{ 2 }

of TOMBSTONES
and PRETENSIONS

CARLO BOSSI did not go to his grave unnoticed. When the former marble cutter from Porto Ceresio, Lombardy, died a millionaire in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1895, everything about his funeral was in the grand style: the Mass, the pallbearers, the cortège to the Ross Bay Cemetery that included members of the British Columbia Pioneer Society who were among the first men to settle Victoria, the interment close to the tombs of Sir James Douglas and Sir Matthew Baillie Begbie, first chief justice of the province’s supreme court. Bossi’s widow, Petronilla, would spend the first months of her bereavement designing a suitably grand marker for his grave and hiring a carver from his home village to translate her design onto a massive block of marble.

Victoria had come into its own during Bossi’s lifetime. He and other Italian immigrants had played a prominent role in the transformation of the city from an unruly gold rush town to the capital of British Columbia. Few would have predicted this in the early 1860s, however, except for the successful gold miners who returned to set up businesses; others, seeing opportunity, had never left. In either case, there were many newly minted businesses and some branches of main offices in San Francisco that had profited from the continued interest in the Cariboo and the need for supplies all along the route to Barkerville.

But Victoria still looked like a frontier town with its muddy streets, wooden sidewalks, shacks here and there among two- and three-storey buildings—and would for another decade. The original grid—six blocks long and two blocks wide fronting on the harbour—lay between a tidal mud flat on the southern side and a swamp on the northern side. The mud flat would later be filled to provide a building site for the Empress Hotel; the swamp ran roughly parallel to Johnson Street, just within the boundaries of the original town. Beyond the Johnson Street ravine, as the swamp was called, and outside the city limits was Cormorant Street, a dirt road where Chinese gold miners had camped in 1858 before they headed for the Fraser Canyon and where an increasing number of them congregated after the gold rush ended.

The end of the gold rush could have meant disaster for Victoria were it not for the businessmen who could see the continued potential of what was, after all, the largest port on the west coast north of San Francisco. Among these visionaries were several Italians—grocers, purveyors of alcohol, fruiterers and fishmongers, hardware and clothing merchants, restaurateurs and hoteliers—who defied the later stereotype of the Italian immigrant labourer, anonymous and likely to be a strikebreaker, and established businesses throughout the original grid. Poverty might have driven these men from Italy, but they were no more desperate than immigrants from any other European country and included among their number just as many who were adventurous and ambitious.

Italian business activity in Victoria was focussed along Store and Johnson Streets, especially at the corner where the two thoroughfares met. There Carlo Bossi and his brother, Giacomo, built a store that grew, addition by addition, into a three-storey brick hotel that still wraps itself around the corner. The Grand Pacific Hotel was “undoubtedly one of the handsomest buildings in the city” and included, among its many sterling attributes, the longest bar in town.

That brick buildings, “some with great pretensions,” were replacing wooden ones was more than a reaction to fear of a fire like the one that destroyed most of Barkerville. The former fur trade post was becoming an important city, and businessmen were doing their part by employing architects and contractors to design and build in the Italianate style. Although inspired by the Italian Renaissance, the architecture had nothing to do with Italians themselves and everything to do with what had been fashionable in Great Britain in the 1840s and had made its way across North America in the intervening years. Any North American city with visions of grandeur—and which one did not?—had many examples of the two- to four-storey buildings with their low-pitched hip roofs, tall narrow windows, balustraded balconies and arcade porches that sheltered the sidewalks below. Carlo Bossi adopted the style for several of the buildings he built as he expanded his real estate holdings, including the three buildings on Cormorant Street, the street where opium manufacturers and traders thrived and single Chinese men lived in minuscule rented rooms.

THE BOSSI brothers had grown to manhood in a tiny lakeside town then ruled by Austria near where the convoluted Italian-Swiss border now follows the steep mountain valleys of the Lombardy Alps. With conscription into the Austrian army threatening and with relatives in New York offering sanctuary, the brothers’ decision to emigrate was an obvious one. Once in New York, Carlo felt the pull of the west and headed to California, leaving Giacomo, ten years his junior, behind. Then, like so many others, Carlo sailed for Victoria in 1858 with nothing much to show for his years away from home.

