I’ve lived in various parts of the US (Ohio, Indiana, Massachusetts, Tennessee and South Carolina) and traveled more widely across the States than that. There’s something about being a tourist or visitor and encountering the various ways a community tries to market itself to attract visitors that I find interesting. Take Atlanta for example. There are a few vestiges of Old Atlanta that might attract a tourist’s attention, but having visited it dozens of times over more than twenty years, there’s nothing that really sets Atlanta apart from any other southern city. Charlotte, for example, is hardly distinguishable, although it has no street, or boulevard, or avenue, named Peachtree, while Atlanta has dozens. Atlanta, since 1996, has the Olympic venues and a couple of good museums, some really fine restaurants, but very little that sets it apart from any other city in America, or the world.

Corrie and I went to Milwaukee today. It’s an interesting place. We went to an Italian deli, to Will Allen’s “Growing Power,” to the Public Market, where we had a pretty good fish fry, and drove along the lake front. Along the way, we stopped in what’s left of the German section–Usinger’s and a couple of tacky-looking German restaurants.

None of it seemed authentic: not the Italian deli, although Corrie felt reminded of Boston’s North End, and certainly not the German block. Yet I wonder how much more authentic a German city, or Italian city would feel in 2010. Neither of us has spent time in Europe in the last decade. We had a week in Frankfurt in 2008 and then it seemed more authentic than my memories of it from 1980. But of course the US Army was no longer ubiquitous.

On another level, there was in our visit, deep authenticity. When Corrie said she felt like she was back in the North End, she was attesting to the authenticity of Italian-Americans creating space and a new culture for themselves in America. They succeeded in Boston, and in Milwaukee.