The Italian Americans

by Maria Laurino

  Q: In 1984, you were the head of the host committee at a Democratic convention that was very important to Italian Americans. What was that moment like?

  Pelosi: I was very proud that Mario Cuomo was going to be the keynote speaker and that Geraldine Ferraro was going to be the chair of the platform committee. So I was host committee, Geraldine was platform, Mario was the keynote speaker, and then, of course, lo and behold, just a few days before the convention it was announced that Geraldine would be the candidate for vice president . . . Nothing could describe what happened on the floor of that house when she was nominated and accepted the nomination for that convention. Really in my life, there are very few things that would match when Geraldine Ferraro was nominated, and when she accepted the nomination. The response was thunderous.

  Q: The two of you were both trailblazers for women.

  Pelosi: I understood in some ways why it took so long to have a woman Speaker of the House, because this is a male-dominated institution. It always has been. But I never could really understand why it took so long to have an Italian-American Speaker of the House, because we had many great leaders in Congress from our community. And so to be both at once was quite remarkable . . . I’ve always thought I have more energy than anyone because I’m an Italian-American woman. I don’t know that I would have the drive, and the energy, and the enthusiasm, and the spirit if I were not Italian American. I really believe that.

  The peasant instinct to preserve the tastes of Italy that began with pushcarts, and then grocery stores, continues today in fifty-eight thousand square feet of space in New York’s Eataly food store.

  Over 150 years after the first immigrant journey, Italian-American culture is deeply infused into the landscape: in government, business, education, film, food, theater, television, literature, art, and sports, the contributions are countless. The immigrants’ values and traditions not only have given Americans things that we love, but remind us of what we lack.

  To look back on the Italian-American experience is to see how nineteenth-century traditions continue to influence the way we live today. The peasant instinct to preserve the tastes of Italy, for example, has been refined from the early pushcarts to fruit and produce shops to specialty stores to contemporary temples of gastronomy like Eataly, which occupies fifty-eight thousand square feet in New York City and sixty-two thousand square feet in Chicago.

  Though social workers once lectured immigrants about proper nutrition and Americans patronizingly smiled at southern Italians eating “weeds” such as dandelions, escarole, chicory, and broccoli rabe, today these bitter greens not only are served in the best restaurants but are known to contain properties that may offer protection against certain cancers. Olive oil and basement wine have turned out to be good for the heart, and the Mediterranean diet has moved from shameful food to superfood.

  In what we eat and drink, Italians have always seemed to be ahead of the curve. Missing the flavor of dark-roasted coffee, Antonio Ferrara began serving espresso and Italian pastries in a New York Little Italy café in 1892 that still bears his name. Caffe Reggio, which opened in Greenwich Village in 1927, claims to be the first in North America to have served cappuccino. It would take more than half a century for America to replace its typical watery brew with frothy cappuccinos and venti-sized lattes.

  In Greenwich Village, the café Sant Ambroeus—local dialect in Milan for the city’s patron saint, Sant’ Ambrogio—attracts today’s coffee connoisseurs with its stand-up espresso bar.

  An espresso machine from the 1940s. Italian Americans sought dark-roasted coffee since first arriving in the nineteenth century.

  Confectioner Domenico Ghirardelli introduced fine chocolates to San Francisco in 1852. The immigrant tradition of making fresh pasta and ravioli is practiced today by Mario Batali, Lidia Bastianich, Alfred Portale, Tom Colicchio, Michael Romano, Mario Carbone, and Rich Torrisi, who are among the many talented chefs creating innovative cuisines that combine Italian and Italian-American culinary traditions and rival the dishes of the best restaurants in Italy.

  Yet the current American love for all things Italian, and the desire among many to be Italian, extends deeper than this appreciation of food or wine or cozy cafés. Some of the culture’s most distinctive values—the security of family and community, the pleasure of craftsmanship, the yearning for dolce far niente (literally, the “sweetness of doing nothing”)—speak to the void left by a mechanized, productivity-obsessed way of life.