Within seven years he had acquired a nest egg by selling goods in the Cariboo. He returned to Victoria, started a grocery store and sent for Giacomo. Fifteen years later he was an integral part of Victoria society, with friends in high places, a network of businesses and a great deal of real estate. He had, in the careful language of the time, “retired with a competency,” meaning he was worth a million dollars.

Giacomo may have been the less adventurous brother for not having gone to California, but in Victoria he was the more flamboyant of the two. It was common to see him in his white apron greeting his customers as they arrived at the hotel, which was near the harbour, as was its rival, the Pacific Telegraph Hotel, farther north on Store Street and owned by the Astricos, another Italian family. Both hotels were close to the wharves, where passenger and freight traffic was increasing at an encouraging rate. The Pacific Telegraph, with its 150 beds, was the larger of the two and indeed was the biggest hotel in Victoria and among the most desirable, owing in no small part to the excellence of its catering. The fine cuisine he served, however, almost brought the owner, Andrea Astrico, to ruin.

When the vessel Prince Albert arrived in the harbour in 1872 with a case of smallpox on board, city officials placed the rest of the passengers and the crew in quarantine. Thinking that the federal government would pay the tab, the mayor agreed to allow Astrico, who now called himself Andrew, to provide room and board for them in his hotel. Never had a quarantine been so luxurious or so democratic. Everyone, regardless of class, was treated equally to quality food, tobacco and drink. For several weeks the passengers’ and the crew’s every wish was Astrico’s command. Victuals, brandy, liqueurs, spirits and malt beverages, sherbets and ice cream, fruits in abundance—nothing but the best for the guests of Her Majesty’s Government. As Judge Begbie said in court when Astrico sued the federal government for paying only $2,000 of his $11,000 invoice,

I say it with shame and indignation; the whole town was filled with a sort of cackling jubilation at the triumphant manner in which the mayor had enabled certain inhabitants of Victoria to build up enormous claims against the Dominion Treasury.

Astrico wore a neatly trimmed moustache that turned down a little at the ends. Such a moustache has been described as pensive for the sadness it brings to the face of its wearer, which must have reflected Astrico’s mood when Begbie dismissed altogether the jury’s recommended $4,500 award because the hotelier had had no contract with the city. Astrico’s countenance had cause to brighten considerably, however, when the provincial government passed a private act in 1877 “for the relief of Andrew Astrico,” authorizing the city to pay him the full amount of his claim.

INNOCENTE RAGAZZONI was mustachioed too, but his moustache hid his upper lip and gave him a comic air that was enhanced by mirthful eyes. Like many of the earliest Italian immigrants to British Columbia, Ragazzoni had come from Piedmont by way of California, where he was known for playing his fiddle all night through. Gold drew him northward to Victoria in 1858 despite the fact that, unlike most of the others who were part of that great stampede, he had his family with him.

After a foray into the grocery business, Ragazzoni opened a store on Johnson Street that specialized in coffee and spices. Like all Italians then and now, Ragazzoni knew the importance of freshly roasted coffee, but the smell of it as it is roasting is not so pleasant and was not appreciated by his neighbours, especially the one who called the fire department when he saw smoke coming from the store. In the aftermath, Ragazzoni wrote an outraged letter to the Daily British Colonist:

The alarm was given by some dirty people who, unfortunately, are allowed to reside among us, and who were frightened by the smoke of the coffee, which, very quietly, I was roasting.

By the time of the fire, Ragazzoni had been a widower for four years. An infant daughter had died thirteen days after her mother. But he raised his two sons and played his fiddle and prospered in business until his sudden death at the age of fifty-two in 1880. Victorians remembered him for the fiddle playing and for the restaurant in his Metropolitan Hotel on Government Street, where fifty cents could buy a “bounteous” lunch or dinner.

