My Mother’s Kitchen:  The Kitchens of Taylor Street, by Louis Scalzo

Review by Pamela Dorazio Dean

By the turn of the 20th century, Chicago was home to one of the largest Italian immigrant populations in the United States. Between 1880 and 1920, thousands of immigrants from Southern Italy settled along Taylor Street on the city’s Near West Side. At its height, nearly one-third of Chicago’s Italian immigrants lived on and around that street, where family, faith, hard work, and food shaped everyday life. Like many ethnic enclaves across the country, Taylor Street gradually changed after World War II due to expressway construction, urban renewal, suburban migration, and the expansion of the University of Illinois. Today, while Taylor Street remains an important symbol of Chicago’s Italian American heritage, much of the vibrant community that once flourished there is only a memory.

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New Orleans’ Parish Prison in 1891 after a mistrial was declared for the 19 Italians arrested in the murder of Police Chief David Hennessy. Citizens gathered at the prison, and speakers would soon incite the crowd (numbering in the thousands) to riot and lynch 11 of the 19 Italian immigrants.

By Mike Santo

For 135 years, millions of Italian Americans lived under a cloud of suspicion over whether a group of Italian immigrants gunned down New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessy outside his Girod Street home before midnight on Oct. 15, 1890. The tragedy played out in a sham investigation, murder indictments of 19 Italian immigrants, and in the courtroom. While not one of the “defendants” was found guilty after a jury trial, a lynch mob numbering in the thousands, assembled by the influential and financially well-heeled establishment members of New Orleans, marched from Canal Street in the business district to Parish Prison, where the defendants were being held.

There, on March 14, 1891, 11 Italian immigrants were removed from the prison and lynched. As if that wasn’t bad enough, there were no repercussions, no arrests, and a bogus grand jury proceeding with no answers. The local and national press, including The New York Times editorial section, applauded the killers for their actions. In effect, mob rule prevailed.

The city’s wounds were unhealed for 128 years until it was addressed by New Orleans Mayor Latoya Cantrell on April 12, 2019. The Mayor publicly recognized that the then “political leadership was complicit in these crimes…during a time of rising anti-Italian sentiment.” Before a crowded room of Italian American leaders, local, state and national press, as well as descendants of the victims, Mayor Cantrell boldly and genuinely offered a proclamation at the American Italian Museum in New Orleans that acknowledged the injustice and expressed her deepest apologies.

The significance of her words becomes even clearer when viewed against the record of Mayor Joseph A. Shakspeare, who governed New Orleans from 1888 to 1892. Aligned with powerful businessmen who controlled the docks along the Mississippi River and profited from the city’s commerce, Shakspeare presided over an era where Italian immigrants were treated as expendable — and even those who managed to succeed were reduced to pawns in a ruthless game of power and money.

So, there it was: the 11 immigrants, long vilified, were acknowledged as innocent victims. The horrific violence unleashed by a mob of more than 5,000 was finally placed before the public record in 2019, as the press dutifully carried Mayor Cantrell’s words to the world. And then, it stopped there. The city had, at last, offered a measure of closure — an elegant, professional acknowledgment of an ugly chapter in its history. The immigrants were, in effect, exonerated of Chief Hennessy’s murder. Yet one question lingered, unresolved: Who did kill Chief Hennessy — and why?

Among those present at the 2019 mayoral apology was Sal Perricone, author of Cobblestones: A New Orleans Tragedy, a new work of historical fiction grounded in this real-life tragedy that scarred the city. A former New Orleans police officer, later an FBI agent and federal prosecutor, Perricone was determined to uncover the truth. His path crossed with Salvatore A. Serio, a U.S. Marine veteran and volunteer curator at the Italian American Resources Center in Metairie, Louisiana. The Center had received a donation of archival boxes from local advocate Joseph Maselli, and Serio encouraged Perricone — already the author of two books — to dig into them. Inside, Perricone discovered rare and difficult source material that challenged him but also fueled his drive to treat the affair as a long-neglected “cold case.” From those boxes came the research and revelations that inspired him to write the novel.

The local press reported that Chief Hennessy’s final words, spoken to a close friend, were that “the dagos” had shot him. This sparked the phrase, “Who killa da Chief,” which remained a way of instigating and insulting any Italian at the time. In fact, today’s anti-Italian American mafia tropes can be traced back to Hennessy’s assassination and the lynching that followed. As a young teenager growing up in New Orleans and attending a school only a few blocks from Parish Prison (now Louis Armstrong Park), this remained vivid and heavy in Perricone’s mind.

In Cobblestones, Perricone introduces a fictional character, Antonio Carravella, and his journey — more of an “escape” — from Bisacquino, Sicily (the author’s grandfather’s hometown) to New Orleans. The author presents the harsh realities of the time period for Sicily: a very poor region with hard working people in search of jobs and opportunity. There are references to the Padrone System at work, where “godfathers” exploited the locals to earn commissions from the steamship lines. His character is painted as one of the more fortunate ones, who is taken under the wing of a Jesuit priest with church connections in Europe and America. The Jesuits help Antonio make his way by ship to America, where he would learn that many of the problems from which he believed to have left were present in a similar form in New Orleans.

