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BIRDS and FISHES,
SHARKS and FALCONS

IT IS HARD to imagine what harm could come from a soup bowl filled to the brim with zuppa di fava, dark brown, thick with fava beans and steaming. Italians from central Italy to Sicily have been eating fava beans in many forms for thousands of years, but the nutritious legume can have a complicated effect on southerners afflicted with a certain enzyme deficiency. Regular consumption of cooked favas enhances their resistance to malaria, but men who carry the genes for this deficiency can suffer from a severe anemia if they eat large quantities of raw fava beans. Children with the gene can die from toxic shock.

This complicated relationship between fava beans and malaria is typical of the curves history has thrown at the south. Malaria was a major killer in Europe for centuries, and especially in southern Italy, where coastland marshes lay trapped and stagnant on top of hardpan clay. As far back as anyone can remember, farmers lived in the hills kilometres away from their lowland fields because they knew that the danger of infection increased at dawn and dusk; but they didn’t know why until the connection between malaria and the anopheles mosquito was finally understood during World War I. The added time it took such farmers to get to and from work decreased their already limited productivity. And if they were among the many unlucky enough to become infected, malarial fever became chronic and periodically robbed them of their ability to work.

Polenta was another staple food with sinister side effects, this one affecting north and central Italy primarily. One part cornmeal and three parts water—the ingredients couldn’t be more simple or cheap. But the cumulative effect of eating a diet of nothing but polenta could be devastating.

Although Italians will insist that corn was always grown in Italy, the versatile food came from the North American First Nations culture at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Within forty years, it had become the favourite crop of many farmers in northern Italy who planted a fast-growing variety of corn called cinquantino after the wheat, barley and buckwheat harvest in July, thus giving them two crops a year from the same fields. They sold the grains and ate the corn. By the nineteenth century it was called the “miracle crop” because it prepared the ground for wheat and provided the poor with cheap food. But something was wrong in the parts of Italy where the poor had nothing but polenta to eat, and it took over a century of suffering before the mystery was solved and even longer before Italians accepted the solution.

The disease caused by a lack of niacin (vitamin B3) in the diet that began to afflict Spain, France and Italy in the eighteenth century had no name until a Spanish doctor in 1740 called it pellagra, meaning sour skin, for the sufferer’s rough skin that developed scabby crusts. The afflicted became fearful, depressed, dizzy and eventually insane. By 1810, two thirds of the inmates in a large insane asylum in Milan were suffering from the malady. As the disease became endemic, authorities could not build enough asylums to hold all the pellagra patients and many had to remain at home.

By the turn of the twentieth century, as the rate of Italian emigration was reaching its peak, scientists in France and Spain discovered the link between pellagra and a deficiency of niacin. American First Nations people had eaten their corn in the form of hominy or ash bread, a process that released the important vitamin for the body’s use, but Europeans knew nothing of the liberating effect of ash or lime on corn. People eating a varied diet were not in danger, but people who could afford to eat only polenta were.

The Italian government ignored the scientific evidence and chose instead to launch a huge sanitation campaign to keep corn from being spoiled by “pellagra-causing microbes.” Some said pellagra was hereditary and nothing could be done for the sufferers. In the United States, a rumour that pellagra was infectious gave racists another reason to despise Italians. And a rumour that Italian food was contaminated with the disease made it difficult for stores selling Italian foodstuffs.

But within the Italian immigrant community in North America, where diets were more varied, the eating of polenta was a way to maintain a connection to the Old Country, and the making of polenta was a cherished ritual, usually performed by men. A coal miner named Albino Yori, who had come from Brez, Trento, at the turn of the twentieth century and settled in Ladysmith, had a Sunday-morning ritual. He put on his second-best suit and, instead of going to church, made polenta using a paddle he had carved out of the handle of a hoe.

Abbondio Franceschini, who came from Motta, Lombardy, made his weekly polenta in a tapered copper pot with brass fittings that fit into one of the openings on the top of his coal stove. Using a wooden paddle, he stirred continuously until the mixture had cooked to a thickness that would hold its shape. At that point he turned the pot upside down and banged it to release the polenta as a loaf onto a breadboard, where slices could be carved off for the rest of the week.

IN THE first decade of the twentieth century, the men who made polenta or grew fava beans or turned the lees from winemaking into grappa were coming to British Columbia in large numbers. But they were there to build railways, not to farm as they had in Italy, because Canadian politicians of the day were basing their immigration policies on the belief that Italians made poor farmers.

The Liberal government of Wilfrid Laurier, in particular his flamboyant minister of the interior, Clifford Sifton, wanted to encourage immigration, but only of the right sort of people. Sifton believed that southern Europeans, blacks, Jews and “Orientals” would not make good farmers by their very ethnic origin. He wanted settler farmers to fill up the vast emptiness of the west, but railway companies wanted labourers “willing to roam the country to take up whatever work was available.” Officially, Sifton got his way; in reality, it was the railways and other businesses that won. In the years leading up to World War I under the Liberals and even more so under the Conservatives after their election victory in 1911, the proportion of the workforce entering Canada that was classified as unskilled increased from 31 percent in 1907 to 43 percent in 1914. The ethnic composition changed too. Of the immigrants who entered Canada in 1907, 20 percent were from central and southern Europe; by 1913, the figure was 48 percent. Every year between 1901 and 1911, approximately 6,500 of these immigrants came from Italy.

