Around 1880 the Italian immigration to North America—which up to that point had grown at a relatively modest, if constant, rate¹—sharply increased. A human flood, mostly from the south of Italy but also from the north-central region (most typically, Lucchesia), started inundating the United States. Villages and small towns from the rural districts of the Apennines, Abruzzo, Calabria, and Sicily gradually emptied out. The numbers are impressive: about 5 million Italians had departed in the course of roughly forty years, until in the early 1920s the United States promulgated more restrictive immigration laws. From the beginning the rate...

Carlo Barsotti was the torment and delight of a host of polemical editors, who accused him of every kind of nefariousness, among other things, of having made money managing suspicious small hotels and of having cheated the trustees of Little Italy, resulting in the bankruptcy (1897) of their bank. Yet, despite troubled private affairs and passionate colonial¹ diatribes, Carlo Barsotti (whose name will recur often in this book) was the found er of the dailyIl Progresso Italo-Americano, which among the Italian American newspapers in New York was the most long-lived and widely circulated. In 1928, the newspaper passed to...

The testimony of Ferdinando Fontana, who in 1881–82, with his colleague Dario Papa, made a journey through the United States from New York to San Francisco, offers firsthand documentation of the epoch of the great Italian emigration. Above all, it strongly presents the way the phenomenon of America was perceived in Italy. Still permeated with the spirit of the Risorgimento and therefore with nationalistic pride, the Italians viewed America with a mixture of surprise, frustration, and disdain, though in their country the great social questions had also come to the fore. In respect to these, however, Fontana was very...

Luigi Roversi, who took a degree in law in Italy, was a lawyer and doctor of letters. He was a correspondent of theGazzettaof Turin, ofL’Italia del Popolo(The Italy of the People), and ofIl Risorgimento(The Awakening); he also wrote literary pieces forLa Patria(The Fatherland) of Bologna, submitting short stories and poems to the press. Through maternal descent, he was the nephew of Paolo Bovi Campeggi, an associate of Garibaldi’s in New York.

Roversi emigrated to America and became subeditor ofIl Progresso Italo-Americanoand ofL’Araldo Italiano(The Italian Herald). He was a...

Between 1902 and 1906, the weeklyThe Independent, directed by Hamilton Holt, published seventy-five autobiographies of ordinary people, mostly immigrants and anonymous workers in the most modest ranks—miners, cooks, washer-women, drivers, and so forth. The issue of December 4, 1902, published “The Biography of a Bootblack,” signed by one R. Corresca, The text reveals that the name was purely conventional. No further data of identification are available, aside from those furnished by the text.

A brief introductory note clarified that autobiographical information was presented to the reader. It reads:

The story of Rocco Corresca is presented almost as he...

Gaetano Conte was sent to school in Naples by his father, and in that city Gaetano came to know the Dutch count and missionary Oswald Papengouth. He converted to Protestantism. Because of this, his father Luigi put him out of the house, and Gaetano managed to earn a living working as aprecettore(tutor). In 1882, he entered the Opera Metodista Episcopale, which was directed at that time by the American Leroy M. Vernon. The first place he was sent was the little town of Venosa in Basilicata, then to Naples (where he came in contact with Freemasonry), and then...

Gino Carlo Speranza, was the son of Carlo Leonardo, who emigrated to America with his wife in 1868 and became a professor at Yale and Columbia. After the age of twelve, Speranza spent nine years in his parents’ birthplace, Verona, and then returned to America in 1895, where he completed his studies and undertook a legal career. From 1897, he was the legal advisor to the Italian Consulate in New York and a member of the Emigration Commission of the State of New York. As corresponding secretary of the Society for the Protection of Italian Immigrants, Speranza learned that native...

Alberto Pecorini was a journalist, one “of those misfits: adventurers, people of talent—now exploited, now blackmailers, eccentric and excited, now subversive, now nationalists, sometimes anarchists, sometimes semi-scholars, other times bankrupt; always ready to fight with the pen and perhaps with punches in defense of their ideals and of their persons, and attack the ideals and persons of others, in a tone rising many octaves above the level of their financial means and of the circulation of their periodicals” (Prezzolini). In New York, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Pecorini directed the newspaperIl Cittadino(The Citizen), which, after...

Between 1907 and the autumn of 1916, Alberto Tarchiani, one of the most esteemed among the exiles in the 1930s and 1940s, carried out his first profitable journalistic experience in New York, directing the weeklyIl Cittadino(The Citizen). Administered by businessman Joseph Personeni and of modest means, though of a much higher quality than the average colonial newspaper,Il Cittadinopublished stories in series, such as Gogol’s “Taras Bulba,” and did not hesitate to enter into debate with theProgressoof Carlo Barsotti. It distinguished itself during the First World War for its democratic interventionism, which, among other things,...

The son of immigrant parents who came to Brooklyn, New York, when he was a baby, Alphonse Capone is the most famous gangster in American history. From childhood, he was in the ranks of organized crime, in Brooklyn and at the “Five Points” in Lower Manhattan, profiting in the field while he was working as a barman for the criminal Frankie Yale. Bearing a disfigurement on his face, he was nicknamed “Scarface.” When the atmosphere in New York became troublesome, Yale sent him to Chicago, where he arrived in 1919, with his Irish wife, whom he had married a year...