Perricone’s descriptions of the late 1800s-period is captivating and informative, detailing the modes of travel, the economy and businesses of the southern United States region, and the devilish dominance of those of power in a major city. He provides intricate details of history in palpable doses from the evolving perspective of Antonio, who is now working as a runner for a local newspaper covering the trials of the time. The author’s deep dive into the legal proceedings leading up to and including the lynching trial is exquisite and very telling of the legal system. He exposes the marionette-like control of the police and the government by the businessmen of the time.

The author’s impressive research includes quotes from legal proceedings, press coverage, correspondence, and other material not printed anywhere else to date.  His work, in short, is the penultimate writing on the subject of not only the Italian tragedy, but one which defines and articulates how events of the March 14, 1891, lynching exploded from a local territorial issue to an international affair involving the Italian government and then-U.S. President Benjamin Harrison.

Perricone provides accounts of the meetings before and after the lynchings. He builds the “case” for his hypothesis in a detailed manner as a criminal prosecutor would for a trial. His background and experience pour onto the pages in a systematic and reasoned approach. It becomes clear: the “dagos” did not kill Hennessy; the vitriol and hate mongering of the press subjected Italian immigrants to a long and needless social stream of stereotypes. The motivation in writing the book was to expose the truth; the result was vindication.

In 1892, the diplomatic pressure from the lynching produced results. There were reparations paid to the victims’ families. President Harrison issued a proclamation celebrating the 400^th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the New World. Harrison was forced to intervene in the New Orleans lynching.  He had no choice.

In Columbus, Italian Americans now had their symbol to help assimilate and move upward in our nation. The book proves that Italians were victims, yet society hardly considers them as such and certainly not now after years of bias in the press, nor how the media and Hollywood slanders and portrays Italians in a negative light. Mr. Perricone’s timely book is a shocking reminder of why the lessons of history must be published. We have him to thank for his thorough research and presentation.

Other immigrant groups came to America. There were many other instances of shame, tragedy, and horror in our history. Through Cobblestones, the reader learns of just one, but one that never was addressed at the level to which it is now.

To purchase Cobblestones on Amazon, click here.

Mr. Santo has been an active advocate of Italian American affairs for more than 40 years, acting as counsel to a variety of well-established Italian American organizations. He spearheaded the request for the New Orleans mayoral apology in 2019. He continues to practice as a civil litigator on behalf of injured clients as well as offers his pro bono services to Italian American projects.

 Contact: AttySANTO@gmail.com

The post The Killings That Shook America — and United Italian Immigrants appeared first on Italian Sons and Daughters of America.

Joseph “Joe” Sestito was a deputy sheriff of Oneida County, New York in the late 1920’s. He was a hard, no-nonsense man with a tough job.

Thanks to Prohibition, by the time Joe wore the uniform, one deputy sheriff had already been killed chasing bootleggers in 1921.

Years later, Joe’s children and grandchildren would crowd into the Sestito kitchen after Sunday Mass. As his wife poured coffee and thimble-sized glasses of anisette, Joe could be persuaded to talk about his days as deputy sheriff. His audience was always on the edge of their seats, listening to tales that would eventually inspire the award-winning Galliano Club books.

I know, because Joe was my grandfather.

Early years

Joe was the oldest of the seven children of Nicola and Marietta Sestito, both from Serra San Bruno, Calabria, who settled in Rome, New York. After three years of school and a stint as a barber’s apprentice, he lied about his age to get a job at the Revere Copper and Brass Rolling Mill. At the time, Revere was Rome’s biggest industry and employer, a few blocks from the Italian neighborhood called East Rome.

He joined the Liberty Club, a social hangout for Italian men and developed a reputation as a hellraiser. One time, he and friends fell through the frozen Mohawk River while skating. They built a fire, stripped off their clothes and dried them. There was little choice; they’d die of exposure in wet clothes.

Which escapade brought Joe to the attention of Oneida County Sheriff John G. Thomas has never been clear, but he personally appointed Joe as one of several deputy sheriffs at a time when more muscle—and an Italian speaker—was needed.

Midway between the Canadian border and New York City, Oneida County was a crossroads for bootleggers and smugglers. Meanwhile, local residents hid stills in farm buildings like the trio from East Rome who operated a “complete distillery . . with two 1,000-gallon tanks” in a farmhouse. According to the Rome Daily Sentinel, Boniface Mariana, Martial Del Nero and Carmino Tuosto were arrested when federal agents traced their equipment purchases.

Jailer Joe

Joe’s primary job as deputy sheriff was to supervise the county jail in Rome. One day as prisoners lined up, one of them kicked Joe with a steel-toed boot hard enough to break a leg.

Joe punched the prisoner into submission but the damage was already done.

The broken leg swelled. By the time Joe clocked out and limped home, the front of his leg was a lurid bloom of black and blue, with a 2-inch dent in the shinbone midway between ankle and knee that would remain with him forever.

Another time, Joe had to transport a prisoner and borrowed his brother’s new Oldsmobile roadster to do so. Unhappy at the fate awaiting him, the prisoner threw himself at Joe who lost control. The roadster careened off the road and flipped into a pond.

The deputy and his prisoner survived. The vehicle was less lucky.

Joe was also tossed into the melee of Prohibition enforcement. One night, he was assigned to stake out the city cemetery.

