The departure, the journey on the steamship, the arrival in the other world. The awe in front of the skyscrapers, the hard work, the daily sacrifice. Little Italy reassembled in mutual aid societies, the white, red and green cockade pinned on the lapel of the jacket. Racism and the Black Hand. Fascism, anti-fascism. Integration and new citizens with dual passports. In the end, for many, success and pride. “It is the will to succeed that is the connotation that holds everything together, a value stronger than any difficulty, fueled in each by a sense of redemption,” explains scholar Mario Avagliano, author with Marco Palmieri of Italiani d’America (“Italians of America”) published by Mulino.
The book is a powerful, documented, unbiased account. Facts, names and numbers describe what the great mass emigration to the U.S. was: a chiaroscuro path made up of desires and disillusions, hopes and tears, which forever marked the history of two nations. And the fate of at least four to five generations born between the mid-19th century and the 1980s, when the hard computer case took the place of the cardboard suitcase tied with string. “The latest official 2010 census reveals that more than 17 million Americans have Italian blood, the sixth largest ethnic group. But according to authoritative associations it is almost double that: 30 million. If we add the many living in Canada, South America, Australia and elsewhere, we realize that there is a parallel Italy in the world. Outside the boundaries of the map,” Avagliano points out. It is therefore impossible to understand the history of our country apart from this fact.
Where to begin? The advent of the steam engine shortened travel time and lowered the expense of travel. Genoa, Naples, Palermo (and Trieste, for those who chose the route to the East) filled with poor people with two pennies and a pile of rags in their trunks. They have peasant faces, holding a third-class ticket and the shipping company’s card tucked into the brim of their hats. They go up from the dock of the port on the steamers of the General Navigation or of Florio and Rubattino, Piaggio, Colajanni, Raggio. “They leave, they leave! By the thousands the young men arrive and embark. Thus Italy loses its warm blood from the arteries,” wrote the socialist periodical Era Nuova in November 1894. They are laborers, workers, artisans, ringers and peddlers squeezed by speculators and swindlers. Passengers travel in slave trade wagons, meager food and not even two cubic feet of air per person. Until New York appears: the arrival station at Ellis Island, the islet opposite Liberty Island.
The words of poet Emma Lazarus, engraved on the pedestal of America’s iconic statue, say it all: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Gold. The dream (and nightmare) of prospectors during the great rush for wealth. Three thousand landed in 1852 in California from the Ligurian coast to hunt for nuggets around Red Dog, the Sierra Nevada ghost town. Others did the same in Nevada, Montana, Colorado, or the Klondike.
Frontier adventures, like that of Angelo Charlie Siringo. The son of immigrants, he became one of Texas’ most famous cowboys, a hunter for the Pinkerton Detective Agency who crossed the path of Sheriff Pat Garrett. And then there was sister Blandina, born Rosa Maria Segale, registered in Cicagna in the Fontanabuona Valley in 1850. She emigrated at age four to Cincinnati, was a missionary nun in the Far West in the circle of the bandit Billy the Kid (she saved his life) and the Apache and Comanche leaders, fighting for the abolition of lynching. Her diary collects letters exchanged with her sister Giustina, also a member of the clergy in Ohio.
They were pioneers, explorers of the unknown. Between 1880 and 1915 nine million Italians crossed the Atlantic, nearly half headed to America and the rest distributed among Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, places far from the heart that became the new homelands where they exported passions and nostalgia–even soccer. Montevideo’s Penarol, a club founded in 1891 and winner of 54 championships, owes its name to Piedmontese immigrants from Pinerolo. And the link between Genoa and Buenos Aires is a bridge between the Marassi stadium and the Bombonera, embodied in Boca Juniors, the team christened on April 3, 1905 by a group of Xeneizes, mixing jerseys and colors. It is a tangle of identity, tradition, roots. With the drive of ambition that means making their way into entrepreneurship and commerce, the stonebreakers who set up on their own and build roads, railroads, buildings. But there are those who are not satisfied and aim even higher.
One was Amadeo Peter Giannini, born from parents who left Favale di Malvaro, in Liguria. In 1904 he opened the Bank of Italy in a saloon, a hub for villagers who lost everything in the San Francisco earthquake. He was a friend and financier of Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, and Frank Capra. The institution expanded in 1927 to Bank of America, still the largest bank on the planet after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. There was also Luigi Fugazzi, another shrewd businessman like Giannini, who emigrated in 1869 from Santo Stefano d’Aveto. He changed his name and founded the Fugazy bank in New York, looking after the Italian community’s deposits and remittances, which elected him Pope of the South Village.
Meanwhile, goods of the tasty variety arrived by ship from Italy. Andrea Sbarboro, born in 1839, created Italian-Swiss Colony Wine. Paolo Pastene was the pioneer of Italian merchants in Boston, selling Italian olive oil and tomato sauces he sourced from Imperia and Naples. Antonio Cuneo, who dealt in peanuts and fruit, was called the “Banana King of Mulberry Street.” Marco Giovanni Fontana (Mark John to Americans) from Cerisola in Val d’Aveto reached the top of the canning industry in California, founding the Del Monte brand. Giovanni Di Martino and Emanuele Ronzoni, cousins who left from San Fruttuoso di Camogli, founded the Atlantic Macarony Company in New York in 1893 which, in the early twentieth century, put 30 thousand kilos of pasta a day on the market. Ronzoni brand pasta is still sold throughout the United States today.
And we didn’t even get to the remarkable people in politics, entertainment and sports. Avagliano and Palmieri’s book is an encyclopedia, the Yellow Pages with the names of those who made it.
Between us Italians still in Italy and those lives, there’s an ocean in between.
