In both his print Last Spaghetti Dinner and his painting Pompeii Mural Tagged, Petracca continues his tagging, this time using visual references to The Sopranos, which he admits to having watched a couple times “just to see what it was all about.” Its offensiveness was even greater than he had anticipated, and as such became a key symbol of Italian American stereotyping in the new body of work. A mural with a white field, a cupid and architectural motifs strung with garlands photographed in a small bedroom (Cubiculum 4) of The House of the Venus in a Seashell provides the setting for Last Spaghetti Dinner. Petracca tagged this mural with a newspaper notice advertising a play that was actually staged in Greenwich Village about the Sopranos’ farewell dinner for Tony, the main character who is being sent up the river. Despite Tony’s perennial philandering (to which the presence of cupid is a witty reference), his family and his wife nonetheless rally round to send him off in stereotypically loving fashion—with a big bowl of pasta. In this work Petracca shows us that The Sopranos are no longer confined to television. Their potency has now spawned a play. And then, to drive home the point even further, Petracca (thankfully only in his art) has brought notice of both manifestations of the Sopranos across the ocean to Italy, back to the place where these caricatures supposedly originated.

Petracca’s painting entitled Pompeii Mural Tagged takes the tagging a step further. Upon a mural with poetic landscape motifs he observed in the atrium of The House of the Small Fountain, Petracca tagged the cover of the Sopranos’ Family Cookbook. Rather than showing it whole and pristine, Petracca manipulated it digitally so that it appears to have already been partially torn off by someone who came along after him. Here his image begins to work on a matrix of levels: the artist shows he is cognizant of the fact that his artistic viewpoint isn’t the endpoint in this argument about Italian American stereotyping. His view is one part of a dialogue with as many layers left to excavate as Pompeii itself, still partially buried under all that debris after 2,000 years.

One of the most successful prints in the series from a purely formal point of view is Villa of the Mysteries, photographed in the villa’s spectacular dining room or triclinium which contains one of antiquity’s most celebrated works of art, the bacchanalian fresco. Near the middle of long north wall of this electric painting, its rich red background showcasing the 29 life-size figures involved in an initiation ritual into the cult of Dionysus, god of wine and debauchery, Petracca inserted that infamous still from The Gold of Naples of food festival fame. He colorized it so that it blends in perfectly with the mural proper. Closer examination reveals that Petracca actually hung this still like a framed painting on top of the real work, obscuring part of it entirely and even casting a shadow on the wall. Here Petracca’s “American style tagging” subtly changes one thing into another. He replaces the prelude to an ancient sexual orgy with a modern food orgy.

Petracca’s print Costello Grande presents a view within the atrium of the House of the Vettii, looking southwest into its peristyle. One of the best preserved residences in Pompeii, the Vettii house belonged to two brothers, wealthy freedmen who made a fortune as wine merchants. They spent it on lavish embellishments for their home including an extensive trompe l’oeil style art gallery, as well as large numbers of highly entertaining pornographic frescoes. Petracca has “tagged” an image of Lou Costello, the American equivalent of Toto, on the wall above a “portrait” fresco of a laurel crowned figure in a toga. According to Petracca: “Lou Costello was a talented actor who made a living making fun of himself, making fun of how stupid he was, which of course he wasn’t. It exemplifies poignantly the kind of role open to Italian Americans, character roles, playing gangsters and buffoons. If you wanted to make it in show business, you basically could become great if you bought into these stereotypical roles. That’s where the work was.” In this heart of the Vettii home, where the upwardly mobile brothers poured most of their money, Petracca placed his portrait of the great Costello in his baseball cap, hanging it a little askew, of course, since the actor had to tilt his talent to fit the available mold.