A gang of bootleggers had staged an elaborate funeral. Rumor had it that instead of a corpse, the casket was loaded with a fortune in illegal booze bound for New York City. The bootleggers were bound to come back to the cemetery to retrieve it.

Unwilling to go to the cemetery alone, Joe enlisted the help of his best friend, Hank Rizzuto.

Hank, the father of future Givenchy fashion house scion John Rizzuto, sold insurance.

In the cemetery, the two men huddled behind a large headstone where they could see anyone who approached the fresh grave.

Joe’s hand twitched on his revolver. He didn’t know how many bootleggers would turn up.

It was a cold autumn night, but the ground had yet to freeze. The sky was pitch-black, the rustling wind sounded like a legion of ghosts while the tilting headstones spoke a haunting silence.

They waited . . .

Ten, possibly 15 minutes.

Joe and Hank scrambled to their feet and made a run for it. If the bootleggers had the guts to come back and dig up a liquor-filled casket, they were welcome to it.

The deputy takes a wife

In April 1928, Joe married Marianne “Ann” Amateau, whose family had also emigrated from Calabria. They wed in Newark, New Jersey, then traveled by train to Rome for a reception.

That night when he should have been with his new wife, Joe was called to duty at the courthouse. A double murder had occurred. The perpetrator was at large.

Not only did Joe know killer Vito Stagliano and the two victims, but all three had attended the wedding reception just hours before.

In its breathless account of the murders and manhunt that followed, the Rome Daily Sentinel didn’t name Joe and Ann Sestito as the happy couple, nor Joe’s role as a deputy sheriff, only saying that “All three men and some of the children returned Sunday afternoon from a wedding reception at Unity Hall. A countryman had been married in New Jersey and his friends here were guests at a feast.”

Stagliano was found the next day “almost uncontrollable with fear” that he would be killed by the family and friends of his victims.

It was an uneasy start to marriage for Joe and Ann.

The murderous father-in-law

Years later, I wondered if my grandfather knew that his father-in-law was also a double murderer.

Sixteen years before Joe and Ann married, her father killed both his wife and a neighbor in Hartford, Connecticut.

Guiseppe and Carmella Amato and their five children lived on Spruce Street, in a tenement housing Italian immigrants. Neighbor Giovanni Tassone was considered a violent and unstable man. His wife ran away on at least one occasion, only to be found by a private investigator, according to the Hartford Courant.

In July 1912, Guiseppe secretly sold his barber shop and bought an automatic handgun, giving a false name and address to the store owner. He also drained his bank account and destroyed a drawing of himself which had occupied pride of place in the family apartment.

On the evening of July 23 Guiseppe shot and killed Tassone in the Amato apartment.

Both wives tried to intervene. Guiseppe shot them as well. He fled toward railroad tracks and disappeared into a maze of rail cars.

Tassone died immediately. Carmella died three days later.

Despite a vigorous manhunt and widespread media coverage, Guiseppe Amato was never seen again.

The Amato children, all of whom were thought to be in the apartment during the shootings, were parceled out to relatives and never saw each other again. Ann grew up in the home of Ciro Amato, her mother’s brother. She attended school through sixth grade, then became a tailor in New York City’s garment district.

Our family didn’t find out the real story until after Ann had passed. She always claimed that she and her siblings were orphaned when her parents returned to Italy and died in a train accident. But if Ann believed that story, why did she change the spelling of her last name to Amateau and claim that her father was French?

If Joe knew the truth, he never said.

After Prohibition

One of my earliest memories is of going to the new police station in Rome with my grandfather.

To the hilarity of the cops at the station, he locked his toddler granddaughter in a cell and caught up with his cronies.

Joe was City Marshal then, back in law enforcement circles after many years. His appointment as deputy sheriff didn’t survive the Great Depression, which settled over upstate New York like a solid, smothering blanket. The mills closed. Joe worked as a barber and even sold chickens from the back of his truck to support his family.

Eventually the Revere mill reopened. Joe rose to the position of shift foreman during World War II and de facto deputy to mill foreman Art Tedd, a lifelong friend who would become mayor of Rome. “It was hard work but not really too dangerous,” Joe recounted in an interview in 2001 with the Rome Daily Sentinel to mark Revere’s 200^th anniversary. “I was in charge of three bays with three cranes in each. That’s nine cranes I had to watch.” Joe also developed a test for a critical chemical solution. “I would dip my finger into the solution and rub it across my tongue. I could always tell, always, whether it needed more or less acid.”

After retiring from Revere, Joe became a constable and City Marshal, serving legal documents like summonses and divorce papers. He collected debts and enforced the seizure—garnishments—of wages to pay off creditors.

I still have his ledgers from the 1950’s and 60’s. Among other things, they are a record of the debts, lawsuits, and feuds of the Italian community in Rome. Familiar names jump off every other page: Cicero, Squadrito, Cianfrano, Esposito, Giardino.

He earned a percentage of debts collected and $2.50 for each summons delivered into the right hands. For example, on August 19, 1958, he earned $2.50 for serving a summons to John Naroli, in dispute with Louis Pettinelli, resident of 516 West Dominick Street. When Vito Doria finally paid his bill of $69.40 in full to Breman’s Brake Service, Joe earned $8.90.

Once again it was a dangerous job, taking Joe into neighborhoods where money was tight and tempers were hot.

