IT IS early in my liaison with Italy and its emigrants. My husband, Dick, and I have rented a tourist apartment on a farm on the fertile plain that makes up much of the Friuli–Venezia Giulia region northeast of Venice. The plain is bounded on three sides by a continuous wall of mountains—the Dolomites to the west, the Carnic Alps to the north and the Julian and Dinaric Alps to the east—abrupt and impossibly high even for someone used to the coastal mountains of British Columbia as I am. It takes fifteen minutes driving eastward from the farm before the compact Peugeot we rented in France is climbing past foothill vineyards and up into a steep-sided valley in the tree-covered pre-Alpine mountains. The road is paved but narrow, the corners a test for the nimble steering of the little French car. Each corner reveals something new: a looming peak, a sharp right-angle turn to cross a bridge, a stone wall glimpsed through the trees on a perpendicular hill.
This is the Valle Cornappo, a narrow valley named for the stream that in spring becomes a torrent as it rushes toward the Tagliamento River on the plain behind and below us. The road reaches the height of land and we descend into a hidden valley this one drained by the Natisone River. I am surprised by how the terrain in the valley of the Natisone River widens and how, from the village of Platischis, which occupies the grassy opening in the tree-covered hills, the towering mountains behind are almost blocked from view.
Italian-Canadian friends in Nanaimo, my hometown on Vancouver Island, emigrated from this tiny village within walking distance of the Slovenian border. The name of the village reflects this proximity to the former Yugoslavia, and though my friends insist that their roots are pure Italian, Platischis has been part of Italy only since 1866—a mere moment when compared with the antiquity of the area but longer, they point out, than Rome, which didn’t become part of the Italian state until 1870.
Three generations ago, when our Nanaimo friends were children, only a trail connected this village to the rest of Italy. There was little need for a road. With a garden behind each house and a barn next door to stable a cow, some chickens and two pigs, each family raised everything needed for a balanced diet, albeit one with little variety. What could not be grown in the village—tobacco, sugar, salt—the men smuggled in over the border. They knew the foot trails through the mountains well because they travelled them in the spring when they left to work in Germany or Austria, and in the late fall when they returned in time for Christmas. Even today, the only place of business is a bar, where we buy cappuccini and gelati. The closest thing to a piazza is a widening in the road where a Roman Catholic church on one side faces a cenotaph on the other.
We leave the bar and walk to the cenotaph. On the modest monument to local soldiers and civilians who died in two world wars are several Nanaimo surnames: Cormons, Cuffolo, Sturma, Sedola—names of school principals, city councillors and businesspeople from our small city on the other side of the world.
A white-haired man steps up to my husband. “Siete francesi?” he asks, seeing the French licence plates on our car.
“No,” Dick replies and continues with some of the few Italian words he knows, “la macchina è francese ma siamo canadesi.”
In Europe, people often assume that French is the first language of all Canadians. When we reveal that we don’t speak French, the white-haired man switches easily to English. “Where are you from in Canada?”
“Vancouver Island.”
“My grandfather died in a coal mine on Vancouver Island.”
Ferruccio Sturma owns restaurants in France and is visiting his family home in Platischis. His grandfather, Giuseppe, was one of the sixteen coal miners who died when the cable on the cage of the Protection Island Mine in Nanaimo broke on September 10, 1918, not long before the end of World War I.
Giuseppe Sturma, his son-in-law Giovanni (John) Cuffolo and Cuffolo’s brother-in-law, Angelo Sedola, left their homes that morning to work the day shift. Because the pithead and main shaft of the mine were on an island in the harbour, miners rode to work on a scow pushed by a tugboat. The three men, plus three more of their countrymen and the rest of the day shift, scrambled ashore as soon as the scow touched the mine dock. They exchanged small metal tags stamped with their identity numbers for lamps and joined the lineup for the steel cage that would lower them down the shaft sixteen men at a time.
When it was their turn, the six Italians and ten other men filed into the cage. Then John Cuffolo realized he’d forgotten his lamp and stepped back, leaving room for the next man to take his place. The cager did a head count, shut the heavy-screened doors, waited for the signal from below, then engaged the engine.