The Metropolitan Hotel was only two blocks from the intersection of Store and Johnson Streets, where so many Italian businesses were located. And just around the corner on Wharf Street was the branch store of Caire & Grancini. The partners had established the hardware business in San Francisco at the time of the California gold rush, and Grancini had opened the Victoria branch at the beginning of the gold rush on the Fraser River. In the next twenty-one years, before he died in his fifties, Ermenegildo Grancini was a leader in both the Italian and the greater Victoria communities.

To his fellow Italians, Grancini could have been called padrone in the best sense of the term, and his open countenance confirmed it. Italians from the interior of the province stopped at his store to buy goods, seek advice and borrow money. Felice Valle trusted Grancini to hold the thirty scudi he owed to a friend until the friend could pick up the money. Just two months before Valle died, Grancini had given him cash to help a sick relative. Everyone in Victoria, no matter what nationality, knew Grancini for his generosity and kindness, his honesty and good judgment.

He remained a bachelor until he married his French housekeeper, Blanche, in 1875. When he died just four years later at the age of fifty-two, his funeral procession rivalled the cortège of Sir James Douglas, who had died two years before. The parade of dignitaries that proceeded through the spectator-lined streets to the Episcopal portion of the Ross Bay Cemetery included Masons and Oddfellows, three fire companies and fifty-nine carriages carrying politicians and “influential gentlemen from the mainland.” Women did not attend funerals in those days, but five hundred men in buggies and on foot followed the flower-laden coffin; eight pallbearers, only one of them Italian, lowered Grancini into his grave as fire bells tolled and flags dropped to half-mast.

Grancini and the other affluent Italians were well integrated into the community of Victoria, a city that was still by far the largest in British Columbia, with the greatest number of Italians, although they represented a small portion of the city’s total population. And just as many members of the Italian community were not wealthy. In the 1880s there were Italian boilermakers, fishermen, clerks, compositors, painters, ship’s cooks and whitewashers, not to mention waiters, brewers, bootblacks and ferrymen.

With no gold rush to bring newcomers to the city and the bright promise of a railway fading, the population of Victoria had settled at seven thousand souls by 1882. Despite the early infusion of Italians and other nationalities, the capital city of British Columbia was at risk of becoming a backwater intent only on proving how English it could be. Croquet, cricket and high tea occupied the leisure hours of many of its inhabitants; a sprinkling of aristocratic and wealthy naval officers from the base at Esquimalt added a touch of imperial elegance.

And in the midst of all this Englishness, rich Italians were just as likely as any other wealthy citizens to build large brick homes with stone fronts on the quieter streets on the outskirts of the city, where they might even partake of high tea on the lawn. Grancini’s pallbearers were “old and tried friends,” almost none of them Italian. Wealthy Italians were Masons and Oddfellows and not necessarily practising Roman Catholics. They had come to Victoria as miners, marble cutters, labourers, merchants and adventurers. They had become rich and well-known and—except for the occasional misguided use by some ignorant person of the word dago, a word that was in those times more descriptive than pejorative—were not subject to discrimination or stereotyping.

Even in their marriages, they were in the mainstream. Except for the men whose wives came with them from Italy, most of them married non-Italians—women of Irish, German, French, Swiss and First Nations heritage. But the businessman Carlo Bossi’s choice of a wife had been a notable exception.

PETRONILLA MEDANA was fifteen years old in 1867 when she married Carlo, who was forty-six at the time and well on his way to a fortune in retail and real estate. An age difference somewhat smaller than this was not uncommon on mid-nineteenth-century Vancouver Island. It was a reflection of the fact that most immigrant men of whatever nationality arrived in British Columbia single and with little money. By the time they had established themselves financially, they were well into their thirties. If they wished to marry and sire a family, they needed wives who were young enough to bear children; since women were much in demand, there being fewer of them than men, the most likely age group in which to find a bride was of women who had only recently reached puberty.