The increase in numbers alarmed opponents of southern European immigration, who claimed that many of the newcomers were “professional vagrants . . . whose habits were repugnant to Canadian ideals [and] lowered the Canadian standard of living.” But a powerful B.C. railway construction company, Foley, Welch and Stewart, convinced the prime minister to lower the standards. Henceforth, loggers, miners and navvies would be defined not by their ethnic origin but by whether they were able to perform strenuous labour.

The reputation of southern Italians continued to decline during this period, and the more of them there were, the more threatening they seemed. They were deemed to be inferior people who lived in substandard conditions and were hot-blooded, prone to acts of violence and likely to be criminals. Their black hair and olive-coloured skin, a gift from the Mediterranean sun and from the genes of colonizing Greeks in pre-Roman times, made them look even more foreign. Buddy DeVito, remembering his youth in Trail, said,

They called us niggers too . . . A lot of time people from the South have got dark skin and when they go out in the sun they turn black . . . Italians were the Canadian version of niggers.

Feeding the prejudice against Italian immigrants was the fact that in 1911, two thirds of the Italian population of Canada lived in Montreal and Toronto in ghettos. That concentration of Italians reinforced the stereotypes, which were spread across the country by newspaper columnists such as the one who, when commenting on the trial of an Italian woman who had murdered her husband, opined that her execution might serve as a serious reminder to newcomers that they were expected to adopt more civilized standards. With his call “to repress the blood of the hot-blooded Southerner,” the columnist was pandering to the popular stereotype of “black Italians.”

AT THE museum in Revelstoke, there is a large map of Italy that shows the places of origin of the Italian families in the city and the arrival dates of the various branches of each family. Each region of Italy is represented, but the proportion of southerners to northerners in Revelstoke far exceeds the proportion shown by Italian statistics, which indicate that only one quarter of all Italian emigrants were from the south in the 1890s. By 1913, however, Italian figures showed that 50 percent of all Italian emigrants were from the south.

The exodus of southerners in increasing numbers demanded action by the Italian parliament. The problema del Mezzogiorno was now inseparable from the issue of emigration. A new law, the Royal Decree of 1901, acknowledged that emigration had become a necessity; that two or three thousand people a year had to emigrate if there was to be work for those who stayed behind; and that money sent from Italians abroad to the postal savings banks in their home villages had enabled conversion of the public debt and had been used to make loans to utilities throughout the country. One senator credited God with having ordained emigration as a way to help Italy out of its fiscal difficulties.

Having recognized the value of emigration, the politicians now turned to protecting the emigrants themselves. It was clear to the lawmakers that emigrants were likely to be outwitted and defrauded in the New World because they were shy, ignorant and incapable of looking after themselves. The new law insisted that dishonest officials and bureaucrats be replaced by honest ones who would assist emigrants free of charge wherever they were. It required emigrants to carry passports for travel outside of Europe, but the passport would be free instead of costing the equivalent of three days’ wages as it had before 1901. The theory was that all these measures would ensure the loyalty of the emigrants to Mother Italy even if they became citizens in their new countries.

The assumption that a law could protect emigrants from hundreds of corrupt or greedy mayors, prefects and sub-prefects within the country and from corrupt or greedy agents in the rest of the world was at best naive. And in fact, thirteen years later, in 1914, the law had been so ineffective that the foreign affairs minister would still be moved to say,

These great currents of our workers who go abroad resemble the currents of birds and fishes; the fishes are pursued by sharks seeking to devour them, the birds by falcons and other birds of prey seeking to ravish them, the emigrants are accompanied by a troop of exploiters eager to pounce upon and despoil them.

Although it was a term not used in Italy, the word most commonly used in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century North America for these sharks who lay in wait for the unsuspecting immigrant was padroni. It was a term often associated with exploitation or criminality, but could apply to anyone: labour recruiters, immigrant bankers, steamship and travel agents, saloon keepers, boarding house proprietors, interpreters, private postal agents, ethnic-newspaper publishers, work gang bosses, commissary and bunkhouse agents, barbers, undertakers, real estate and employment agents or friendly paesani like Felice Valle’s Nicola Cuneo—virtually any Italian with a little more experience, a little more literacy and a little more knowledge of English than the newcomer might be a padrone. And Canada, with its less restrictive immigration laws, gave padroni and employers a freer hand than did the United States at the turn of the twentieth century.

By 1910, the padrone system had become subtler and less ravenous. But there would always be someone with a new way to exploit immigrants: a company store that charged high prices for essentials or an employer who paid wages late or less than he promised, who deducted from their wages the cost of their transportation to and from remote worksites, who also had the contract for providing shelter and food and took his cut. The greatest abuses would occur when the economy was slack and a padrone demanded a commission in return for a job. Then the worker had to remain silent. Padroni existed in British Columbia too, but it was more likely to be employers—the railways, the mines—or employment agents in the east who exploited the immigrant Italian in the west.