He carried the same revolver as when he was a deputy sheriff.

From Sunday stories to award-winning books

Joe survived Ann by 16 years, passing in 2004 in his 100^th year. Over the years, he seemed unchangeable, always hard as iron. His only weakness was industrial deafness, legacy of his years with Revere.

He missed the pandemic that caused lockdowns across New York state, including the senior living community where my mother Jean—Joe and Ann’s oldest—lived. To alleviate her sense of isolation, I called every night.

I shared my idea for books based on her father’s stories set in East Rome. She was my biggest fan and the Galliano Club series became a collective effort, bridging the distance enforced by the pandemic. My mother offered more stories, more memories.

The 4-book saga is set in 1926 during the height of Prohibition. An immigrant from Calabria desperately holds on to the Galliano Club as a gunslinging Chicago bootlegger tries to turn it into a speakeasy.

With its double decker houses and warren of narrow streets where Vito Stagliano killed my grandparents’ wedding guests, Joe’s East Rome became East Lido. Dominick Street—the boulevard synonymous with Rome’s Italian neighborhood–is recast as Hamilton Street.

Besides Joe’s cameo appearance, his cemetery stakeout is in the books, along with the copper mill, family feuds, bootleg beer and so much more.

The first novel in the series, Murder at the Galliano Club won the Silver Falchion for Best Historical in 2023. The last in the series, Revenge at the Galliano Club was a finalist for the same award in 2024. Find the books here: https://carmenamato.net/galliano-club-series

What would Joe think about his experiences being turned into award-winning historical fiction thrillers?

It’s hard to know. After all, writing is “not really too dangerous.”

Make a Pledge and join Italian Sons and Daughters of America today. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Inspired by the real-life exploits of her grandfather Joseph Sestito, who was a deputy sheriff in upstate New York during Prohibition, mystery author Carmen Amato created the Galliano Club historical fiction series. Set in 1926, the first novel in the series, Murder at the Galliano Club, won the 2023 Silver Falchion Award for Best Historical. Third in the series, Revenge at the Galliano Club, was nominated for the same award in 2024.

A 30-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency, Carmen Amato also writes the contemporary Detective Emilia Cruz series pitting the first female police detective in Acapulco against Mexico’s cartels, corruption, and social inequality. Optioned for television, it’s a 2-time winner of the Outstanding Series award from CrimeMasters of America and was lauded by National Public Radio as “A thrilling series.”

Her standalone thrillers include The Hidden Light of Mexico City, which was longlisted for the 2020 Millennium Book Award.

Carmen is a recipient of both the National Intelligence Award and the Career Intelligence Medal. She has been a judge for the BookLife Prize and Killer Nashville’s Claymore Award. Her work has appeared in Huffpost, Criminal Element, Publishers Weekly, and other national publications.

Originally from upstate New York, after years of globe-trotting she and her husband enjoy life in Tennessee. https://carmenamato.net/links

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PAPA is a collection of short stories through which author Jerry Il’Giovine takes readers on a journey of his life beginning with his formative years in the 1950s and 1960s in an Italian American neighborhood in the Clark-Fulton area on the West Side of Cleveland, Ohio, through an extraordinary adolescence, and to raising a family of his own in the suburbs.

“THE MONSTER BARBER”

MY FATHER LEFT HIS BARBERSHOP to work in construction years before I was born, yet he never stopped cutting hair. If you knew Gennaro well enough to visit his Italian home in Cleveland’s inner city, it entitled you to free kitchen haircuts for life. Try finding that in any book on proper hosting etiquette. In any case, it was one helluva perk for his family, friends, and one improbable guest in our ethnic neighborhood.

I returned home from playing outside one Saturday afternoon in 1963, just eleven years old, to an all-too familiar sight. Someone plunked down in the middle of our kitchen draped in a pinstriped barbershop cape receiving the royal treatment. Two empty coffee mugs and an open pastry box from Hough Bakeries were sitting on the table. Pop stood behind the swaddled figure, positioning the man’s head downward about to groom the back of his neck. I naturally glanced to see who it was as I made my way toward the living room.

At first, my young mind grappled with identifying the daunting face. It caused me to slow down for a closer look, until a cold shiver shot down my spine, with the worst of my fears confirmed. This was no friend and most definitely not family. It was Marteen, our neighborhood’s equivalent to Frankenstein’s monster – minus the neck bolts.

This article will appear in the July 2024 edition of ISDA’s monthly Italian American newspaper, La Nostra Voce. Subscribe here

Only this village monster roamed freely throughout our streets dressed in a tweed coat, drooping pants, and worn-out boots muttering to himself uncontrollably with intermittent outbursts to scold nothing more than pure air. He also practiced a bizarre ritual of tossing litter from the sidewalk to the curb. Adults passing Marteen on the street sheltered their eyes and quickened their pace. Children like me just shamelessly ran the other way.

When he wasn’t patrolling for litter, chances were you’d find Marteen in front of our local parish, St. Rocco. There, he made a real spectacle of himself by kneeling on the concrete steps, while passionately crossing himself in a rapid, repeated succession. He spewed fire and brimstone at no one in particular or worse, to unsuspecting passersby caught in his crosshairs. He was always first to the altar for communion at Sunday masses, then would wave the congregation forward with both hands. Grown-ups used words like demented and deranged to describe him. No one knew for sure if he was homeless. Rumor had it he took refuge in the cellar of one of the church buildings.

