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BOOKS IN REVIEWtween Old World and New. Her extensiveresearch indicates that culturalawareness of Italy in Canada was significantin the nineteenth century, as articlesin The Week (Toronto; 1883-1896) indicate.Abroad, the Canadian traveller(often a woman, unlike her Quebeccounterpart) tended to interpret whatshe saw, as opposed to the Québec traveller,who tended towards an impersonalrecitation of facts. Kröller traces thisattitude to the tradition of Protestantindividualism. By contrast, Québec travelaccounts often repeated details verbatimfrom other sources (which was apparentlynot that uncommon, as James deMule's brilliant parody, The DodgeClub; or, Italy in 185g, indicates).Another nineteenth-century travellerto Italy, Napoléon Bourassa, was concernednot at all with the Italy that wasthere, but with the Italy that was not. AsNovella Novelli points out, modern Italywas for Bourassa merely the decadentremnant of Rome's glory. Similarly,Earle Birney's twentieth-century travelsto Italy were primarily literary. In a delightfulvignette, "Io e l'ltalia," he relatesthat he first encountered Latium inthe person of his boyhood chum, TubbyPasquale. Later he visited Italy underthe aegis of Dante, Petrarca, and Boccacciowhile he was studying Chaucer.Then, at Berkeley on a fellowship, heexplored Cavalcanti, Bruno, Leopardi,zabaglione, and some Sicilian swearwords he learned in San Francisco's LittleItaly. Only in 1958, and then againin 1963, did he set foot in those otherinvisible cities: Rome, Florence, Pisa,Siena. . .At about the same time that Birneywas making his first trip to Italy, thesecond great wave of Italian immigrantswas establishing itself in Canada. One ofthe most interesting results of that translationwas the invention of a CanadianizedItalian (or was it an ItalianizedCanadian?) known as Italiese. GianrenzoClivio provides a small lexicon ofthis language, showing how it differsfrom standard Italian. Thus, basementbecomes "basamento" rather than theItalian "seminterrato" ; carpet becomes"carpetto" and not "tappetto." And Ican remember my uncle saying "checciabesa"for catch basin, though he droppedthe final "a" to make the word conformto his dialect.Taken as an insieme, these two volumesindicate that the relations betweenthe two countries merit more than theambassadorial gush with which they begin.While much original research remainsto be done (as Stelio Cro's discoveryof an unknown letter by Bressaniindicates), we have, nevertheless, comefar from the stereotypes of James S.Woodsworth's Strangers Within OurGates (1909) and the effusiveness ofJohn Murray Gibbon's Canadian Mosaic(1938). It is in this direction of understandingthe heterogeneity of Canadiancultural phenomena that II Veltromoves: "e sua nazion sarà tra feltro efeltro."THEATRE ENCORERICHARD CAVELLROCH CARRIER, L'ours et le kangourou. Stanké,n.p.JEAN DAiGLE, Au septième ciel. Editions duNoroît, $10.95.L'ours et le kangourou is a dialogue(divided into sixteen chapters) between"Roch," the bear, and "Chris," the kangaroo.It has attributes of the novel, thetheatre, and the travel journal. As theytravel about Australia, each of the twocompanions vies with the other in tellingtall tales about his own country and inprovoking his interlocutor with the absenceor presence of the oddities expectedby the "informed" tourist. Roch, after255