Antonio Cordasco, the exclusive CPR employment agent for three or four years in the early twentieth century, serves as a classic example of an eastern employment agent. Late of Calabria, a former CPR crew foreman and, more recently, recruiter of strikebreakers, Cordasco had his office on St. James Street in Montreal right next door to CPR headquarters. The company paid him five dollars a day to recruit labour, but this was nothing compared with his other sources of income. He charged each new recruit ten dollars for his services; as agent to several steamship companies in the United States, he sold prepaid tickets to Italian emigrants; and, as if he had not wrung enough money out of Italian labour already, he supplied provisions to CPR work gangs at a markup of between 60 and 150 percent.

Cordasco’s scheme to provide ten thousand new navvies to build the proposed Grand Trunk Pacific (GTP) Railway in British Columbia would be his undoing, however. Thousands of Italians responded to Cordasco’s circulars and recruiting agents as they fanned out to New York and Boston and to Friuli and Calabria promising long-lasting jobs at $1.50 a day and contracts in Italian. The new arrivals began to fill the streets of Montreal in the fall of 1903 in preparation for the work that was to begin in the spring. While they had money they patronized Montreal businesses. When their money ran out and grocers and landlords grew reluctant to extend credit, they became a nuisance. With few other options, their only choice was to trust in Cordasco. So trusting were they that two thousand of them marched in a parade on a bitterly cold day in January 1904 to celebrate the “coronation” of Cordasco, who had styled himself “King of the Italian Laborers.”

By spring there were even more Italians roaming the streets of Montreal with no money, no food and no jobs. A royal commission heard testimony and issued a report. Cordasco admitted that the GTP was interested only in labour from Britain and northern Europe. The Canadian government passed a bill that curtailed private entrepreneurs, but the CPR in particular ignored it and the government, not wishing to alienate the CPR, failed to take action. In the meantime, Cordasco vanished.

But labour agencies flourished. The largest ones were in Toronto and Montreal, but the number of agents supplying Italian labour to British Columbia was growing. As early as 1890, agents in San Francisco had been charging strikebreakers $2.50 each for a chance to work in the Wellington mines. By 1913, forty-five of the three hundred private labour agencies in Canada, agencies that included the Salvation Army and the major railway companies, were situated in British Columbia.

Alberto Dini signed up hundreds of Italians to work on the CPR and the GTP, the latter having been forced to change its policies and hire large numbers of Italians both as labourers and, in 1912, as strikebreakers. Canadian railway companies also used private American agents to recruit labour; one of them, Stephen De Vita, had supplied labourers to the CPR from his office in New York. In 1904 he moved to Victoria and set his sights on recruitment for a more genteel project. Boasting of his highly placed contacts in Victoria and Ottawa, he petitioned the CPR for help in setting up a colony of Italian fruit growers on Vancouver Island. That he had recognized the farming skills of Italians did him no good. Five years later, having received no encouragement whatsoever, he was still asking for money to finance a recruitment trip to Italy.

The CPR didn’t need fruit growers; it needed navvies. If such workers had been available, the CPR, the GTP and the Canadian Northern Railway (CNoR) could have employed fifty to seventy thousand of them annually between 1907 and 1914. The CPR was building innovative new tunnels on its main line—the Spiral Tunnel, between Kicking Horse Pass and Golden, and then the Connaught, between Golden and Revelstoke—to lessen the steep grade. The GTP was building the British Columbia section of the line that would join Winnipeg to Prince Rupert via Edmonton. The CNoR was building a second transcontinental line whose B.C. section would connect the Yellowhead Pass to Vancouver through Kamloops.

IN SPEZZANO Piccolo, Calabria, Francesco Bafaro married Rosina Grecco, and they had a baby. With his grade five education—the maximum the village offered—Bafaro had gone further in school than most, but there was no paid work for him there. Rosina’s brother, who was in Revelstoke, offered to send Bafaro his fare. Rosina would stay behind with their son and wait for his instructions. He wrote to the mayor of the commune applying for a passport, confident that he qualified for a nulla osta, which meant he guaranteed that his family would be provided for, that he was not underage, had never been in jail and had served the required three years in the army.

Taking leave of family and friends in the village, he walked the hilly roundabout roads to Cosenza. At the train station, which was decorated with placards from steamship companies, he bought a third-class ticket and caught the train for Naples. The train was slow, the engine belched black smoke and, because there were no toilets on board, it stopped at every town. It headed north, skirting the bleak shore of the Tyrrhenian Sea at times, and at other times headed inland into the mountains, where castle ruins, ancient watchtowers and derelict villages poked through the fir forests.