So you see, there was never any real justification for engaging our monster. Yet, for some ungodly reason, he was in my kitchen in the middle of a shave and haircut no less. Pop was a kind, quiet man and my hero. He had a way of teaching me things without ever saying much. Strong too, but really, what the hell was he thinking inviting Marteen into our home? Now he’s snipping away as if it were cousins Freddy or Joe, Uncle Rico, or my godfather Chucky sitting there. Even our old watchdog Rusty slept on the floor with one eye open. I stopped to gawk. Hell, I’d never been this close to him before, close enough to touch – and smell.

I lapsed into a spellbound gaze standing there as Marteen kept his chin glued to his chest. I noticed the wiry hair on his head was peppered gray, but his eyes and brow were jet-black. So were the wild hairs budding from his nostrils and ears. And that look of contempt chiseled on his haggard facade remained fixed even as he sat still.

Suddenly, there was movement from our monster, startling me out of my hypnotic trance. Marteen began contorting his forehead, shifting his face my way while straining to keep his head down. I felt another shiver as our eyes made contact through his bushy eyebrows, and would have fled, but was unable to move my arms or legs. I was literally scared stiff.

But what happened next in that frozen moment was the damnedest thing I could never have imagined as a child. A half-crooked grin rose tenderly up the side of his cheek. Marteen was smiling at me! Then his face dropped back to the floor before I could wipe the repulsion off of mine. I regained the feeling in my limbs enough to dash to the living room, now more confused than afraid.

Turning on the television, I tried watching my favorite cowboy show starring Roy Rogers, yet my bewilderment lingered. Later that hour, I crept to the kitchen archway for a little covert surveillance. My father was alone in the room sweeping the floor. Then from the bathroom off of the kitchen, I heard the toilet flush and the door opening. My kneejerk reaction was a beeline back to the television, but eventually, curiosity got the best of me. I tiptoed back, carefully peering into the kitchen only to find them sipping wine at the table, sharing a relaxed conversation like two old paesans. If that wasn’t already odd enough, Marteen’s appearance gave me another surprise. He never looked better. I ducked around the corner as he glanced my way, only this time, I wasn’t as frightened. How peculiar.

Finally, I returned for one last peek when I heard them leaving the table. Pop helped Marteen with his coat and even offered him a couple of dollars, which the improbable guest agonizingly refused to accept.

“Go on, take it. It’s okay,” Pop said, and Marteen reluctantly obliged him.

“Grazie,” Marteen said, nodding awkwardly. “Tante grazie.”

“Prego,” Pop replied, “you’re welcome.”