The rickety cage rattled and squealed as it started its descent. The cable attached to its roof wound off the drum as it had many times every day. Then suddenly the cable parted. Cut loose, the cage plummeted 180 metres to the squaretimbered base of the landing platform. Crashed through the massive timbers into the pit below. Tipped at an angle. Stopped cold. The sixteen were dead, their bodies in a twisted heap. The first men to reach the site said it was impossible to tell one body from another.
Fourteen women became widows and forty children became orphans in an instant. Giuseppe Sturma’s widow, Anna, still lived in Platischis with seven of her ten children. She would not hear of her husband’s death until after the end of the war, three months later. One of her adult sons had died in October of the previous year at Monte Nero, fighting the Austrians in the legendary Battle of Caporetto. Two of her adult daughters were married and lived in Nanaimo near their father. Anna would stay in Italy and raise her remaining children in Platischis, separated from her Canadian daughters and their families.
ONE OF Anna’s sons was the father of Ferruccio Sturma, the white-haired man we met in Platischis. His family’s story is the Italian emigrant story. Many families in the past century and a half could tell a similar one: unable to earn enough to feed his children and aging parents, the father leaves Italy to find work so that he can send money home. He goes to Europe for several months each year, or to North or South America or to Australia where he has brothers, cousins or townspeople. He works at whatever job he can find—usually one requiring a strong back, a job at the bottom of the ladder. He may return home on occasion, often leaving his wife pregnant after each visit, or his family may join him eventually in the new country.
NINE YEARS before we met Ferruccio Sturma, Dick and I had accepted a last-minute invitation from friends to share a house on the Tuscan coast just outside of Castiglione della Pescaia. At the end of an enchanting week, Dick said, “Why don’t you write a book about Italy?” His motive was clear. Research for such a book would entail many more trips to this country that fascinated both of us.
But Dick’s suggestion triggered a memory of a previous, much less self-indulgent encounter with the people of this lovely country. Twenty years before, when I was researching my second book, Three Dollar Dreams, I came across a reference to Italians in the letterbook of the manager of a coal mining company in Nanaimo. John Bryden was writing in 1880 to his superiors at company headquarters in London, England, of a threatened strike in the Nanaimo mines and of his intention to hire strikebreakers.
It won’t be any use to try and get white men. There is I believe a good many Italians in San Francisco, and many of them are good miners, and if we find it necessary to get fresh hands, I think we should try them, as they are a class that would not be easily advised or intimidated.
I took the time then to find out enough about Italian history to explain why one particular group of immigrants to a country built on immigration from countries all over the world had this reputation. The seeds of my eventual fascination with Italy and its people had been planted.
It didn’t take me long to fall in love with the people once I got to Italy that first time: their flamboyance, their energy, their love of family, their flair. In my besotted state, the country seemed to be bathed in a golden light. I loved everything about the old town of Castiglione: the restored buildings with freshly painted doors—blue, red, dark green—set in walls of ancient stone and brick salvaged from the ruins of other buildings. Tumbles of geraniums in each window box, hydrangeas in urns by the door. I loved the fishermen who took their boats out each morning before sunrise and returned before breakfast to sell their catch of some dwindling species of white fish on the docks. And at the end of the afternoon when the men pulled kitchen chairs outside to sit with their neighbours and the women, two by two, linked arms to walk up and down the streets—I loved the passeggiata too.
I am not alone in my fondness for things Italian—the brilliant sunshine, the simple food—but what many italophiles, past and present, love is the ancient, medieval and Renaissance architecture, paintings and music. They love the Italy of Romans and Florentines, of cardinals and popes. Of the nineteenth-century grand tour. But there is another Italy that existed for over a hundred years until the 1970s, an Italy of grinding poverty and wholesale export of its peasantry. An Italy whose inheritance laws decreed that a man must divide his land between all his sons until no one had enough land to feed himself, and where that land, in the south especially, had been degraded by natural disasters and poor farming methods. An Italy where heavy taxes and unemployment made it impossible for its most humble citizens to survive unless they found work elsewhere in the world.
And when they came to the new place intent on earning as much money as possible but were forced to accept low-paying jobs, some Italian immigrants were reviled for being strikebreakers. And even those who did not work during strikes had to endure the sort of discrimination reserved for people who speak a different language, whose skin is darker than Anglo-Saxon skin and who will work for lower wages, the sort of discrimination that shouts “dirty dago” and “wop” and worries about the Black Hand and the Mafia.