  Take the delicate fig tree, a symbol of Italian tradition forming its roots in America. Botanists say that there would be no fig trees in New York if southern Italian peasants had not brought and planted branches here, which they had carried with them in the ships’ steerage. Once the fig trees began to grow, the immigrants would tenderly wrap and blanket the roots during the long harsh winter, replanting them each year in the softened spring soil. Thus they produced one of the New World’s most delightful fruits, whose sweet, juicy bursts on the tongue reveal the small pleasures cultivated through time, patience, and effort.

  Celebrity chefs like Mario Batali have created innovative cuisines that rival the dishes of the best restaurants in Italy.

  Yet the immigrants detected early on that America didn’t share these values—if it meant losing profit. Diary entries of the first wave of immigrants reveal these sentiments and fears. “The Dollar is King in America and truly represents the life in this country,” one man wrote. Although the Italians came here to earn badly needed dollars, they were surprised at the supremacy placed on work above all else and at the lack of interest in craftsmanship. An artisan complained that while Italians sought perfection in their handiwork, the typical American response was, “Never mind your art; we want efficiency.” At the start of the twentieth century, the immigrants already anticipated the country’s long-standing affinity for fast production over the painstaking process of creation.

  Michael La Sorte, who compiled numerous diary entries into a book on the immigrant experience, noted that the early arrivers “considered American cultural priorities to be perverted. Italian culture emphasized simplicity, beauty, temperance, love of family, a spirit of economy—values that transcended the individual, and time and place. Americans were concerned with the here and now.”

  These values—of community over individual, beauty over mass production, time over profit—continue to be part of the magnetic pull that leads Americans to Italy today, in search of an attitude toward life lost between the Old World and the New. The appeal of Frances Mayes’s best-selling memoir Under the Tuscan Sun, along with its numerous sequels, and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love were all based on the premise that time spent in Italy offers renewal for a depleted spirit.

  Mayes, who lived in San Francisco, left a region in large part shaped by Italians from Tuscany for a more authentic Tuscan experience. Recovering from divorce, she suggested that happiness and a back-to-basics approach to life were deeply intertwined: restoring an old farmhouse with one’s hands, planting in cycle with the seasons, mingling with locals, cooking with garden-grown ingredients. After the success of Mayes’s books, American real estate companies began scooping up thousands of acres in Tuscany to build and renovate homes that offer the benefits of this slower, simpler life. Today, purchasing a time-share in a farmhouse restored by one of these American companies can cost a million dollars for a three-week annual stay.

  To walk through villages in southern Italy today, meeting local artisans and hearing their stories, is to listen to echoes of the early immigrants’ diary musings. When an American businessman, for example, tried to persuade an artist to mass-produce his beautiful hand-painted ceramics to sell in Target, he briefly considered the highly profitable offer but ultimately refused. Craftsmanship had shaped his pride and sense of purpose in life and he wasn’t going to risk the reputation of his product to the flaws of assembly line production. “We live in a nice house. We have a nice life. How much money do we need?” he concluded.

>   The timeless values of Italian culture that the early immigrants found lacking here—community over individual, beauty over mass production, time over profit—still attract Americans to

  Italy today.

  A greengrocer from the same town expressed confusion at an American’s annoyance that his shop didn’t stock seedless grapes. “But there is no such thing as a seedless grape!” he emphatically declared. He had been in the grocery business for thirty-five years, yet was unaware that fruit is often genetically modified to fit consumers’ needs.

  Handcrafted work over mass production, seasonal harvests over genetic modification. Italians characteristically prefer the relationship of hand to object, seed to soil. They do not like to tamper with the essential nature of things—the modern-day quest to manipulate life’s rhythm to fit our ever-changing and unquenchable desires.