Marteen silently left our home. As always, Pop methodically cleaned his barber tools and carefully put them back into the black case he kept stored in the closet.

~~~

Papa, my quiet hero, delivered yet another one of his subtle life lessons in that simple act of kindness. Then I understood my earlier confusion. My father didn’t see a monster. All he saw was a needy man and offered a helping hand. Now, I don’t see monsters anymore.

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When and how, we might ask, did this temperamental, politically-obsessed and sexually driven man, who spent much of his life wandering from place to place, ever find the time or conditions to write “The Divine Comedy,” the greatest masterpiece of Italian literature? Neither of those questions has a certain answer. Nobody knows precisely when Dante started writing his “Commedia,” although he seems to have begun work on it in Florence, before his exile. (The title doesn’t refer to humor in the modern sense, but is a more ancient use of the word, meaning a work with a good or happy ending.)

When Dante’s wife, who did not accompany her husband into exile, asked a nephew to sort through some papers Dante had left behind, the nephew found a bundle of sheets covered with tiny writing. Gemma recognized it as her husband’s work and delivered it to one of his poet friends in Florence, who was stunned by the power of what he read. The bundled sheets were quickly sent to Dante.

Wherever he happened to be when he finished a section of his epic, Dante sent the canto to Cangrande della Scala, the one ruler he esteemed and trusted, in Verona. There, in Cangrande’s court scriptorium, the cantos were copied, bound and readied for circulation. “The Divine Comedy” thus appeared not as a single work but in installments. As the successive cantos became known, they made Dante the most renowned literary figure in Italy. And his fame wasn’t confined to the rarefied world of intellectuals. Ordinary Florentines, many of whom were literate, also eagerly read and discussed the poem. At the time of Dante’s death, it was believed that the poet had completed the work, but the last 13 cantos had never arrived in Verona.

For months after Dante died, his sons conducted a frantic search for the missing cantos. When they were unsuccessful, friends urged the young men to finish their father’s work themselves, which is like asking Beethoven’s servants to compose the final movement of the Ninth Symphony or telling Michelangelo’s plastermixers to finish painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Finally — or so the story goes — Dante’s son Jacopo had a dream in which his father appeared to him and told him where to find the final cantos: in a window frame concealed behind a mat tacked to a wall in the house where the poet had died.

Sure enough, there they were, covered with mold but still legible. These, too, were sent off to Cangrande, and so the poem was finally completed. In his three-part epic, Dante details a fictional sojourn through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio) and finally his vision of a dizzying flight through Paradise (Paradiso). Along the way, he encountered a host of individuals he either knew well or knew of, having hit upon the perfect way to reward those he approved of and punish those he regarded as villains. He wafts the people he believed deserving to Paradise, while he crams his Hell with those “most exceedingly vile Florentines” of his own and earlier times — forgers, traitors, violent sodomites, murderers, bankrupts, heretics, thieves, and usurers. Dante treats his own most frequent lapse, lust, as the least serious of the Seven Deadly Sins, placing those guilty of it not in Hell but in Purgatory, where they will be purified and eventually saved.

As a modern writer said of the “Commedia,” “Nothing like it had ever been written before. It reared up from the lush, exquisitely cultivated garden landscape of previous Italian poetry like a massive rocky mountain impenetrably covered by clouds.” And in writing of his beloved Beatrice as his final guide, the beautiful, immortal being who leads him up through the wheeling spheres to Paradise, to a beatific vision beyond even his own formidable powers of description, Dante at last fulfilled the promise he had made when he composed “La vita nuova” — “to write of her what has never been written of any other woman.”

Reprinted with permission from Fra Noi. (© 2021) For more information on Dante, visit franoi.com.

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The Italian American community deeply mourns the loss of one of its great pillars on Sunday, Jan. 16. Anthony Vincent Riccio’s great passion was chronicling the lives of the Italian immigrants who settled in Boston’s North End, as well as those who settled in New Haven.

I met Anthony for the first time in 2018 at a joint signing at I Am Books in Boston. I was immediately struck by his friendliness and his kindness, and we forged a wonderful friendship. We would talk about how fun (and sometimes frustrating) it could be researching local communities when information is sometimes hard to come by.

We would talk about how much we loved our respective locales and how it was interesting to discover just one more thing when we thought we had seen it all. And we would talk about just how moving it was to discover the stories of our immigrant forebears and how proud we were not just of our families, but also of all those who came to this country seeking a better life.

The last time I saw him was at IDEA Boston in 2019, where he exhibited the pictures he took in the North End in the 1970s. The sparkle in his eyes as he talked about his work is something I will never forget, and the conversation we had during that trip will remain in my heart forever, as he truly encouraged me to change my life, and he was right there cheering me on as several of the things he predicted for me came to pass. I will truly miss him.

Anthony’s loss will be felt forever, but I know his work will live on through his incredible books and the body of research he left behind. We local ethnic historians are his legacy, as he was truly the best there was. I learned so much from him and am thankful for the friendship we had. My only hope is that in the Great Beyond, he still gets to share the stories he loved so much, and perhaps hug the people whose stories he worked so hard to share on earth.

To purchase one or more of Anthony’s timeless books, please click the covers below: 

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Yet, as The New York Times points out, he finds tastes of Italy throughout the world: in Vancouver, where an Italian restaurant becomes his home away from home; in Egilsstadir, Iceland, where he’s lamb-struck; in London, where he and his wife-to-be, Felicity Blunt, pluck the feathers from two dead pheasants from a local restaurateur, lending new definition to the phrase “lovebirds.”

There’s even a great anecdote from France, where he and Meryl Streep attempt to enjoy a meal at a local restaurant while promoting their film “Julia & Julia.”

They ordered the “andouillette,” assuming it meant several little andouille sausages; however, they were greeted with one giant sausage of pig intestine.

Streep took one small bite, and proclaimed “it does have a bit of the barnyard about it.”

Tucci also touches on his brutal fight with tongue cancer, when he underwent radiation therapy in 2017 that erased his sense of taste, and his appetite (he ate through a feeding tube in his stomach for almost six months).