Italian emigration has been described “as the largest exodus ever from one European nation,” “a situation so extreme that one writer has called it ‘well-nigh expulsion.’” Between 1876 and 1976, 26 million Italians emigrated from a land they had no wish to leave, from a climate and terrain essential to their being, from families and villages that held on so tightly that most Italian emigrants chose a destination in the New World where there was someone from the home village—an uncle, a cousin, a sister, a neighbour—who knew who they were.
BEING A writer of history for a general audience, and one with a particular interest in western Canadian history, I wanted my book about Italian immigrants to be connected to my home province of British Columbia. My previous books were about coal miners, loggers and prairie settlers, and though I was related to some of the settlers, I had had no connections to miners or loggers other than those I acquired through research. In order for me to write a book, I need to meet the people in person or through the documents they leave behind. I need to see the places, smell the air, note the quality of the light, touch the artifacts and find out how they work.
In the years since our first trip in 1993, Dick and I have travelled to Italy seven times, driven its width and length, sought out the villages and towns whose citizens emigrated to British Columbia. With him or on my own, I have driven to most of the towns in my province that have an Italian story to tell, interviewed the living and searched for the dead in archives and recorded interviews. Through a series of language lessons, I have developed a tenuous relationship with the Italian language but no connection at all to the myriad dialects spoken by Italian immigrants. I am fortunate that the members of the Italian lodge I belong to have been gracious and long-suffering. I have entertained Italian friends in my home and been entertained in theirs. I’m learning to make pasta from scratch and I’ve eaten enough fettuccine with ragu sauce to qualify for honorary Italian citizenship.
Some of the Italians I meet are reserved. They eye me warily; they wonder why I am interested in them, what my motivation is for asking them questions about their origins and decisions to emigrate, and refuse to speak further when I ask them about their lives under Mussolini’s rule. Others are friendly and helpful. All are dignified and careful. It hasn’t been that long since it was hard to be an Italian in British Columbia. The legacy of the strikebreakers, the imagined threat posed by the thousands of navvies who built our railroads but lived apart, the bitterness of World War II, when Italy was the enemy and Mussolini sent his consuls to strengthen immigrants’ ties to the Fatherland—all this lingers in the minds of some non-Italians.
There are scholars and novelists who have examined this gap in understanding between Italians and non-Italians, but much of the work has been about Ontario and Quebec, where the majority settled. British Columbia, which has the third-largest number of people of Italian origin in Canada, has seen only a handful of academic articles and novels about Italian immigrants. And the story in the west has different beginnings. Fifty years before there were Italians in eastern Canada, there were Italians in British Columbia. They came via San Francisco at a time when settlement on the west coast of North America had hardly begun and there was no railroad across the continent. They came north to the isolated valleys of this mountainous province to pan for gold, raise cattle, dig coal, fell timber, build railroads, smelt copper and refine lead or start small businesses. And they often stayed in the towns where they first landed rather than migrating to the cities.
Most of the earliest immigrants returned to Italy regularly and always planned to return for good; the later ones settled in British Columbia and went home only to visit and to show how well they were doing in the New World. There is a strong connection between Italy and the places in British Columbia where Italians found work: it is as if they straddle the ocean and the continent with a foot in each place.
WHEN WE’RE in Italy, we go to the countryside because Italian immigrants come from small towns and villages, but we live much more comfortably there than the people whose desperate circumstances drove them to leave Italy. As we eat in picturesque restaurants or friends’ kitchens, we remind ourselves that the ricotta-and-spinach-filled tortellini warmed in butter and sage and served on a patio in the shadow of a ruined castle, or the platter of grilled Tuscan bread drizzled generously with extra-virgin olive oil that comes from the farm of a famous winemaker, or the zucchini risotto fresh off the stove in a Pordenone kitchen has its roots in the simple, fresh food rural Italians have eaten for generations. Poor man’s food: cotechini made with scraps from the pig slaughter; flour ground from chestnuts gathered in the hills; polenta boiled, grilled, baked or fried; black bread made from the leftovers of white-flour milling; and grappa made from the leftovers of winemaking.
This is the food the exile pined for and sought out in an Italian boarding house or an auntie’s kitchen, the food he grew for himself as soon as he had a garden, the food his wife cooked for him after she joined him in Canada, the food they shared with fellow immigrants as they gathered in lodges and church basements in the new place on the other side of the world.