On September 29, 1880, the first issue of a new daily was published in New York. The founders were Vincenzo Polidori and Carlo Barsotti, a native of Lucca who emigrated to the United States in the early 1870s. After serving (among other things) as “foreman for a number of railroad jobs which employed many Italian workers,” Barsotti made his fortune first as a banker and then as a printer and owner of a small chain of cheap boarding houses,¹ which he called hotels but his many detractors would continue to define as brothels. The new newspaper was calledIl Progresso...

Luigi Donato Ventura arrived in New York between 1879 and 1880, very probably from France—given that in his pocket he had five hundred francs, as he narrates inPeppino. Some years later, he was offered a teaching position in Italian, at Sauveur Summer College of Modern Languages in Burlington, Vermont. Thanks to the encouragement of Lambert Sauveur, president of the institute, in New York, in French, he published the narrativePeppino, which was then featured in a series ofcontes choisis(selected stories) for the school. The year after, in Boston, he publishedMisfits and Remnants, a collection of...

Descended from a notable family of musicians, Fanny Vanzi-Mussini was bred in a circle of people with international connections and culture. She was one of five children (four girls and one boy) of the famous painter Cesare Mussini and his wife, the Prussian aristocrat Elisa von Blesson. In 1879, she married the journalist Leonetto Vanzi, and they had seven children. In 1895, the family moved to America, and in San Francisco both Fanny and Leonetto—who were to go back several times to Italy and then return to California—were engaged in the milieu of Ettore Patrizi, the editor of...

After high school, which was interrupted by his father’s death, and after being employed by the post office, Adolfo Rossi published inBacchiglione, a journal in Padua, a novel “on the condition of young elementary schoolmistresses.” Rossi’s fellow-citizen Alberto Mario aided him in publishing some novellas in theVita Nuova(Milan) of Arcangelo Ghisleri. One of those novellas,Lo zingaro(The Gypsy) was published in the appendix of the first issue of theIl Progresso Italo-Americanoon December 13, 1880. After founding a bimonthly of family readings entitledIl Grillo del focolare(The Cricket in the Fireplace) in 1879, Rossi...

In Italy, Professor Giuseppe Antonio Cadicamo, of whom very little is known, published poetry in a series of pamphlets dedicated to patriotic Italian themes. Poems center on the defense of the betrayed workers in Marsah, Libya, and Marseilles; other poems center on the Balkans, in the vein of anti-Islamic irredentism. Among these is “Davvero è morta? Ode patriottica” (1877), relating to Albania and its early roots. In this last pamphlet, among other things, “a Bosnian novella in five cantos,” is announced, entitledZulica di Costainitza. However, it was not published.

The ninth of fourteen children of a notable Arbresh (Italian-Albanian)...

Little is known of Edoardo Michelangeli, who was born in Rome around 1860. In 1877, he published a booklet entitledS. Fridolino confessore, protettore e titolare dei Cantoni svizzeri Glarus e San Gallo, ricavata dal testo di San Notkero, tradotta e annotata da Edoardo Michelangeli alunno del collegio francese, diretto dai Fratelli delle Scuole Cristiane in Roma(Rome: Tipografi a Guerra e Mirri). This indicates that his education was of a certain rank, and that he studied with the Jesuits. Another small work he published, also on a clerical subject, wasThe Thirteen Pope Leos: Historical(Rome: Tipografia Forense, 1878)....

Bernardino Ciambelli is a central figure in the colonial culture between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A very prolific author, active until the end of the 1920s, Ciambelli was born in Lucca or in the province of Lucca (perhaps at Bagni). He settled in the United States in about 1888. Ten years later, after an experience on the editorial staff ofCristoforo Colombo, he was summoned by Francesco Frugone to direct theBollettino della guerra ispano-americana(Bulletin of the Spanish American War), soon renamedBollettino della Sera(Evening Bulletin), a daily.

From this moment on, he contributed extensively to many...

Camillo Cianfarra was probably born in Lama dei Peligni (Abruzzi) in 1879; the Ellis Island database has a notice of a certain “Cauillo Cianfarra” arriving in 1894 at the age of fifteen. He died in Rome on August 14, 1925, “from heart failure and complications resulting from his arrest and torture by the Fascisti” (Chicago Tribune, August 15, 1925). After serving in the diplomatic corps in New York and (probably) Washington, where he also “investigated numerous cases of Sicilian murderers who were given opportunities to go to America instead of having to serve in Italian jails” (ibid.), he went back...

Thomas Fragale’s bookPoesie(Poems) was published in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1929, which, according to Ferdinando Alfonsi, is the same year the author died. From Serrastretta, his hometown, to which he dedicates a poem, Fragale emigrated to America in 1892. Diverse compositions dated to the 1890s were composed in Hammonton, New Jersey, where he was pastor of the Presbyterian Church until 1900. Later poems, dating from the first years of the new century, were composed in Pittsburgh, the city in which Fragale was remembered by Gaetano Conte as a Protestant missionary, active in an Italian and English school, a...

Antonio Calitri studied to be a priest and dressed in a cassock; then he cast it off and emigrated to New York in 1900. He had taken his degree in letters at the University of Naples, and in America he was an Italian teacher in various public schools. Among other things, he wrote short plays for use in schools. He contributed to theAraldo Italiano, and in 1909, he published, among other poems, “La canzone dell’Hudson River,” composed on the occasion “of the memorable festivals of Hudson and Verrazzano.” Then in 1925, a collection of his poems,Canti del Nord-America,...