But the good news is, he made a full recovery and is in the process of shooting the second season of the CNN hit show “Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy.” He was recently spotted shooting in Venice; however, a release date has yet to be announced for season 2.

The book is worth the read, as he recounts time spent with southern Italian relatives, and discusses a recipe near and dear to Italian American hearts: zeppole.

Click here to pick up a copy.

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His seminal work, The Divine Comedy, is widely considered to be the preeminent work in Italian literature and one of the greatest works of world literature.

The epic poem, which is split into three parts and traces a pilgrim’s journey through hell, purgatory and heaven, was written in the vernacular Tuscan dialect to make it accessible to the masses, instead of Latin.

His choice had such a great impact on writers at the time that the Tuscan dialect formed the basis for modern Italian, which is why the poet is known as “the father of the Italian language.”

The iconic piece took Dante 12 years to write, and he finished it just one year before his death at the age of 55.

On March 25^th, Pope Francis and the Italian president, Sergio Mattarella, both paid tribute to the poet to mark Dante Day.

The pope wrote that Dante remained a “prophet of hope and witness to the human desire for happiness,” especially at this “moment in history”.

Free virtual exhibits that honor the poet and celebrate his work are being held now in Italy. Click here and explore his legacy.

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Luigi Galvani, one of the most renowned physiologists and obstetricians in Bologna. had been waiting for storms.  As of late, he had been delving into experiments that complemented the medical and surgical skills he practiced in the city’s many hospitals.  But for almost a decade now, he had also been studying the field of elettricita’ animale, animal electricity.  As a doctor, the field of electricity in general interested him deeply, particularly as it related to the cure of paralysis.

This so-called cure had been shown to work before.  The Bolognese physiologist Giuseppe Veratti had applied electricity to various diseases, including paralysis and arthritis.  The positive results were then set down in a book published in 1748 that Galvani had most certainly read.

Late in the 1760s, Veratti’s experiments had also included the use of frogs and other small animals.  Although those particular findings were never published, he gave a demonstration at the famed Academy of Sciences in Bologna in the years 1769 and 1770, where, at the time, Galvani had been a member and professor for the Institute of Sciences.

Galvani’s choice of experimental animals also included frogs, what Hermann Hellmholtz in 1845 called “the martyrs of science.”  Thousands of these amphibians had been slaughtered in the company of his nephews, assistants, and wife, eventually arriving at one conclusion: There was a fluid inherent to all living creatures that ran from head to toe, and this could be manipulated with an outside apparatus, such as a metallic arc or a rod.  This manipulation allowed the body to restore its inner activity, which in turn aided in the cure of paralysis and other diseases, restoring vitality.

In time Galvani found that pharmacology also influenced the results.  In a lecture he delivered at the Academy of the Institute of Science, he spoke of the effects opiates had on animal electricity.  According to his notes, he injected opium into the frogs’ abdominal cavities, the stomach, or the cerebrum.  While at first the frogs remained splayed and flaccid, they eventually revived and demonstrated a “violent convulsion, either from a slight tremor of the surface upon which they were resting or from contact with some body.”  If he hacked off the frogs’ heads and pumped their bodies with opium, he got the same results.

But on that hot August 17, 1786, he wanted to prove a different theory, one that in part resembled Benjamin Franklin’s famous kite experiment: He wanted to see if he could elicit movements in the frogs’ legs by employing atmospheric phenomena.

Galvani, his wife, Lucia, and his two nephews, who also served as assistants, gathered atop the balcony, the highest point in his house.  Galvani had ordered metal hooks hung on the iron railings, and now a “prepared frog” dangled from each. The prepared frogs, he said, “should be cut transversally below their upper limbs, skinned and disemboweled . . . only their lower limbs are left joined together, containing just their long crural nerves.  These are either left loose or free, or attached to the spinal cord, which is either left intact in its vertebral canal or carefully extracted from it and partly or wholly separated.”

He imbued the frogs with the same attention he gave all of his patients, employing the same expert surgical skills he had obtained at the Hospital of Santa Maria Della Morte, Saint Mary of Death, and S. Orsola.  The movements of his hands were fluid, sinuous and virtually flawless.

Notebook in hand, Galvani took copious notes.  Those that knew him were aware that he brought an almost religious fervor to his work.   Of course, that was not a coincidence.  In his childhood, he had wanted to devote his life to God, a life of obedience and order, going so far as to join the Oratorio Dei Padri Filippini, a religious order.  But, as the first born in the family, his father, Domenico Galvani, and his mother, Barbara, who followed protocol and sent him to university, had chosen his path.  It was at the University of Bologna, in the Faculty of Arts, that he came to realize the possibility of finding spiritual solace in scientific work.  The university  had been founded around the end of the eleventh century and eventually became known all over the world as “Alma Mater Studiorum” for being the oldest university in the western world. It boasted scholars and researchers in many fields, from law to philosophy, but the study of medicine, particularly anatomy, eventually made it notorious.

Lucia was the daughter of one of the most famous anatomists in the city, Domenico Gusmano Galeazzi.  Unlike children of her age, Lucia had grown up privy to her father’s  experiments often involving mangled corpses being anatomized in a laboratory close to the family kitchen.  During her youth, city officials had not precisely condoned anatomizations in private homes, though they had not discouraged them either.

They had turned a blind eye even during seasonal changes, when the weather warmed  and the rotten stench of decaying bodies trickled out, the sickening odor of putrid flesh mingling with the cooking smells of the city.  Even then, officials assumed that anatomists were learning information that would be useful not only for their students, but for people at large.  They were correct.  Through one of those experiments, Galeazzi first detected the presence of iron in the blood, and furthermore, made even more discoveries regarding the body’s gastrointestinal system.

As the boom of thunder neared, Galvani and his crew noticed the amphibians’ legs twitching, and as he later reported in his Commentaries, “just as the splendor and flash of the lightning are wont, so the muscular motions and contractions of those animals preceded the thunders, and, as it were, warned of them . . .”

The frogs behaved as expected, and “in correspondence of four thunders, contractions not small occurred in all muscles of the limbs, and, as a consequence, not small hops and movements of the limbs.  These occurred just at the moment of the lightening . . .”