There were other would-be emigrants on the train heading for Naples and a ship to the New World, but some of them, as many as half, had no passports. They had bribed officials in their villages or would quietly pass money to agents in Naples. Those who were illiterate, whether they had a passport or not, had to trust in the good intentions of strangers and ask someone who was literate to write their names and destinations on pieces of cardboard, which they pinned to their jackets.

Naples was old, dirty and overcrowded, but brimming with life. The migrants saw beggars everywhere. Herds of goats roamed the streets, dropping their feces to be carried on people’s feet into the houses. The harbour was easy to find, but it was hard for the migrants to get their bearings as the breeze off the bay set flapping the agency banners and American flags that marked the steamship ticket offices. The port had grown rapidly on the import of offshore coal that Italy needed to fuel its railways and on the export of people and the foodstuffs—wine, cheese, olive oil, garlic, macaroni—bound for Italian grocery stores in the New World. The migrants waited for the passengers who had just arrived from North America to disembark—the strutting americani from first class, the failed cafoni from steerage.

The voyage across the Atlantic would test them all—the seasick, the homesick, the ones who had never been farther from home than the next village. But Italy’s Royal Decree of 1901 had their interests at heart. Its long list of requirements for emigrant ships included the one that required ships to have bathtubs—an unsettling luxury to people unused to changing their underwear every day or taking their clothes off in front of strangers. On the back of each steamship ticket was a detailed list of food and drink that the ship was required to make available daily to Italians while on board: 300 grams of fresh bread, 160 grams of pasta, 50 of beans, 20 of olive oil, half a litre of wine—all of good quality—among the required twenty-one categories. Rice must be served four times a week, lentils once a week, wine vinegar five times a week—the list was precise and even included suggested menus for each day and the rule that a cup of good-quality coffee and a cookie be provided to each passenger every day.

The bureaucrats who drew up the list must have been thinking of their own food intake and not that of migrants who were accustomed to food nowhere near as varied and plentiful. But few Italian immigrants looking back over their journeys had anything to say about the food on board the ships, although they had much to say about the food on the almost week-long journey across North America to British Columbia on trains that were beyond the jurisdiction of the Royal Decree of 1901.

They told of having to buy their own food and not being able to speak enough English to find out where they could buy it, and then worrying that the train would leave without them when they got off at a station to find a store. They told of learning quickly that the simplest solution was to stock up at the first stop on sliced meat, cheese and bread—meat and cheese that would be unrefrigerated and bread that would grow more stale with each passing day.

THE COREA family of Kamloops likes to tell how the family patriarch, Antonio, coped with the mysteries of eating on the train when he came to British Columbia from Albi, Catanzaro, with thirty-five dollars in his pocket and no English in his vocabulary. Unlike most migrants, the sixteen-year-old Calabrian was eating his meals in the dining car. He heard someone else order “baconeggs,” and so he ate “baconeggs” for every meal until he arrived in Vancouver. There, because he was short, he qualified for a job carrying water with the CPR at Jackass Mountain in the Fraser Canyon.

Corea had seen a lot of the province by the time he opened a shoe repair business in Kamloops a decade later. There were lots of Italians in Kamloops, 99 percent of them living in Little Italy on Lorne, Seymour and Victoria Streets, where the CPR tracks parallel the South Thompson River in the vicinity of the Red Bridge. Most of them worked for the railway, but there were Italian bakers, grocers and restaurant owners too—there had been since the CPR came through in 1885, bringing hundreds of Italian navvies.

Kamloops had been attracting the occasional Italian for at least ten years before that. In a Coast Mountain rain shadow, the semi-arid climate—hot and dry in the summer, mild in the winter—reminded some people of California. Ponderosa pine, sagebrush, prickly pear cactus, rattlesnakes and black widow spiders added to the California impression in the valley where the North and South Thompson Rivers meet. The Oblate Mission that ministered to CPR navvies had already been there for two years when Kamloops became a railway division headquarters in 1880, a natural choice considering that the village had been a transportation hub since the fur trade began. The itinerant Father Coccola, who could speak to the navvies in Italian, used Kamloops as his home base.

Italians had been passing through this natural hub since Francesco Savona began his ferry service at the other end of Kamloops Lake in time for the Cariboo gold rush. The first Italian to stick around was the same Giovanni Sciutto who had been in business as a general provisioner in Victoria and Yale. He went into partnership in a bakery, grocery and restaurant with one Martino Gaglietto just when the CPR brought a lot more Italians to the area.

By the turn of the twentieth century there were also pool halls and more than one shoe repair shop. Some Italians had bought houses; others had built their own. They had planted gardens and fruit trees, and those who could afford the fees were sending their children to the Sisters of St. Ann Academy for a Roman Catholic education. Like so many communities in British Columbia, Kamloops had an Italian band, and like many Italian bands it appeared and disappeared as the interest and the number of musicians waxed and waned. In the case of the earliest Italian band in Kamloops, its end came when the bandmaster took off with all the instruments.