Witty annotator of Italian American newspapers while working as a bank functionary, Angelo Rosati was essentially a satiric poet, often appearing in theFollia of New York. Emigrating to the United States in 1901, an American citizen after 1911, and the father of nine children, Rosati settled in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Some of the poems contained inParole, parole, parole … !(Words, Words, Words … !), his only known collection, published in 1925, date to Rosati’s years in Scranton. The collection also contains older components, as, for example, a poem on the death of Giosuè Carducci. Rosati also wrote a...

Calicchiu Pucciu’s real name was Calogero Puccio. A sculptor and carver, Puccio had a studio in Brooklyn. He was also a dialect poet and began to publish verses inLa Follia of New Yorkin 1906. In America, appointed to a special committee, he sculpted the wooden panels of the principal altar of the parish of Santa Margherita, in Sicily. He was then sent to Sicily to mount the work and was caught up in the war. He went to the front, then came back to America, then, in 1920, returned to his hometown to complete the work he had...

Paolo Pallavicini’s four-act dramaLa figlia di Nennè(Nennè’s Daughter, 1914) was perhaps his first published work under the name Pallavicini-Pirovano. Born, according to Ario Flamma, in Turin, and according to Giovanni E. Schiavo in Milan, Pallavicini arrived in New York in 1908. Here, he founded and directed various newspapers and was editor and/or contributor to theProgresso Italo-Americano, to theGiornale Italiano, and then to theCorriere d’America. In 1920, the engineer Patrizi asked him to come to San Francisco to direct the dailyL’Italia, which he did for some fifteen years.

A very prolific author, a figure in...

Ettore A. Moffa, who adopted the pseudonym of Italo Stanco, and, on other occasions, that of J. Cansado (stancois Italian and cansado Spanish for “tired”), undertook his first freelance activity in Naples, then in Florence. In 1907, he emigrated to Argentina, where he worked for theGiornale d’Italia e dell’America del Sud(Journal of Italy and South America). In 1909, he was in the United States. On July 23, Riccardo Cordiferro presented him at the Beraglia Hall, in New York, with the following words: “Still an adolescent, he began to contribute to the literary newspapers of Naples, revealing himself...

On October 2, 1912, a pharmacist in the Bronx, Vito Pittaro, received a threatening letter from a criminal organization that designated itself “The Iron Hand.” The letter demanded a good sum of money in exchange for the possibility of his continuing his business tranquilly. Pittaro, whose shop was the place for the gathering of a small crowd of Italians in the neighborhood, confided in some of them, drawing diverse impressions and reactions. Immediately, they created two factions: the first was decidedly in favor of telling all to the police and asking for protection; the second was oriented instead toward a...

Eugenio Camillo Branchi was a journalist, a contributor to theCorriere della Sera, for which he went on a mission to the military operations in Tripolitania, but he was expelled in 1912, for entering prohibited territory without authorization. Shortly before the war he attempted a journey around the world, which he interrupted in Lima, Peru, because he had contracted a tropical disease and because of the looming conflict in Europe. At the beginning of 1915, he was a second in a duel for the anarchist lawyer Merlino, who had challenged the then-director of the Popolod’Italia, Benito Mussolini. Branchi told...

Agostino De Biasi’s reviewIl Carroccio, first nationalistic, then openly Fascist, constituted an important literary venue for the colony. This periodical, which published well-known Italian and American writers, early opened its pages to numerous aspiring Italian American writers working in English or Italian. Writings of Silvio Villa, Louis Forgione, Pascal D’Angelo—among the first Italian American writers definitely choosing the English language—appeared in theCarrocciowith a certain regularity. But besides these authors, there were more numerous writers in Italian, among whom, notably, a handful of women writers, who, however, were not included in the important anthology,The Dream...

As stated in the preceding introduction, Agostino De Biasi’s reviewIl Carroccioconstituted an important literary venue for Italians in America. Caterina Maria Avella, of New York, was a regular contributor, but not much is known about her, save that she was the author of the novellasLa “Flapper”(August 1923) andPatsy e Patricia(June 1924).

Like Colonna, Avella probes middle-class interiors, ambiances, and customs; they depict a style of life no longer tied to the Italian tradition. And if inLe due amicheColonna treats of the old theme of the drama of emigration in a new style,...

The simple poetry of Severina Magni (whose surname is that of her husband Gianni) is clearly removed from that of all the other authors included in this section, not only by virtue of her notable aesthetic value but also and above all because she chooses an expressive line, new and different in respect to the dominant classical, restrained style of Carducci and Stecchetti that weighs upon most of the colonial poets. The vein of Severina appears very delicately crepuscular—that is, belonging to a sort of late de cadent style—and in the best moments, it would be tempting to...

Antonio Marinoni, destined to become professor of languages at the University of Arkansas, is included in this anthology by virtue of a lively book of memories entitledCome ho“fatto”l’America(How I “Made” America), published in Milan in 1932, which has a certain interest because of the notably extraordinary character of the author’s personal experience. The book relates that his father had already emigrated to America when Antonio was a baby. Marinoni recounts, in fact, that when he was nine years old, his mother took him to Brazil in search of his father. Later, his father apparently moved to...