If the Bossis’ intention was to have children, however, it came to nothing. They remained childless and Petronilla made her mark by being a steadfast wife, a patron of charities and a renowned needlewoman. Opera cloaks, table scarves, fancy aprons, seed and leather wreaths and crochet work flowed from her skilful hands. And so she occupied herself throughout the twenty-nine-year marriage that ended with Carlo’s death in 1895.

One year after Bossi’s grand funeral, the massive marble tombstone that Petronilla had designed and caused to be carved to mark his grave was installed on a granite base in the Ross Bay Cemetery. The draped marble urn that crowned the top was similar to the ones that decorated other monuments nearby. The two ornate medallions that showed images of Petronilla and Carlo were good likenesses, and the insignia of the Pioneer Society shared a position of equal importance between the two heads. Carved into the marble beneath Carlo’s medallion were the crucial details of his life. Because Petronilla was still alive, the marble below her medallion was blank.

Whether in Italy or in foreign lands, Italians seldom go to their graves unnoticed. And yet no one marked Felice Valle’s grave. The only Italian gravestone in Barkerville, a town that saw many Italians, is one placed in memory of a man named F. Castagnetto, who was so successful at mining gold and doing business that he rated an obituary in the Victoria Colonist when he died at the age of forty-two in 1882. His funeral had to be moved from the Methodist church to the Theatre Royal in Barkerville to accommodate the large number of mourners.

In Calabria and Lombardy, relatives place the body in an open casket filled with flowers and photograph the departed with the casket tipped up on its end and attended on either side by the bereaved. Cemeteries all over Italy are walled and well tended; older bones are transferred to boxes and their markers embedded in rows on the enclosing wall; almost all the stones that mark more recent graves are embellished with a coloured photo, enamelled against the weather, of the dead person in life.

In parts of Italy, the absent dead, the ones who died somewhere far away, are commemorated in various ways. Some of the cemeteries in Trentino–Alto Adige contain gravestones that bear as many as six names each. The stones mark empty graves. According to the custom in practice since the 1840s, the names belong to family members who have died in a foreign country. The murmur of many different languages provides the soundscape of Genoa’s Staglieno cemetery, which is famous for its impassioned monuments. Partially draped stone figures lie in anguish, their arms flung over their stone faces; other statues sit pensively on stone benches.

WITHIN A month of the unveiling ceremony of the marble monument to her husband, Petronilla Bossi, forty-four years old and the sole heir to his fortune, married Lorenzo Joseph Quagliotti, aged thirty-one, in a private ceremony in the Catholic cathedral. Seventeen years later, Petronilla died and was buried beside her first husband, but the space below her likeness on the marble monument remained blank. Her second husband, having inherited all her fortune, which had grown during her lifetime, spent it building the Romano Theatre, the first of several, and squandering the rest, including the money in a trust fund that Petronilla had established for four orphans. When Lorenzo died years later, he was penniless and deeply in debt. The Bossi family allowed him to be buried with Petronilla and Carlo but resisted any attempts to add his name to the monument.

When Lorenzo’s brother Eugene, an inventor described as “the man who improved on Edison,” died five years later, his obituary said the Quagliotti family was “prominent” and frequently invited to openings of the provincial legislature. Another sibling, Hector (Quag) Quagliotti-Romano, continued the theatre-owning tradition established by Lorenzo and became well-known for his high standards, which included asking theatre patrons to refrain from putting their tickets in their mouths.

But there was something off-kilter about the Quagliotti family. The patriarch, Giovanni (John) Quagliotti, had emigrated from Piedmont with two children and his wife, Lucia Bonanati, daughter of one Lorenzo Romano. Why her surname was different from her father’s is unknown, but she named her eldest son after him and four of her thirteen children carried the double-barrelled surname of Quagliotti-Romano, presumably in his honour. During the twenty-year period in which all the children were born, the family lived in Yale, Switzerland, Washington State and California, but most of the children were born in Victoria. The fact that Quagliotti owned stores in Yale, Lytton, San Francisco and Victoria—it was at the Victoria store that Felice Valle had purchased his soft wool finery the year before his death—is the likely explanation for the multiple moves. But they made for a disrupted existence.