Settling in Kamloops made a lot of sense for Italians, many of whom were from the south. The CPR had become partial to employing Italians—35 percent of its workforce was Italian in 1904—and the climate was more akin to a Mediterranean one. Antonio Corea was just one of many who came from Calabria. About twenty kilometres as the crow flies over the mountains from Corea’s hometown of Albi is Colosimi, the home village of the Fuocos. When Domenico Fuoco left Colosimi for Canada, he chose Revelstoke as his destination because his father and brother had died of the flu there, but he soon moved to Kamloops to run a grocery store near the Red Bridge.

The reason why Fuoco left Revelstoke for Kamloops is unclear, but it could have been because Revelstoke had a reputation in those years as a place especially intolerant of Italians. When two or three prominent citizens of Revelstoke received Black Hand letters in the fall of 1908, fingers pointed immediately at the entire Italian community. Local newspapers fanned the flames of prejudice against Italians, and one urged employers to drive them out of town by refusing to hire them. A year later, lawyers defending three Italians charged with slitting the throat of a CPR freight checker, who also happened to be Italian, asked that the trial be moved from Revelstoke, where the foul deed had occurred, to Kamloops, because they felt their clients could not get a fair trial in Revelstoke “owing to the state of public feeling against Italians here at the present time.”

But Kamloops was no different when it came to anti-Italian prejudice. One Italian in particular had borne the brunt of it in 1903 when he was fired by the mayor from his job as a janitor for “political activity and his Italian origin.” Having fled his northern Italian hometown of Barcon, Veneto, after he cut another man’s cheek open with a knife, Alessandro DiMarchi was no angel. Whatever caused him to leave his first Canadian job with the CPR may or may not have had anything to do with his reputation “as a bit of a thug,” but being fired from his second job because he was an Italian indicates an unthinking acceptance of prejudice in the community.

No one could have accused DiMarchi of not working hard. He was always able to find a job. When his second wife, Agatha Basso, and two of his three daughters, Cesira and Italia-America (also called Clara), arrived in Kamloops in 1908, the family set up housekeeping in Little Italy. There was an older daughter, Teresa, from his first marriage and there would be other children: a son, Guglielmo, and a baby daughter who died of cholera infantum. Most of his descendants who lived into adulthood stayed in Kamloops, but it was an incident involving his daughter Cesira that secured the family’s place in the history of the city.

It happened in 1909 when Cesira was eight years old and was keeping an older friend company while the friend was babysitting. Two versions of what happened next have survived. One of her sons says there was a shootout on the street and she ran out into the crossfire. Her eldest daughter says the shooter came to the door and mistook Cesira for his former girlfriend. Whatever the circumstances, she took a bullet in the leg. The gunman jumped on a CPR train heading east with Cesira’s father in hot pursuit. The last time anyone saw the gunman alive was in Revelstoke that same day.

Cesira’s leg had to be amputated, leaving a seven-inch stump. She had been a student at a private school, but her education came to an end when she had to start travelling from one town to another to raise money for an artificial limb. And though she had learned to speak English well from the First Nations children living on the other side of the Red Bridge, she had never learned to read and write.

When Cesira, now known as Cecilia, was seventeen, she met and married Antonio Comazetto, who, like most of her own relatives, came from Veneto, where his family raised cattle on a farm leased from an aristocratic landowner. He had been in British Columbia for four years, working in Lytton until a job ended, in Ocean Falls until he grew tired of the coastal rain, in Trail until he could no longer stand working in the smelter and finally in Cherry Creek, where he worked as a section foreman for the CPR. Cherry Creek was close enough to Kamloops that he could come into town on the speeder after work. It was on one of those nights that he met Cecilia.

Soon after their marriage, the Comazettos started a dairy farm, first near the Red Bridge and later on land at the north end of Kamloops in Valleyview. There, a collection of brothers and other relatives raised corn, hay, mangels and pigs, and eventually they built houses for seven family members. Four of Antonio and Cecilia’s sons became managers and delivery men for the Noca Dairy. If only the politicians who deemed Italians to be poor farmers could have seen the success the Comazettos made of farming.

THE COMAZETTOS were in the minority, however, in choosing to farm in their new country. The majority of Italian permanent immigrants to British Columbia, though many of them had come from farming stock, were working in industrial jobs or owned small businesses.

Angelo and Sabrina Teti were certainly not farmers. She ran a boarding house and he speculated in real estate. Speculators are drawn to centres of population and so the Tetis chose to live in Vancouver in 1903. They were at the vanguard of Italian families who were moving into what had become, in just fifteen years, British Columbia’s biggest city. The tree-lined street where the Tetis bought a large frame house was in Strathcona, the district that lies at the heart of Old Vancouver between Gastown and False Creek east of Main Street. When the Tetis arrived, most of their neighbours were Scots, Irish and English. By 1910, however, the focus of power in Vancouver had shifted from the East End, as it came to be known, to Georgia and Granville Streets, and the British residents of Strathcona had moved to better houses in the West End or Grandview.