Although the frogs were dead, skinned, and nearly eviscerated, when zapped by an electrical arc or when they they came in contact with a distant flash of thunder, their legs twitched in a way that made them seem as if ready to hop off the balcony and into the streets below.  While this was happening, Galvani’s tempestuous nephew, Giovanni Aldini, looked on. Standing on that balcony, feeling the hot August wind, watching black clouds roll above his head, and hearing for the first time in days the slight pinging of rain on Bologna’s rooftops, he must have realized that these experiments were more than just his uncle’s folly: they were the very essence of life.

In those moments, the theories that would direct the rest of his life began to form: Could those frogs truly return to life?  And if that happened, what were the implications?  Could his uncle’s ideas later be used on lambs, oxen, sheep, and cows?  And even further, could men benefit from such a thing?  Not only the living, but also the dead?  Could the process of reanimation be proven correct?

In the years that followed, Giovanni Aldini further tested those theories, the climax of his beliefs occurring on January 17^th, 1803, at the Royal College of Surgeons, in London, where he performed a never-before-tried experiment on the body of a convicted felon.  By then, many of his earlier experiments performed on animals and humans – some dead and some living – had convinced him that galvanism (the new science named after his uncle) presented an opportunity for restarting one of the body’s main vital organs: The heart.  If that were to happen, the dead could reawaken.

By then, Aldini’s experiments, and the topic of reanimation in general, had become fashionable in all of European society, from the natural philosophers, who began to delve deeper into the powers and possibilities of a vital force existing in humans and nature, to the more amateurish individuals whose dubious endeavors merely allowed for a massive slaughter of frogs, pigs, and dogs, all in the name of science.  It also became a go-to subject not only in the scientific community, but also in the artistic, literary, and crowd-pleasing soirées and salons all over England, France, and Germany.

In the early 1800s, the distinction between a scientist, an artist, a political reformer, and a man of letters was not as clear-cut as it later became.  The disciplines intertwined, the interests overlapped.  As such, scientists like Humphrey Davy and Erasmus Darwin not only studied the topic of electricity and vitalism, but also wrote poems and essays on the subjects, which were published and well-received by the public-at-large.  Poets such as Percy Shelley experimented with galvanic electricity, poisons, and gases, later jotting down long poems and odes that mused on the sublime mysteries of the natural world and the awesome powers of lightening and thunder.

But one particular author, Mary Godwin Shelley, truly combined the urge of scientific endeavors of the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, the lure of forbidden knowledge, and the power of literary interpretation in her masterpiece, Frankensteinor, The Modern Prometheus.   That it was published in 1818 and written barely a year and a half earlier was not a coincidence.  She was well aware of the scientific procedures occurring around her.  She had heard of Giovanni Aldini’s experiments (earlier from her father’s friend, the medic Anthony Carlisle, who took great interest in such events and is believed to have attended Aldini’s experiments, and later from her lover, Percy Shelley, and of his uncle, Luigi Galvani’s theories on animal electricity.

She knew of Humphrey Davy and was aware of his lectures and writings, even using them, and him, for inspiration in her work.  She had also read Erasmus Darwin’s early theories of evolution.  More importantly, her lover, who later became her husband, Percy Shelly, a poet, science aficionado, and fan of the macabre, was the one who introduced her to many of the scientific properties and theories exploding around her.  He even went so far as to demonstrate certain experiments to her.  Along with all of that, the literary publications of the time provided her with a good foundation.

Thus, it is no surprise, given all Mary Shelley had at her disposal, that she was able to create the archetype of the famed, mad, brilliant scientist of the 19^th century: Victor Frankenstein.

 For the complete story, click here:

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From the late 1800s to early 1900s, as many as 16 million people left Italy for more opportunity elsewhere. About five million of them came to the United States. Most were from Southern Italy. But they also went to other countries like Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Peru, Chile, Venezuela, Canada, Mexico, the UK, and Australia. In Argentina, about 60% of the population can claim Italian ancestry. There, the majority of immigrants were from regions of Northern Italy, and Southern Italian immigrants came later to Argentina. Over one million immigrants went to Brazil, and São Paulo has been described as an “Italian city.” Again, there were more Northern Italian immigrants to the country, but Southern Italians arrived after World War II.

The fact that the immigrants came from different regions of Italy affects the Italian food in the countries to which they moved. For example, the United States has more Neapolitan and Sicilian immigrants, so we have foods like pizza and cannoli. The tomato, prevalent in Southern Italian cuisine, is the star of many dishes in the United States. In Argentina, you find Italian foods like milanese—a filet of veal pounded thin and breaded; risotto; polenta; bagna cauda—an olive oil and anchovy dip for vegetables; and the focaccia-like fugazzapizza. (You find these foods in the United States too, in the small pockets where Northern Italians settled.)

Winemaking is a popular tradition the Italians brought to Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Chile. In Chile, they make prosciutto and salami, just like their ancestors did—and just like their Italian cousins do in America. Pizza is a popular food in Brazil, and in São Paulo, there are over six thousand pizzerias!

Like I write in my book, Authentic Italian: The Real Story of Italy’s Food and Its People, Italians settled all over the globe and carried on their traditions wherever they went. Northern Italian immigrants are the reason South American countries like Argentina and Uruguay serve gnocchi (or ñoquis) on the 29^th of every month—in honor of a Venetian saint. There’s a region in Brazil where people speak an Italian dialect from Veneto called Talian. And panettone and other sweet breads are popular for the Easter and Christmas holidays. In the UK, Italian immigrants owned fish-and-chip shops and ice cream parlors.

To learn more about the Italian influence around the world, click here.

Polenta Recipe

6 cups water

2 cups cornmeal

1 teaspoon salt

Butter and grated cheese or tomato sauce

In a large pot, bring the water and salt to a boil. Slowly pour the cornmeal into the boiling water and stir using a whisk. Reduce the heat to low and cook for about 30 minutes or until done. Serve hot with butter and grated cheese or tomato sauce.

Dina Di Maio is a writer and lawyer and author of Authentic Italian: The Real Story of Italy’s Food and Its People.

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