by Valeria De Cecco

To someone arriving from Kennedy Airport, New York first comes into view with the headstones of Calvary Cemetery, in Queen’s, standing out against the background of the skyscrapers of Manhattan.

One gets to reflect for a moment on the brevity of life, and then it’s like stepping into an episode of NYPD.  And you feel like you’ve always been there. Brawny, good-natured black policemen, Fifth Avenue, Tiffany’s. the Empire State Building, Broadway, the Hotel Plaza and Central Park.

But just take a leap backward a hundred years, before movies and television, before everyone fell in love with Yankee culture.  When Italy was still an agricultural country and meat was a luxury.  When a honeymoon meant at most a trip to Rome or Venice and blue jeans were worn only by the stevedores in the port of Genoa.

The “Tubica” at Ellis Island
Back then New York received Italians from the side opposite Manhattan.  At Ellis Island, a former US Navy munitions depot, on January 1, 1892, an Irish girl named Annie Moore made history by becoming the first of twelve million men and women to enter the United States through the spanking new Immigration Station.  The Gateway to the American Dream, closed down forever in 1954, still holds in one of its display cases in the Registry Room a small bit of Abruzzo, a piece of “tubica”, the typical chequered cloth used for tablecloths made in the Tinari Cotton Mill in Lanciano.

Lost Names
Other remnants are buried in the memories of computers which with the touch of a button will let you search for the names you may be interested in of  those who passed through the gates of Ellis Island.  Unless, that is, the names were mangled by some immigration official.  Many lost their identity in this way.  Others cut the thread to their roots on their own.  “Even in the sixties people hated themselves because no one could be what they were,” says in a 1995 interview Rosetta Romagnoli of Boston, President of the Federation of Abruzzesi Organizations in the United States.  “Italians were ashamed and would even change their  last names.”  Americans, a multiethnic people par excellence, crushed by the policy of the “melting pot”, have only recently begun to appreciate multiculturalism.  And Italian-Americans have been no exception.

The First and the Last
Again, Rosetta Romagnoli: “There was a great deal of intolerance towards the recently arrived immigrants on the part of Italians who had been here for some time.  I remember one day when I went to buy vegetables and the grocer, of Italian origin, gave me some greens that were all yellow. I said to him: ‘Excuse me.  Why are you giving me this stuff?’  ‘Why, in Italy you ate better?’ he answered in italiese.  I dropped the vegetables and ran away crying.

Mutual Assistance
In Newton, Massachusetts, John Amicangioli, who had arrived in America at the beginning of the 1900’s, noticed the difficulties standing in the way of his countrymen’s American dream.  Discrimination, poorly paid work and hunger when you were sick.  It was 1915 when he realized his dream of founding an organization that would aid its members and their families in times of hardship.  He modelled it on Mutual Aid Societies and named it after a republican from Sulmona who had died at the beginning of the century: the Filippo Corsi Italian Benevolent Society.  It was the first Abruzzese Club in the US.

The Orsogna Mutual Aid Society
In New York the same idea came to seven immigrants from Orsogna: Filippo Di Benedetto, Antonio D’Angelo, Giuseppe and Pasquale Iocco, Nicola Pisoti, Emidio Di Rico and Nicola D’Alleva.  On June 27, 1939, was born the Orsogna Mutual Aid Society.  It gave assistance to Abruzzesi who were ill through a weekly allowance and the services of a doctor.  After the war there were 230 members in the Society.  They bought the property on 26-23 18th Street in Astoria, Queens, between the East River and Fiorello La Guardia Airport.  

Dolls and Turkeys
Antonio Carlucci is the 19th President of the association.  The new executive consists of: Maria Augusto, Rocco Ciancio, Nicola Di Rico, Maria Fosco, Giovanni Iocco, Vincenzo Madonna, Joe Munge, Armando Sacramone, Nicola Sciorilli and Sara Tenaglia.  The headquarters with its bar and a restaurant-banquet hall which seats 150, is open daily.  You can get real espresso from the bar and Italian publications.  The tv is constantly on the soccer channel.  In he back there is a garden with a bocce pitch where a tournament is held every year in which the first four winners receive a trophy.  Before Thanksgiving five turkeys are raffled off. And on the eighth day after Easter there is a feast with dinner based on lamb and ‘fiadoni’ (a flan type pastry but salty and with a cheese base) and sweets for boys and girls in the shape of dolls and horses, the dough is based on an almond paste and they are typical sweets during the Easter season.

San Rocco
On August 16 at the same time as their fellow townspeople left behind in Orsogna, the feast of San Rocco is celebrated.  There is a mass in the garden, a dinner-dance and fireworks, but the central event is the procession of four to five hundred people through the streets of Astoria, similar to those in honour of San Gennaro and Sant’Antonio in New York’s Little Italy.  The statue, they say, “is originally from Orsogna, brought over by Don Vincenzo more than twenty-five years ago.”  On October 12, everyone moves to Manhattan along with the other Italians of Queens for the massive Columbus Day Parade.  It is estimated that some 4000 people whose roots are in Orsogna live in the Astoria-New York-Everett-Massachusetts area.  But there is no figure on how many Abruzzesi are in New York.  There are over 1.8 million Italian-Americans spread out between the downtown area and the suburbs.

Good-bye to Little Italy
Little Italy has thrown up its hands with the invasion of the Chinese.  The only holdouts are the bars and restaurants of Mulberry Street.  There are other neighbourhoods which offer Italian food and comforts.  But he cooks in Italian in the US, Harry Liebman suggests on the site of the American Immigration Centre, are by now Palestinian, Jordanian and Iranian refugees who, before landing in the States, detoured through the kitchens of restaurants in Italy.  He thus makes the prediction that in the near future with a flowering of Albanian Italian restaurants those who start out as cooks will then buy the places from the Arab Italians who, like the Italian Americans won’t want to cook for others any more.  And, he concludes, the American dream still works.