There were Japanese, Yugoslavian, Russian, Scandinavian and Italian immigrant families among those who bought the empty houses. The majority, however, were Italian, and one quarter of them provided housing for the other three quarters, most of whom were single. Fifteen hundred itinerant Italians—off-duty loggers, miners, fishermen, navvies and the unemployed—filled the frame houses to the rafters and paid for a bed, laundry and sometimes board; the sense of belonging and being cared for cost them nothing. The women who ran the boarding houses to supplement the family income or because their priest asked them to worked hard for the money they earned.

In the Tetis’ house on Atlantic Street, Sabrina looked after ten boarders, mostly loggers, but she didn’t cook for them—it was enough that she did their laundry. When they came in from months in the bush, she made them leave their filthy, flea-infested clothes in the yard, where she used a stick to pick up each garment, hold it under a tap, then throw it into boiling water before taking it inside to wash it properly. Her daughter Violet summed up her mother’s life in this way: “She had to wash the clothes and clean the house and every nine months she was pregnant.”

While Sabrina looked after her boarders and babies—one boy, the rest girls—her husband, Angelo, bought real estate, loaned money, made deals and threw his weight around. Violet Teti remembered what her father said to her mother one morning when he saw her combing their daughters’ hair outside in the yard.

“You’re not going to stand there with a comb in your hand all morning combing their hair.” We girls didn’t know what was going to happen. So he just took the scissors, and then afterwards, the razor on our heads. We put our hand on our hair—it was all gone. Beautiful hair, flying all over the yard.

Like any Italian papa, Angelo called the shots. He expected his wife to be industrious and obedient and stay in her world of the home and make it a place of refuge for him. Doing laundry for bush-hardened loggers was acceptable however, because she could do it at home and it brought in money. That was the way life was in Italy, and that was the way it was for the 240 women who lived in Vancouver’s Piccola Italia in those early days.

But many people who spent their childhoods in Vancouver’s Little Italy at that time have good memories of living on the shore of False Creek when it was four times as big as it is now and extended as far eastward as Clark Drive. Shingle mills and sawmills dominated the shoreline, but the summer waters of False Creek belonged to children on homemade rafts and courting couples in rowboats, and the winter ice belonged to skaters of all ages.

Little Italy was shabby and rundown, but its streets were full of life lived in public, the way Italians do. Merchants in horse-drawn buggies or children on bicycles delivered groceries and bread to customers’ homes. Wooden sidewalks offered respite from the muddy streets. Families with boarders crammed into second-floor bedrooms opened businesses on the main floor or at the back.

Giovanni Battistoni’s Venice Bakery and its large brick oven occupied the backyard of a house on Union Street. In the days before he could afford to hire an assistant, Battistoni, an experienced baker, mixed, weighed, shaped, baked and delivered as many as 240 loaves of bread a day. Being covered with flour and sweat all day did not interest his brother, Luigi, however; he owned a tailor shop and paid special attention to the way he dressed. In white-striped pants and a black jacket with a carnation boutonniere in his lapel, Luigi made una bella figura. Italian miners and loggers understood this impulse to make a good impression; they too wanted to look their best on the streets of Little Italy after months spent in isolated logging camps up the coast. On their way to their boarding houses, they stopped at Luigi’s shop to pick up their city suits and hats from the glass case he used to store their clothes while they were away making money.

ANGELO CALORI knew what it was like to work in mining and railway camps, but by 1905 when he posed in front of the hollow tree in Stanley Park with his fancy buggy and stunning white horse, he could afford to spend as much as he wanted to make una bella figura. There he was, wearing plaid trousers, a plain jacket over a waistcoat, leather gloves and a white-banded homburg. Closer observation would have revealed the inch-long gold nugget mounted on his tie pin, his gold watch fob and the black cane that always accompanied him with its ornate gold handle inscribed with his initials, A.B.C.

Calori would be known in later life as the patriarch of Vancouver’s Italian community, but he had begun his life in British Columbia as a twenty-year-old immigrant from Liguria looking for work in the coal mines of Vancouver Island. The year was 1882—just five years after Robert Dunsmuir first hired Italians as strikebreakers for the Wellington mines. That Calori was able, by 1888, to learn English and acquire enough money working in the mines and on construction of the CPR on the mainland to buy an old wooden building on Powell Street—reputed to be the only building left standing after the 1886 Vancouver fire—is testimony to his determination to become successful and wealthy. A year before he bought the building, he had been a coal miner; now, with the help of his brother, Giuseppe, he was the proprietor of the European Hotel, with immediate plans to enlarge the building and change its name to the more grand Hotel Europe.

By 1890, the number of warehouses and hotels in Gastown spoke of Vancouver’s rapid growth as the new terminus of the CPR main line and a shipping and distribution centre. Cordova Street was the main commercial thoroughfare and the electric streetcar line running its length was proof of it. The Hotel Europe did a brisk business providing meals and accommodation to businessmen as well as to Italian labourers, but no one now living, including Calori’s descendants, knows for sure how he acquired enough money in the following decade to finance the construction of the landmark building that graces the site to this day.

