California Italian Studies

What can it mean to talk or write or shout about "Italian sound"?  I search for answers to this question in the history of Italian(ate) opera, dance, cinema, anthems, popular songs, taxi horns, violins, headphones and mopeds, as well as the braying of Neapolitan donkeys, the clanking of Roman lawyers abuzz in procession, the vociferations of Futurists at war, and the silence of Etruscan funerary sculpture.