It was Nanaimo’s turn for the Quagliotti touch in 1879 when a general store named Romano and Quagliotti opened on the corner of Victoria Crescent and Albert Street in the centre of that coal mining town one hundred kilometres north of Victoria. John Quagliotti fed his clerks well and paid them good wages plus room and board, but he required them to work from seven o’clock in the morning until midnight and, because the clientele was chiefly First Nations, to speak Chinook jargon.

In that same year Quagliotti became the principal investor in a saloon in South Wellington, a small mining camp west of the village of Wellington, ten kilometres north of Nanaimo. Wellington was the site of Robert Dunsmuir’s coal mines. He had come to Vancouver Island from Scotland thirty years before as an indentured miner to work in the new HBC coal mines. By the time he encountered Quagliotti, he had discovered his own coal seam and was well on his way to becoming the richest man in British Columbia. He had also used strikebreakers, some of them Italian, in a ruthless and successful campaign to prevent labour unions from ever gaining a toehold in his mines.

The South Wellington Mine, which Dunsmuir had just purchased from a San Francisco promoter, was worked by miners who lived nearby. Quagliotti’s saloon was seventy metres from the pithead of the mine and, more importantly, only ten metres from the payroll office.

Despite his own fondness for drink, Dunsmuir professed concern for his employees’ ability to resist temptation. In a letter later published in the Ministry of Mines Annual Report, he complained to the inspector of mines that the saloon was highly dangerous.

It is impossible to keep some men away from drink when it is so easy of access and, as you must be aware, a very little taken on surface will make a man intoxicated when he gets below.

To be suddenly drunk fifty metres below the surface would be alarming indeed, not only for the inebriated miner but for his fellow workers in the dangerous, gas-laden environment of a newly developed mine. But Dunsmuir’s fears of instant intoxication upon descending into the mine have no scientific or anecdotal basis. More likely his concern was for the end of the shift on payday, when a miner might spend all his earnings at Quagliotti’s before going home to his family drunk and empty-handed.

The situation came as no surprise to the inspector of mines. He had frequently called the attention of the mine’s previous owner to the saloon’s close proximity to the mine, but the American was not troubled by the situation. As the inspector explained to Dunsmuir,

I did not think it right to say much until I had seen how it worked. Since that [time] I have ascertained at least one reason why that gentleman advocated so strongly for the existence of this saloon so near the pit, viz.: that he had an interest in the concern.

The inspector’s recommendation to the minister of mines was that the sale of liquor be prohibited within four hundred metres of a colliery, but since there were saloons near the entrances of other mines on Vancouver Island and since the distance was hardly enough to deter a man intent on having a drink, it is unlikely that Quagliotti’s business was in any danger from a ministerial decree. The danger to the business came instead from the fact that, within a year, Dunsmuir had closed the mine entrance and connected the workings to his larger mine, whose portal was some distance away. The inhabitants of South Wellington had three choices: walk farther to work; dismantle their houses and move them closer to the mine; or quit working for Dunsmuir and move somewhere else. Whatever option they chose, Quagliotti’s would no longer be the closest saloon to their place of work.

ALTHOUGH HIS business dealings might not have been quite as respectable as those of his countrymen, John Quagliotti was an example of the entrepreneurial Italian who came from the northwest of Italy seeking adventure and success on the west coast of the New World. There would always be Italians who would do well in business in British Columbia, but as poverty and desperation increased in Italy in the wake of Italian unification, another kind of Italian immigrant became more numerous. These were men who were willing to work at any job, no matter how difficult and degrading. They came to Vancouver Island in the 1870s at a time when coal mining had become an important part of the new province’s economy and when labour was making its first attempts to organize. They came via San Francisco, as Italians had since the time of the gold rush, but this time they came as strikebreakers.