Gente lontana(People Far Away), the novel that Corrado Altavilla published in Milan in 1938, is a curious, very captivating mixture of narrative voices. Above all, the novel is a “giallo” (detective story), in fact, what Americans call a police procedural, a narration that has its moment of greatest tension in the trial phase. At the same time, it is also a metropolitan novel, whose best pages are those dedicated to the description of New York: its mythic underworlds, its affluent sections, and the Babel of people who live there, strongly typified. Although characterized by a rapid pace, a nervousness,...

“Mandolin players on clear nights filled the salt air with soulful strumming of old folk tunes.”¹ With this quietly touching and melancholic image, a novelist of the 1930s portrays a group of emigrants on the deck of theConte Bertoldi, an imaginary transoceanic steamship that is taking them to America. Could one speak of Italians without mentioning music? No, not since the days of Dapontian opera; indeed, even earlier. Since the eighteenth century, music, along with the broader range of staged spectacles, from prestidigitation and pyrotechnics to acrobatics and various other circus performances, puppet theater, and experiments with mediums,² was...

The Neapolitan Francesco Ricciardi, “prince of the pulcinellos,” head of a “Neapolitan Company of New York,” was among the leading figures on the scene in Little Italy, specializing in the production of comedies, farces, and other shows in dialect. Already active in 1889 as an amateur (he was a glove maker), in the new century he assumed a more decisively professional position, including as director of the theater Villa Vittorio Emanuele III, on Mulberry Street. More than sixty years later, Rocco De Russo, one of the most acclaimed Italian American caricaturists, would remember him in this capacity. In his still...

The name of Riccardo Cordiferro, a pseudonym for Alessandro Sisca, is tied to that of theFollia(Folly)of New York. In January 1893, not quite eighteen, Cordiferro was one of its founders, together with his father, Francesco (1839–1928), who was also a poet, and with his brother Marziale.

The Siscas moved from Calabria to Naples, following the head of the family, a functionary of the prefecture. In 1886, Alessandro entered the Seminary of San Raffaele, in Materdei, and it could be that this brief experience was instrumental in forming his successive anticlerical choices. But the Neapolitan sojourn might...

Emelise Aleandri is the first scholar to attempt to organize the imposing legacy of Eduardo Migliaccio, the famous “Farfariello,” without doubt the most popular figure in the Italian American theater at the beginning of the twentieth century. Thanks to Aleandri, there is emerging a systematic arrangement of manuscripts made up of scores, newspaper articles, loose sheets, and pamphlets, but no books or collected works. Among the difficulties of construing Migliaccio’s legacy is a scholar’s imperfect knowledge of the Neapolitan dialect and the varying theatrical texts, continually modified, lengthened, or shortened, according to the exigencies of the interpreters and the taste...

In the period in which Migliaccio appeared at the Caffè Ronca, relates Cautela, Tony Ferrazzano presented himself to him, pleading with Migliaccio to take a look at Ferrazzano’s writings, and Migliaccio obliged him. Despite noticing many errors, Migliaccio recognized Ferrazzano’s talent and encouraged him. In this way, a very fertile collaboration was born, producing some of Farfariello’s best caricatures, among themIl cafone patrioto(The Patriotic Bumpkin);Lu cafone che ragiona(The Thinker Bumpkin);La lengua ’talian(The Italian Language); and’O sunatore ’e flauto(The Flute Player). Generally, the loose sheets of text stated “Versi di T. Ferrazzano” (Verses...

Nofrio La Fardazzi, figghiu di don Saullu e niputi di Cuticchiuneddu,the comic masque (in Sicilian dialect) invented by Giovanni De Rosalia on the Italian American vaudeville scene, is the equal of Migliaccio’s “Farfariello” for ingeniousness, popularity, and success. Nofrio was the type of newly rich immigrant, proud of achieved prosperity and the many status symbols that surrounded him, and at the same time uncomfortable in his close contact with the objects of that bourgeois respectability because of his bottomless ignorance. A stupid fool, nonetheless, he gave substantial proof that he was not devoid of peasant cunning.

De Rosalia, who...

Armando Cennerazzo, an actor and author of theater, poetry, songs, and Neapolitan caricatures, arrived in America at twelve years old. Self-taught, he collaborated with Francesco Ricciardi, performing duets and Neapolitan songs. Ario Flamma maintains that he performed with Maldacea and Mimì Aguglia. Franco Scozio remembers one of Cennerazzo’s cinematic experiences, in which he performed with Marion Davies. They were engaged by the Vitagraph Company, with studios in Fort Lee. Already celebrated, Scozio adds that Cennerazzo entered theater later in his life. Aleandri relates that he worked at the Coccè Press, the printing house founded in 1922, by Adamo and Attilio...

For the Italian American colony of New York, the fresh Roman vein of Gino Calza, author of witty sonnets in dialect, was a meteor that expressed itself for a few years in theFollia di New York. He was an esteemed columnist whose signature was “Poco de Bono,” writing theSchizzi romaneschi(Roman Sketches), which, together with theMacchiette napoletane (Neapolitan Portraits)of Sandro (Riccardo Cordiferro) and theScene siciliane(Sicilian Scenes) of Giovanni De Rosalia, constituted one of the most popular parts of the newspaper. Besides his rubric, Calza also presented poems to the reader, which he signed with...

The poetic endowments of Michele Pane, writes Pier Paolo Pasolini,

exceed that of his contemporaries. [He] portrayed his birthplace in the tender, poetic style of Giovanni Pascoli and within the traditions of an effortless romanticism (the Byronic, romantic scenery of English landscapes of the first half of the nineteenth century, which is among the most perfect images of nature in Italy)…. [He] does not succeed in transcending that theme. His poetry conveys an authentic nostalgia, which motivates his description, assuming that when he was young, he went to America to settle there, only to regret his quiet Calabria. Even, perhaps...