This much is known: Calori’s business had been strong enough to survive the severe worldwide depression of the early 1890s, and the jewellery fashioned from gold nuggets that his descendants now possess says that he had benefitted in some way from the Klondike gold rush a few years later. The family can only assume that the money that paid for the jewellery, built the hotel and bought large amounts of Vancouver real estate in the years to come was money wrought from gold.

Word of the Klondike gold rush had reached the outside world when the steamer Excelsior arrived in San Francisco on June 16, 1897, and prospectors who had spent the winter on the Yukon River staggered down the gangplank laden with $750,000 worth of gold dust. By September, thousands of prospectors were on their way up the coast to the head of the Lynn Canal in the Alaska panhandle to begin the overland route to the goldfields in Yukon over the Chilkoot and White Passes, packing a year’s worth of supplies acquired in Seattle and Vancouver.

Calori’s name does not appear in any gold rush records in Dawson City, the logical archival repository, but after the gold rush he began to wear the gold nugget jewellery; despite volatilities in the economy triggered by the Boer War, the explosive growth of Vancouver, the long-awaited construction of the Panama Canal and the New York bank panic of 1907, followed by sudden unemployment in British Columbia, he was able to build his new hotel. He commissioned the architects John Parr and Thomas Fee to design an Edwardian building for the triangular site next door to the Hotel Europe between Powell and Alexander where they merge into Water Street.

The beautiful, wedge-shaped structure was inspired by New York City’s Flatiron Building, which, thanks to new technology, was the first tall reinforced-concrete building in the world when it was constructed five years before. The architects designed the new Hotel Europe using the same technology. It was the first fireproof hotel in western Canada, its floors were marble, its railings brass, but it was the flat brick walls and sparse decorations that made it stand out among the more ornate buildings on Water Street.

A FEW blocks inland, scruffy and crowded, Little Italy flourished. Rats and cockroaches inhabited the boarding houses. Bootleggers thrived. Most Italians made wine for their own use and boarding houses sold it to their lodgers by the glass, but the real bootleggers were in the liquor delivery business. It was a real bootlegger who loaned Alphonso Benedetti the money to buy out his partner in Benny’s Ice Cream Parlour.

Since Benny’s Ice Cream was the place to gamble at punchboard, it was fitting that the money Benedetti used to buy the store was the bootlegger’s proceeds from one night of gambling. All Benedetti had had to do to set up was to buy a board from a distributor who just happened to be in the neighbourhood. The punchboard was small and full of holes, each containing a rolled-up slip of paper with symbols printed on it. The gambler paid a small amount of money for the privilege of pushing a slip out of a hole in the hope that it entitled him to a prize. Only successful gamblers who dealt in real money, however, could afford to buy the expensive cigars Benedetti sold in his store along with the banana splits and the boxed chocolates.

Angelo Teti could have afforded one of those cigars. By 1914, the father who had shaved his daughters’ heads owned a lot of real estate, including the Sylvia Apartments on English Bay and the Royal Hotel on Water Street, and had anglicized his name to Tate. Included in his holdings was the mortgage on the home of his paesano Mario Montenario. Later, when Montenario found himself unable to pay the mortgage, Tate threatened to evict him. Rather than give in, Montenario succumbed to the urging of his wife and confronted Tate in the doorway of a real estate office at Main and Georgia, fired three fatal bullets into Tate’s back and side and then surrendered to police.

Both Mrs. Tate and Mrs. Montenario were pregnant when they attended Montenario’s murder trial, but Montenario’s grieving widow put on the better show. This woman, who had urged her husband to use the gun in the first place, stood in front of the judge, her belly prominent, her red hair matching her temperament, and said, “How have you got the heart to hang the father of this unborn child?” The judge sentenced Montenario to life in prison, but some years later, he escaped from the New Westminster penitentiary and disappeared into legend.

A year after Tate’s murder, his only son, twenty-one-year-old Fio, joined the army. When his mother heard what he had done, she tried, unsuccessfully, to buy him out, and when he came home from boot camp in Victoria to say goodbye to her before he left for the battlefields of Europe, the distraught woman, wearing only a flannelette nightgown, followed her son out into the street.

Sabrina’s troubles continued unabated. Fio died of shrapnel wounds in the Battle of Ypres; her teenaged daughter, Nellie, survived a gunshot wound to the head fired by a misguided boarder who wanted to marry her; and fourteen-year-old Violet married Alphonso Benedetti, owner of Benny’s Ice Cream Parlour and a man many years her senior.

So young and uninformed was Violet that when she became pregnant, she thought the baby would come out of her stomach. After the birth, she fled to her mother’s house and lived there for six months until her mother made her go back to her husband. Benedetti worked long hours and he didn’t make much money—“Some days he never took in two bucks.” But customers liked the ice cream parlour, liked to sit around the pot-bellied stove in the middle of the floor. A more settled Violet came to appreciate the aroma of the chestnuts they roasted on top of the stove and the orange peels she burned to take away the smell of the cigars.