  But the immigrants came to a land defined by such tampering—this restless search for the new on a vast untried canvas. Each generation fearless enough to pull up roots to heed this call to adventure has absorbed the competing ideals of harboring tradition and embracing change. The alliance has not always been easy, but at its best it created dreamers who combined Italy’s eternal values with America’s boundless imagination—people with the equanimity to build a supportive neighborhood and business community that gained national attention for staving off heart disease; the innovation to restore San Francisco after its colossal earthquake, teach a population of poor people how to save money, and create the largest bank in the world; the courage to tell workers that they’re not machines, but humans with dignity who deserve roses as well as daily bread; the humbleness of faith to bow to life’s mystery; the passion to reimagine a beleaguered New York City as a gleaming metropolis; the artfulness to redefine music and film; the talent and dedication to become public servants at the highest levels of the land—all of these men and women re-creating the past and imagining the future, contributing to the palimpsest of ideas, dreams, and visions written onto the American landscape.

  Today it’s hard to imagine that the twentieth century began with austere and venerated Americans pronouncing southern Italians as nothing but trouble. Or, considering the wide-ranging artistic achievement of Italian Americans, to look back to those darker days when a sociologist prophesied with italicized emphasis that the south of Italy was, and would always be, “utterly sterile as creators of beauty.” Creators of beauty define the way America sees the many Italian Americans of southern descent who became its most beloved actors, filmmakers, singers, composers, writers, architects, chefs, and designers.

  In fashion, southern Italians created a style that reflected elements of their ancestral roots, and these choices, at first considered brash and in bad taste, eventually redefined contemporary haute couture. Designer Gianni Versace, who lived in Italy and America, flamboyantly putting his stamp on fashion here, adopted the sunburst colors of the Mediterranean for his palette. Versace’s wildly ornate designs often appropriated Greek and Roman influences from his homeland of Reggio di Calabria. His choices defiantly contrasted the subdued earth tones of his chief rival, Giorgio Armani, who was born outside of Milan. While Armani clothes reflected the casual elegance of the north of Italy, a Versace wardrobe, worn by cultural icons as varied as Madonna and Princess Diana, heralded the exuberance of the south.

  In the visual arts, Massimiliano Gioni became, in 2013, the youngest artistic director in the 118-year history of the Venice Biennale, the most prestigious art exhibition in the world. Gioni grew up outside of Milan and lives in New York with his Milanese wife, who is also a curator; they represent the latest wave of first-generation Italians, well-educated men and women who seek America’s vibrant multiculturalism. For the Biennale, Gioni, then thirty-nine, chose to showcase the Encyclopedic Palace of the World, the work of an Italian-American auto mechanic and self-taught Pennsylvania artist named Marino Auriti. By making Auriti’s work the theme of the exhibition, Gioni embraced the idea of this outsider artist in order to charge the imagination of the world’s leading artists.

  In the 1950s, Auriti built in his backyard the Encyclopedic Palace of the World, an eleven-foot-tall architectural model made of wood, brass, plastic, and celluloid to showcase his dream: a 136-story skyscraper museum that would contain all the world’s knowledge “from the wheel to the satellite.” Auriti imagined that the building and its surrounding piazza would encompass sixteen blocks in Washington, DC.

  His eccentric vision, long before the Internet, of amassing and showcasing the world’s knowledge would have remained in storage if his family hadn’t taken up its cause. His granddaughter B. G. Firmani explored the American Folk Art Museum but initially thought that its objects of pure Americana—weather vanes, quilts, and Shaker wood—portended an unlikely fit for her grandfather’s baroque vision. But hanging on a wall was Iceman Crucified #3, by Ralph Fasanella, the self-taught Italian-American painter whose bright colors and thick brush strokes depicted the ethnic group’s struggles and icons. The painting portrayed Fasanella’s father, who was an iceman, crucified on a giant block of ice. “I felt such a mixture of grief and hope,” wrote Firmani, “that I burst into tears. And then I thought: this is the place!”