In 1902, Achille Almerini took his degree in medicine in Turin, and in 1907, he emigrated to America and established himself in New York, opening an office for ear, nose, and throat diseases, frequented mostly by Italian clients. A volunteer in the Italian military during the First World War, he was stationed at the front as a medical army officer and later was nominated supervisor of the health office. Returning to America, he married and had one son, whom he named Achille. Before the Second World War, he returned to Italy for reasons of health. (According to Prezzolini, “He left...

In 1927, in Philadelphia,Il Presidente Scoppetta; ovvero, La Società della Madonna della Pace dalla sua fondazione al suo scioglimento(President Scoppetta, or, The Society of the Madonna of Peace from Its Foundation to Its Dissolution) was published. It was described as a “satirical-burlesquebozzetto[a short novel on themes of daily life] on Italian-American customs, in Italian prose, and … ‘scoppettiana’ [adventures of President Scoppetta], written to entertain all and offend no one, by Professor Pasquale Seneca.” In addition, it was illustrated by the pleasing drawings of Alfredo Melina. Seneca, an instructor in Romance languages at Lafayette College, Temple...

Taking his degree in economics, freelance journalist Vincenzo Campora moved to New York in 1914 and the following year initiated the publication of the monthlyColumbus. Signing himself at times as “The Man in the Street,” Campora would allude to the need for the common sense that animated his journalistic work. For the rest,Columbusproposed to contribute to “a major reciprocation of comprehension between Italians and Americans,” supporting “the diffusion of the knowledge of Dante and of his language among the Americans.” He wanted to “encourage economic relations” as well.

Richly illustrated, even in its modest number of pages—...

A collection ofsonettiand Roman poems published in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1948, along with another sonnet sequence in Roman dialect,Cani der core(Songs of the Heart), constitutes the work of Alfredo Borgianini, who was Roman, or, in any case, from the region of Lazio. The two sonnets published here, composed by the author to publicize his business, were printed in 1935 byLa Sampogna, edited by Filippo Fichera. They had appeared earlier in theNuova Capitale, the newspaper of the Italian colony of Trenton, the capital of New Jersey. In Rome, Borgianini had studied, possibly, engineering at...

By 1923, Rodolfo Valentino had been in America for ten years, and he was at the apex of his fame. It is said that at that time, the congressman Fiorello La Guardia had the famed actor’s photograph in his office, and not that of the president of the United States. In that year, in New York, Valentino published a small volume of poems,Day Dreams, which by now has become a bibliographical rarity. The quality of the compositions is very disputable; the language, inadvertently comical in effect, summons to mind that of the aspiring writer Arturo Bandini, in John Fante’s...

Among the colonial dramatists, the Florentine Silvio Picchianti explored the whole gamut of popular themes, preferring plots about exiled families, middle-class interiors, and stories of love and adultery; but he did not omit the patriotic and social muse, nor musical comedy and poetry. In fact, before emigrating at the very beginning of the twentieth century, after having read the odeIn Morte di Umberto I(On the Death of Umberto I) in the National Arena of Florence, in January 1901, he dedicated himself to the musical theater. In America, he wrote, among others, a melodrama in four acts,Varvara, set...

All that is known of Ario Flamma is drawn from a not quite authentic biography, reconstructed below, aided by notes which are hardly reliable, given the commercial sources of the publications: notices in someWho’s Who, and even less reliable, supplied by the author himself in his publications. In any case, a typical self-portrait of an aspiring Italian American writer emerges, possessed of unrealizable ambitions, and a bit of a boaster. Yet Flamma gained a curious preeminence for having pioneered attempts to draw middle-class themes onto the popular stage of Little Italy (though he also boasted of improbable successes on...

The anarchist movement constituted what Nunzio Pernicone has very appropriately defined as a “unique subculture.”¹ In his view, the behavior of the anarchists should be seen in a much broader context than a strictly political one. Rather, it amounts to a complex, variegated lifestyle, a system of values that deeply marked an epoch in America. The years Pernicone is referring to run from the last decade of the nineteenth century to the aftermath of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial (1927). In these years, Italian American anarchists were able to forge their own political line, perhaps more “conservative” than the parallel...

After 1890, Giuseppe Ciancabilla created the position of socialist propagandist and editor ofAvanti!In 1897, he volunteered for the Greco-Turkish war, sending correspondence from the front, an experience that inspired the novellaVerso la morte(Toward Death) and marked his turn toward pacifism, which translated into an adhesion to the anarchism of Errico Malatesta. He was exiled in Switzerland, where in Neuchâtel he founded the newspaperL’agitatore; subsequently, he was expelled from Switzerland for having defended Luigi Luccheni, the anarchist who assassinated the Austrian Empress Elisabetta. He then exiled himself to Belgium and France, where he encountered Jean Grave’s...

The two short poetic texts that follow were absolutely among the most popular in the Italian American colony during the first years of the twentieth century. Both circulated under the name of a mysterious “Rosina Vieni,” behind which was concealed Doctor Simplicio Righi, a physician very well known in the Italian colony of New York, who in 1901, for a brief period, was the director of the socialist newspaperIl Proletario. The first poem, in particular, had an extensive circulation. It was printed in a large number of newspapers and even merited the attention of H. L. Mencken, who included...

