and the search for a past that seems to elude but unexpectedly resurfaces in everyday gestures and faces encountered.
Monte Sant’Angelo, described as a “turreted eagle’s nest,” strikes Miller for its ruggedness and atmosphere suspended in time. The landscape, the people, the silences and the ancient stones of the sanctuary evoke in him familiar memories, tales of his father, images of a lost Europe. His friend Appello, Longhi’s alter ego, is in search of his Italian roots, and his determination to “belong to a story” becomes the symbolic engine of the tale.
One of the most intense moments takes place in the crypt of the sanctuary, where Appello searches for the tomb of an ancestor. The scene is charged with suggestion: the darkness, the illegible inscriptions, the silence broken only by the dripping of the cave. Bernstein observes his friend like a monk or archaeologist, immersed in the long darkness of time. It is in this context that Miller reflects on his own sense of uprootedness, his lack of a shared religion or personal history.
The tale reaches its symbolic climax with Bernstein’s encounter with a peddler, Mauro di Benedetto. The man, wearing a black hat and carrying a bundle of cloth, arouses in Bernstein an immediate feeling of familiarity. When she sees him tying the bundle in a precise, ritualistic gesture, Bernstein exclaims, “That’s exactly the way my father used to make a bundle … and my grandfather. Our whole history is to bundle up and go. Only a Jew can tie a bundle like that!”
This simple gesture becomes a revelation: Jewish identity, seemingly forgotten or hidden, resurfaces in the most humble, everyday details. Although the man denies being Jewish, Bernstein recognizes in him a silent legacy, a memory that survives despite oblivion. The story closes on a note of reconciliation: Bernstein finally feels at ease, as if he has rediscovered a fragment of his own history.
Miller, A. (1951). Mount St. Angelo. Harper’s Magazine. Translated it. in Grittani, D. (ed.), Verso Sud. Grenzi Publisher, 2018. Translation by Cosma Siani and Mariantonietta Di Sabato.