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rendezvous with him, sees Maria Corona, who tells her Michele's gotten his picture in all the local Italian papers, and even begins to read from one in Italian (throughout the opera, the characters liberally mix Italian into their English). Michele appears and pleads with Annina to give up her extraordinary faith; she refuses. The final scene returns us to the original cold-water flat where the physically and emotionally fragile Annina is taking her religious vows. Michele bursts in and tries to stop her, but she is beyond hearing him; she dies as the ring of Christ is placed on her finger. Vital to our understanding of this opera is the knowledge that, in a New World community where immigrant neighbors cling to one another against an unknown, the beliefs of the Old World may become magnified and even distorted in the process...perhaps best illustrated in the scene where the Sons of San Gennaro are both intensely religious and yet outright thugs.

In the next article in this series, we'll look at operas set in New England, where religious and sexual passions make for some pretty intense plots.

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