Exiled from Italy, France, and Switzerland, then imprisoned for five years in Pantelleria, from which he succeeded in escaping in 1900, and then taking refuge in Egypt and London, Luigi Galleani arrived in New York in 1901, at forty years old. He established himself in Paterson, New Jersey, assuming the direction of theQuestione Sociale, and started an intense activity of propaganda and agitation, whose first serious test was the strike of the silk manufacturers of Paterson, in 1902. Wounded in an encounter with the police, he was accused of subversion. He escaped to Canada, then returned clandestinely into the...

Attending technical schools in Sulmona and Rome, Umberto Postiglione graduated in 1910 in L’Aquila as an accountant, and in October of that same year, after having participated in student irredentist demonstrations, he embarked at Le Havre for America. From New York, he moved to Chicago, where he was employed in a bank, on the editorial staff of newspapers, as a librarian, an accountant, a clerk, a worker in chemical factories, in factories making musical instruments, in glassworks, and in foundries, besides as a miner and excavator. In the United States, his humanitarian ideals found an outlet in frequenting anarchist circles....

From a dispatch sent out by the New York Italian consulate in November 1905 we learn that Ludovico M. Caminita was active in the anarchic circles of Barre, Vermont. In this period, he published the dramatic novella,L’idea cammina(The Idea Travels), with a preface by Raimondo Fazio. Warned that he was being investigated by the police of Palermo, Caminita wrote a vibrantly intense letter to the police headquarters, published here. The letter contained news in regard to him, in particular, clarifying the equivocation of his name. He is in reality Michele Caminita. Ludovico was his brother, who failed to...

A “lover of novelty,” Giuseppe Bertelli enlisted in the French Foreign Legion in Algiers in 1887, but a year later he deserted and entered the Italian Royal Army as a volunteer. Accused of theft, he was demoted from the rank of sergeant, put on trial in Naples, and acquitted. He was discharged in 1893 and returned to Empoli, where he joined the PSI (Partito Socialista Italiano) and editedIl Pioniere(The Pioneer). In 1900, he participated in the sixth socialist congress of Rome, then editedIl Lavoratore(The Worker) in Trieste andIl Secolo Nuovo(The New Century) in Venice....

“For eighteen years, I have fought at your side in a whirling alternation of enthusiasms, of dejections, of warlike episodes, and I would not exchange these eighteen years for any other period in my life.” Thus, in July 1921, Alberico Molinari, departing for Italy, took his leave of the columns of theAvanti!of Chicago, and from his socialist companions. In Italy—or better, in Turin, where he would establish himself in 1923—many difficult times were anticipated. Meanwhile, in the harsh struggles in the socialist battlefield, Molinari vigorously supported the Second International in contrast to the communistic direction of...

A complex intellectual figure, perennially astride two worlds, Giovannitti is one of the rarest cases of an Italian American writer who, despite the extraordinary reception accorded him within the American culture, strictly speaking, did not ever abandon the ambiance of the Italian community. His case, similar to that of Emanuel Carnevali, in reality differs exactly because the latter, a full member of the circle of American poets, had no rapport, in practice, with Italian American poets, though he did have one with Italian poets. Giovannitti was an ethnic mediator; his companions of the various socialist locals were close to him,...

Miner, poet, and revolutionary syndicalist publisher Efrem Bartoletti emigrated to America in 1909. He worked in the mines of the Iron Range and fought in the Western Federation of Miners. In 1919, he went back to Italy and became mayor of his hometown, but then abandoned the responsibility, together with all the communal socialistic administration, to avoid the continual violence of the Fascists.

Bartoletti’s “heroic” season coincided with the epoch of the great strikes of the IWW—first of all, in 1916, those of the miners of the Mesabi Range, about which he reported to the readers of theProletario...

Vincenzo Vacirca was born into a middle-class family in 1886. By 1902 he was a member of the Socialist Party of Italian Workers. That year he organized the first union of peasants in Ragusa, and he was arrested and imprisoned for about a month. Editor ofAzione Socialista(Socialist Action) of Brindisi (1904),Parola Socialista(The Socialist Word) of Ravenna (1905–1906), andSecolo Nuovo(New Century) of Verona (1907), he also wrote the social novelL’apostata(The Apostate). Condemned for subversive publishing, he emigrated to Brazil in 1908, and there directed the daily,L’Avanti!(The Advance) and published the...

Onorio Ruotolo spent his infancy in Bagnoli Irpino, Campania, and then went to Naples, where he was a student of the sculptor Vincenzo Gemito. In 1908, Ruotolo moved to New York, to exercise his art and to win notable fame. In 1925, together with Attilio Piccirilli, he founded the Leonardo da Vinci Art School, which constituted an important point of reference for the Italian American community, even though Ruotolo was accused several times, by Carlo Tresca, of holding an ambiguous attitude toward Fascism. Soon, the members of the Circolo di Union Square were frequenting the art school, gathering in Ruotolo’s...

A precocious journalist, in 1893, Agostino De Biasi recommenced a local newspaper,L’Eco dell’Ofanto(The Echo of the Ofanto, a river that rises in Irpinia and flows to the Adriatic), founded twenty years earlier by his father Giuseppe. Joint director of thePopolo Irpino, he initiated a career that carried him to Naples and Rome, contributing toIl Mattino(The Morning),La Tribuna, Don Chisciotte(Don Quixote), andIl Giorno(The Day). In 1900, he arrived in New York, was employed by theProgresso, and a year later, became subeditor. In 1905, already joint owner and director of theTelegrafo,...

