One of the biggest dishes in Sicily is couscous, and there's always been a North African influence on Italian culture, culinary culture there.

When I was growing up, hip-hop music existed as American thing. If you listened to it you were listening to an American subculture, whereas now you're just listening to pop music that everyone shares. I think that's big.

One of the biggest dishes in Sicily is couscous, and there's always been a North African influence on Italian culture, culinary culture there.

Pop stars exist in a different space, one not necessarily tied to a patriotism. So Rihanna is everyone's. She doesn't just belong to America, even though she's a creation of America.

When you have a small town where all of a sudden there's 3,000 black people living in a neighborhood where there were never black people before, that's a dramatic change. I'm not sure how much the people in the north are acknowledging that this is a permanent phenomenon, that it is going to change the social fabric.

Sicilians, Calabrians, Neapolitans - there were real differences between them, and then all of a sudden they're all living in the US, and then they're all Italians.

Even if it's just a little thing, something like a song, there's still that sort of common language, that common denominator that we can all relate to.