Nicola “Nicholas” Casciano nacque a Popoli, in via delle grazie, il 15 aprile del 1885 da Gennaro e Concetta entrambi “contadini” (all’atto di registrazione fu presente l’allora Sindaco Ciro Mancini). Sin da piccolo conobbe il duro lavoro dei campi. Andò a scuola quel tanto che bastò per saper leggere e scrivere. Ma era di intelligenza vivace e sog...

“The moment of arrival was euphoric, and then silence fell upon them. They were afraid they wouldn’t be let in. The question on everyone’s mind was ‘Will we enter or not? Will they let us pass?’” This is the scene Maurizio Igor Meta told me he repeatedly came across in the many diaries he read, written by European immigrants coming to New York via...

THEN: Starting in 1884 and continuing through to 1924, an estimated 290,000 Italian immigrants -- a great deal of them from Sicily -- arrived in New Orleans, fleeing economic and political turmoil. In short order, their indelible influence would be felt on the city. With the French Quarter no longer a fashionable address, many of the city's more we...

Geremia Mancini, presidente dell’Associazione Culturale “Ambasciatori della fame” rende nota la storia di Nicola Rocco De Dominicis, un bambino partito da Vastogirardi e divenuto un grande medico negli Stati Uniti. Fu per gli italo-americani il “medico amico”. Questa la sua storia: “Nicola Rocco De Dominicis nacque in Molise a Vastogirardi  l’11 ma...

It’s a snowy Saturday afternoon in Rockford, Illinois. My grandfather, Ignazio, is all but pressing his ear against the Zenith radio to hear the Metropolitan Opera broadcast of La Boheme, starring Bidú Sayao and Ferruccio Tagliavini. He pleads with me to sit with him and listen to the music of his country, which he deeply misses. No doubt the opera...

When one thinks of frontier justice or violent lynchings in the United States, it conjures the specter of lawlessness in the old West or the anti-black intolerance of the Deep South. This is inevitable, not only because of the magnitude of such atrocities, but because of the attention brought to them by modern American society, which largely sprung...

Early last year, as anti-immigrant rhetoric intensified during the presidential campaign, William Massolia, the Griffin Theatre Company’s artistic director, thought of his own family’s past. All four of his grandparents came from Italy speaking very little English. Massolia started sleuthing. He dug up his paternal grandparents’ marriage certificat...

Un “grazie ai familiari di Aldo Lorenzi, originario di Mozzecane con parentele roverbellesi e di Malavicina”. A rivolgerlo è Daniele Marconcini, presidente della Associazione dei Mantovani nel Mondo, che ha portato la sua storia al Museo dell'Immigrazione italiana negli Stati Uniti di Filadelfia, creato da Filitalia International, l'associazione it...

«Mi chiamo Favola Cinquemani, chista è la mia storia. Una storia siculish. Dicuno chi parru siculish, halfu miricanu e halfu sicilianu». Questo l'incipit del romanzo Zia Favola. Una storia siculish di Cono Cinquemani, appena dato alle stampe dalla neonata casa editrice Aut Aut Edizioni. Protagonista del libro e voce narrante è Zia Favola, un person...

I enjoyed Cyndi Amato’s Maine Voices column (Feb. 12). One of the writers who cleverly welcomed the Italian immigrants in the early 1900s was T.A. Daly (1871-1948). The late 1800s and the early 1900s was a period of substantial Italian immigration. The Irish, because of the famine, had generally preceded the Italians, and had secured political powe...