In 1931, Rosario Ingargiola was the object of stinging invectives flung at him by Carlo Tresca and other leftist polemicists for his subversive past and his writings for the Fascist journalsLa Questione SocialeandIl Corriere Libertario. In 1923–24, Rosario Ingargiola was the editor of and then contributor of critical literary articles to theCorriere d’Americaand other newspapers. He brought many colonial poets to prominence and was himself a poet, publishing a book of verse,Io canto la vita e la morte(1926). He emigrated at eight years old to Brooklyn, where he took his degree in...

Rosa Zagnoni Marinoni is the fiery, patriotic young woman described in a passage in part V of Antonio Marinoni’s autobiography. She would become his wife in 1908 and would move with him to Fayetteville, Arkansas. She was an author of numerous collections of poetry in English, among which,Behind the MaskandPine Needles(1927);In Passing(1930);Timberlane: Selected Verse(1954) andRadici al vento/Roots to the Sky, published in Milan in 1956. She contributed regularly to theCarroccio, in which she published diverse stories, always in English, and for a period, ran a rubric of aphorisms, also in...

Rosario Di Vita suffered a tormented childhood and was made to work right after elementary school. Subsequently, he enjoyed a happy period with an adoptive family in Brescia, followed by a return to his native Sicily and then a stay in Naples in the house of his godfather, studying on his own. Finally, in 1906, he made the “leap” to America and found new work as an employee with managerial responsibilities. He directed several literary newspapers and contributed to many others, and in 1933, in New York, he founded and became president of the Cenacolo Artistico Letterario Vincenzo De Simone....

Umberto Liberatore was born in Alghero, Italy, as we learn from his biography. According to the bibliographic list provided by his biographer, his oeuvre is composed of the pastoral poem “Mariangiola”; the historical tragedyBeatrice Cenci; the dramatic poem, “Le tre sorelle” (The Three Sisters); the poetry collections,Vortici di luce (Vortexes of Light)andSolitudini(Solitudes); the collection of historical and literary writings,Profili storici(Historical Profiles; Rome, Formiggini, 1936), with profiles dedicated to Virgil, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, Leonardo, Galilei, Alfieri, Garibaldi, and Sebastiano Satta; and a series entitledPoemi storici(Historical Poems), consisting of the one-act pieces,...

Armando Borghi was a merchant’s son, first a follower of Mazzini, then a follower of Bakunin. Through his maternal lineage, he was the descendent of a patriotic Mazzinian who died in 1896 in the papal prison of Paliano. Very early in his life, Armando Borghi became an active anarchist orator, modeling himself on the teachings of Errico Malatesta. In 1898, he moved to Imola, then to Bologna, where, working irregularly, he took various classes at the university. After publicly defending the anarchist Bresci, who had shot and killed Umberto in July 1900, Borghi hid for some time in the country,...

Virgilia D’Andrea was Armando Borghi’s loyal companion. Orphaned at the tender age of six years old, she was placed in a religious boarding school, where she remained until she obtained a teaching diploma, and then taught for several years. Very soon affiliated with anarchism, she became a fascinating orator as well as a poet, but as Borghi wrote to Pietro Gori, in intimacy with her, “she did not store the literature in the refrigerator.” Her verses, collected in Paris, in 1929, in the collectionTormento(Torment), prefaced by Errico Malatesta, are all of a social tone and feature the international...

Raffaele Schiavina was a peasant’s son, but he was able to earn a diploma as an accountant, which was useful to him in obtaining his first employment in America, where he emigrated in 1913, settling in Brockton, Massachusetts. Initially an adherent of socialism, he was influenced by reading Kropotkin’sMemorie(Memoirs), and in 1914 he began to frequent anarchist circles. He subscribed to theCronaca Sovversiva(Subversive Chronicle) and became acquainted with Galleani. In 1916, the latter committed the administration of his newspaper to Schiavina, together with Carlo Valdinoci. Schiavina established himself in Lynn, Massachusetts, and began to write articles...

The fourth of eight children, Carlo Tresca was born to a family of landed proprietors, whose mode of living, “because of some unfortunate speculations,” would greatly worsen within a few years. In his formative years, Tresca bore the weight of the anticlerical ideas of his father, fiercely opposed to those of his mother, who would have had her son become a priest. Tresca attended the technical institute, renouncing thereby a more defined course of studies that would have concluded with a degree in jurisprudence.

Already, in Sulmona, the boy adhered to the socialist circle of the railroad workers, and through...

Born to a well-to-do family in 1895, from 1903 Ezio Taddei lived in Rome, and at twelve years old, spent a night in Regina Coeli Prison for having participated in an illegal meeting. From that moment, his father repudiated him, and Ezio Taddei began his life as a vagabond, employed in an infinite number of occupations, from shop boy to furrier and from upholsterer to workman in the steelworks of Terni. He went to Milan and Livorno and worked as a shepherd, carpenter, typographer, electrician, mechanic, baker, and gardener. In 1915, he enlisted in thebersaglieri, a corps of the...