  The self-taught Italian-American painter Ralph Fasanella depicted the ethnic group’s struggles. In Iceman Crucified #3 (1956), Fasanella’s father, who was an iceman, is crucified on a block of ice.

  The American Folk Art Museum first displayed Auriti’s Encyclopedic Palace of the World in 2004; in 2012 it became the centerpiece of a new exhibition and soon after led the Biennale. In Venice, the Encyclopedic Palace, standing in the opening gallery of the cavernous exhibition space, welcomed nearly half a million people who visited the six-month-long art event. The model, with four entrance points, greeted its visitors in English, Italian, French, and Spanish; Auriti printed above its Doric columns aphorisms for how to live ethically:

  The theme for the 2013 Venice Biennale, the international art world’s most prestigious exhibition, was the Encyclopedic Palace of the World, the work of an Italian-American auto mechanic and self-taught artist, Marino Auriti.

  WATCH THAT YOU DON’T BECOME GREEDY WITH YOUR PROFITS.

  THE LESS YOU DESIRE, THE GREATER YOUR HAPPINESS.

  SURROUND YOURSELF WITH HONEST FRIENDS AND LIVE LONG AND HAPPILY.

  LIVE BY YOUR WORK.

  These sentiments, deeply Italian in spirit, mirror the egalitarian credo that guided the settlers of Roseto, Pennsylvania, in the late nineteenth century and the many others who followed. Auriti, born in 1891, a decade after the first eight men from Roseto Valfortore made the New World their home, set forth on an immigrant journey that echoed the struggles of millions of Italian Americans caught in the tumult of history. After Auriti published satirical anti-Fascist poems in a local paper in the 1920s, Fascist goons force-fed him castor oil and took over his home. His wife was born in America, but her family, among the early “birds of passage” who had returned to Italy, could not reenter the country, because of the restrictive 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, nor could Auriti secure a legal emigration. By going first to Brazil, Auriti and his wife eventually found their way to America.

  Above the columns of his Encyclopedic Palace, Marino Auriti printed aphorisms about how to live ethically.

  At the time Auriti designed his Encyclopedic Palace, he had retired as an auto mechanic, yet he still possessed a dream particular to the immigrant experience: he was audacious and bold enough to imagine synthesizing and sharing the world’s knowledge. The amateur craftsman would never live to see streams of international artists paying homage to his vision, but years after his death, Auriti’s daughter had a dream in which her father stood one more time in his backyard, the place where he loved to tinker with oversized ideas. He was holding “a tiny, living tree with its root ball intact” and offering the words that every child who has lost a beloved parent wants to hear: Io vivo (“I live”).

  The roots planted by immigrants in a once inhospitabl
e New World soil are not only intact but thriving. Each subsequent generation, preserving and passing along pieces of Italian-American culture that fed and sustained them, continues to strengthen the stem and nourish the branches. Noi viviamo. We live.

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  The Italian Americans: A History draws on the scholarly and popular works, along with thousands of pages of transcript interviews, of the people who participated in the PBS documentary series. This book is the product of the rich histories composed by academics, journalists, biographers, and cultural historians and told by generations of Italian Americans, including distinguished jurists and government officials; San Francisco fishermen; residents of Roseto, New Orleans, and Little Italies across the country; World War II veterans; and descendants of the documentary’s subjects. We urge readers to explore the extensive bibliography to delve deeper into the history and complex identity of the ethnic group.

  In addition, I would like to credit the books that guided my thinking during the course of writing The Italian Americans: A History.

  Introduction

  In the Introduction, the discussion of the hero’s journey is from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The material on Roseto, Pennsylvania, in “Cent’ Anni!” is drawn from the work of John Bruhn and Stewart Wolf, who conducted the community health study and wrote The Roseto Story and The Power of Clan. In addition, Italian anthropologist Carla Bianco’s The Two Rosetos compared life in Roseto, Pennsylvania, to the original Italian ancestral village Roseto Valfortore.