That Melfi, an upstanding Italian-American and feminist, finds herself caught up in the pull of Tony's retro charm is one of the show's most audacious flourishes. Melfi is the audience's surrogate and her fascination with Tony is a metaphor for our own fascination with the Mafia, particularly as it's been depicted onscreen in "The Godfather" trilogy, "Mean Streets" and "GoodFellas." There's something about those colorful gangsters, with their swagger and their loyalties and their (perceived) victimless crimes, that reels audiences in, again and again.

And Melfi isn't the only civilian who's smitten; "The Sopranos" is filled with mob groupies, from Tony's mild-mannered neighbor, Dr. Cusamano (Robert Lupone), who shows off Tony to his golfing buddies (Tony refers to him behind his back as a "Wonder Bread Wop"), to Melfi's family counselor, who listens to Melfi and her ex's angry exchange about her having a gangster as a patient, and then proudly offers his own bit of family history -- he had a relative who ran with mobster Louis Lepke ("That was one tough Jew"). Chase's best joke, though, is that even the guys in Tony's crew look to the movies, "The Godfather" in particular, for a whiff of the lost machismo and glamour of La Cosa Nostra, which has been weakened from without by federal RICO statutes and from within by impatient young Turks like Christopher, who see the mob as a quick career path to Hollywood.

But even when you take the Mafia out of the equation, the Italian seasonings of "The Sopranos" are utterly irresistible, beginning with the ethnic pride and underdog scrappiness these characters still carry with them on their hejira to upper-middle-class respectability. "Do you know who invented the telephone? An Italian, Antonio Meucci," Tony tells his son. "He was robbed!" And then there's the food -- my God, the food! I mean, doesn't your mouth water when Carmela takes another steaming dish of baked rigatoni out of the oven, or Tony twirls his spaghetti around a meatball as big as his fist?

And, of course, there's Francis Albert. At the beginning of the Jan. 16 episode, a breathtaking montage illustrates the ebb and flow of Soprano life since last season, and it's choreographed, gorgeously, to Sinatra's "It Was a Very Good Year." The scenes float into one another as if you're flipping dreamily through an uncensored family album: Tony playing solitaire, banging his mistress, giving Meadow a driving lesson; Junior behind bars; Livia in her hospital bed; Carmela serving up dinner; Christopher snorting coke while an Edward G. Robinson movie plays on TV. Sinatra's melancholy paean to virility past and good times slipping away is so dead-perfect as a "Sopranos" anthem, the Chairman of the Board could be singing about each character, as each character -- the same way Bruce Springsteen could have been the unsteady inner voice of Tony Soprano when he whispered his disquieting "State Trooper" ("License, registration, I ain't got none/But I got a clear conscience 'bout the things that I done/Mister state trooper, please don't stop me") over the closing credits of last season's final episode.

You don't have to be Italian to feel like one of la famiglia watching "The Godfather," or to share Francis Albert's romantic mood swings. And you don't have to be from the Garden State to feel the Jersey in your soul when you're at a Springsteen concert watching the Boss and the E Street Band doing "Born to Run" or "Backstreets" or "Atlantic City," songs that hover unsung over every lovingly photographed street scene of "The Sopranos" (David Chase is a Jersey boy, too). And so it is with "The Sopranos." Sure, the show's astonishing popularity owes a lot to its crackerjack storytelling and uncompromised vision. But, like Sinatra, Springsteen and "The Godfather" before it, the show also opens up, generously and vividly, a particular set of experiences (being Italian, growing up blue-collar in New Jersey) for the rest of us, and turns them into shared pop cultural history.

"The Sopranos" woos third and fourth generation Americans -- grown beyond our ancestors' ethnic identities, hometown loyalties and economic classes -- with what we crave most: roots. You watch "The Sopranos" and it stirs some deep-down tribal memory. You feel like you know this family, these people with their big emotions and their messy relationships and their ties that bind, and in some strange way, you feel like you're home.

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