Many Italians did not try to maintain their connections with Italy. They arrived in America as children in family groups or alone, as young immigrants in search of fortune. The moment they came into contact with this new reality, they immediately entered into a process of radical cultural change. Some of them fully espoused the new language and culture, and they tended to abandon their Italian roots. Their adhesion to an evidently superior lifestyle was either natural or the result of a courageous bid for autonomy. This implied many challenges. For one thing, it meant testing their own capacity to...

Lisi Cecilia Cipriani was the daughter of the count Giuseppe Cipriani, a brother of the Risorgimento hero Leonetto Cipriani. The count moved to the United States following financial reverses. In 1903, Lisi Cipriani entered the faculty of languages of the University of Chicago. A polyglot (she spoke six or seven languages), she was the governess to the children of numerous rich families in Chicago. Soon Lisi became an instructor of French and comparative literature at Chicago. A skilled philologist, in 1907 she published an interesting essay, “Studies in the Influence of theRomance of the Roseupon Chaucer” in the...

In 1881, when he was not yet five years old, Angelo Patri (whose real surname was Petraglia) and his family joined his father who had emigrated to New York. His education, therefore, took place in America. In 1904, he graduated from Columbia University, continuing with a specialization at Teachers College the following year, and then in 1920 received a Ph.D. from Tufts College, in Massachusetts. Even so, the memory of infancy in Italy remained alive in him; and if we are to believe the initial pages of his most famous book,A Schoolmaster of the Great City(1917), this memory...

Silvio Villa had just taken his degree in engineering at the University of Turin when, at twenty-four years old, he decided to depart for America, where his brothers, owners of a silk factory in New Jersey, made him an associate in their company. His brother Alfonso P. Villa was the chairman of A.P. Villa & Brothers Inc. and a member of a number of boards, including Villa, Stearns & Co. in Broadway and the Lincoln Trust Co. of New York (a New YorkWho’s Whofor the year 1947 calls him “a retired capitalist born in Turin”). From the moment of his...

Constantine (born Constantino) Maria Panunzio was the son of Don Colì (Nicola), a lawyer and teacher, and the namesake grandson of a patriot grandfather who was murdered by poisoning in the Bourbon prison of Montefusco. He was the first male of a group of four sisters and as many brothers. His grandmother, as he wrote in Italian, inThe Soul of an Immigrant, had very clear ideas about his future: “You must become a great man, like your grandfather,” she would repeat to him, and she already saw him first as a priest, then a teacher, and, subsequently, a political...

“I began to write in English when I was nineteen years old. I will remain in America to write. This is my country. The judgments that the Italians generously make about America are as equally imbecilic as those that Americans make about Italy. There is no actual connection between Europe and America.”¹ Writing to Giovanni Papini in 1919, Emanuel Carnevali boldly, and with astonishing insolence, resolved the unresolvable cultural difficulties of emigration. Europe (even more so than Italy) and America are two distinct planets, and it is useless to lose time trifling with old-fashioned sophisms. Carnevali becomes the American; he...

In 1924, an important American publisher, Macmillan, sentSon of Italy, the autobiography of a poor Italian worker, a simple “man of shovel and pickaxe,” to bookstores. The author, Pascal D’Angelo, had arrived in America with his father in 1910 and had had the courage and the perseverance to study the English language by himself until he became a poet and writer. After a long series of unsuccessful attempts, he emerged successfully. In January 1922, Carl Van Doren, editor of the daily newspaperThe Nation, had finally discovered him. He had listened to D’Angelo’s story, and he had esteemed his...

As a townsman of Pascal D’Angelo, it is not far-fetched that Francesco Ventresca decided to write his autobiography,Personal Reminiscences of a Naturalized American(1937). As a result of the relative success ofSon of Italy, a second, definitive edition of Ventresca’s autobiography, amplified by three chapters, was published in 1951. The seventh of eleven children, Ventresca arrived in America on May 1, 1892, at nineteen years old. He did not come from a wealthy family, but was driven toward emigrating primarily by the desire to undergo new experiences, as revealed in his book, where he relates that the day...

Undoubtedly one of the most interesting and complex Italian American authors flourishing in the 1920s, Louis Forgione is also one of the most mysterious. Biographical data regarding him are very scanty, and almost all that is known was published in theCarroccio, the periodical of Agostino De Biasi, with whom Forgione corresponded between 1922 and 1924, and who published his poetic and dramaturgical texts in English. De Biasi identified him as a naval engineer of notable success, active in the zone of New York, a position he obtained at the price of great family and personal sacrifices. Forgione had probably...

Giuseppe Cautela’s biography is another typical romance of the self-taught man. Orphaned at six years old, his father a shoemaker, Giuseppe was entrusted to the harsh care of a maternal uncle. He was able to attend elementary school up to the third grade, when the second husband of his mother decided to interrupt his studies and place him in a shoemaker’s shop. His stepfather, with whom Giuseppe had very difficult relations, subsequently decided to bring the family to America, and in 1897, Cautela arrived in New York, where he worked as an apprentice to a barber and for three months...

Edward Corsi was the oldest son of Filippo Corsi, a militant of Mazzinian persuasion and an enthusiastic supporter of the newspaperLa Democrazia. Edward followed his father into exile in Switzerland before the latter expatriated the rest of the family. When his father was elected deputy in Tuscany, his son could reenter Italy with him. Filippo Corsi, however, died soon after of a heart attack, and the family was divided. Edward was sent to live with a paternal uncle in L’Aquila. His brother Giuseppe was sent to a college in Venice; he was destined to become a director of the...