IN THE fifteen or so years before World War I, Italians, southern Italians in particular, had gained a reputation in the wider Canadian culture as people who lived in substandard conditions and were prone to acts of violence and crime. The archbishop of Vancouver fretted to the apostolic delegate that many Italians spent their Sundays drinking beer and whisky, activities that produced only quarrels and scandals. Italian community leaders were concerned too and had begun to organize activities that would make the Italian community more stable. The move toward stability had begun in 1905 when Oblate priests bought a Presbyterian church at Keefer and Campbell and reconsecrated it as the Sacred Heart Church. In the same year, fifty-nine men founded the Sons of Italy Mutual Aid Society. Such societies or lodges were common in Italy and would play an important part in the New World, as working-class Italians sought to provide themselves with a sense of community, a social safety net—medical coverage, funeral benefits, etc.—and a buttress against racial discrimination. The reputation Italians had as strikebreakers and the resulting antipathy between them and labour unions made mutual aid societies all the more important in the early immigration years.

The founding membership of Vancouver’s Sons of Italy lodge, however, included men like Angelo Calori and, a few months later, his son-in-law, William Gennaro Ruocco, men who had moved into the middle class but understood the importance of the organization in the community. Ruocco was from the south, one of over two hundred immigrants in Vancouver from Castelgrande, Potenza, a village east of Naples, but Calori was from the north and the lodge included members from all parts of Italy. This was necessary in a city where the Italian community was relatively small, unlike those in large urban centres in the United States and in eastern Canada. In 1911, however, a group of mostly northerners broke away and founded the Veneta Benevolent Society under the leadership of Filippo Branca, a man described as “an adventurer from Milano.”

Despite his apparent move to separate northerners from southerners, Branca eventually rejoined the Sons of Italy and would maintain membership in both lodges. The blurring of the barriers between northerners and southerners in those early lodges is an example of an additional, and probably unanticipated, benefit of lodge membership. Italians think of other regions, indeed other villages, as if they were other countries, but in Vancouver before World War I, they lived next door to Italians from places they had never heard of. It was necessary, therefore, for them to suppress these distinctions, to unify or else surrender to racial discrimination. They had to show the wider society in Vancouver that they were from a unified country called Italy. This national feeling was a New World phenomenon, one that has barely taken hold even in modern Italy.

The Sons of Italy lodge in Vancouver missed being the first Italian lodge in British Columbia by six years. That distinction goes to the Giordano Bruno lodge, which was founded in 1899 in the gold and copper boomtown of Rossland; the Felice Cavallotti lodge followed one year later in Extension, where the Dunsmuir family had recently opened new coal mines; Italian lodges followed in Michel in the East Kootenays in 1903 and in Trail in 1905. Many more would appear all over the province. Each was a reflection of the need for community and succour for men from small agricultural communities where help in times of need was only a neighbour away.

Help from a paesano was essential in the British Columbia that Francesco Bafaro came to when he emigrated from Spezzano Piccolo, Calabria, in 1905 or 1906. The province was not disposed toward Italians. But Bafaro had a family to support back in Italy and he knew what he had to do to succeed.

Like many southerners, he was short in stature, but he was a handsome man and his big hands knew how to work hard. Unlike many of his compatriots, he could read and write Italian, and while working at his first job that winter as a section man mending tracks and replacing ties on the CPR main line out of Golden, on the other side of the Rogers Pass from Revelstoke, he spent his spare time at Miss Ouse’s night school class learning to read and write English. Because he was the only literate Italian in Golden, he signed for the entire crew’s paycheques. But Francesco hated being outside in the winter, so he moved to Revelstoke, boarded with Mrs. Pantuso, who was also from Spezzano Piccolo, and took an inside job in the roundhouse as a machinist’s helper.

His wife and son were still in Spezzana Piccolo when the sixteen-month-old boy died of pneumonia. But when his wife, Rosina, joined him in Revelstoke in 1909, the couple filled the little house Francesco built in Revelstoke’s Little Italy with five more children: Michela in 1910, Luigi in 1911, Esterina in 1913, Ernesto in 1914 and Frank in 1921.

Frank grew up to be a shoemaker, learning the trade from an elderly Italian. He moved to Vancouver and married his non-Italian girlfriend, Sheila. For thirty-five years, Frank sat in the front window of his shoemaker shop on Denman Street offering while-you-wait service to people who needed their shoes repaired. Then, tired of city traffic, he and Sheila moved back to Revelstoke, and Frank repaired shoes for another ten years.

When he retired, he devoted himself to gardening—that most Italian of activities. The large garden behind his house across the Illecillewaet River from Revelstoke’s Little Italy grew peas, onions, beets, carrots, corn and enough broad and pole beans to make bean soup, bean stew and pasta with bean sauce all winter long.

Frank brought tradition and poetry to his garden, like every Italian gardener. One man in Nanaimo planted his lettuce on a rising moon to prevent it from going to seed; another planted on a falling moon for the same reason. A man in Ladysmith grew beets not because he liked to eat them but because of how good they looked when they were growing. And although radicchio is bitter and is the first lettuce to bolt, three brothers in Fernie made it the mainstay of their gardens simply because it is Italian lettuce.

An Italian’s garden shows him at his best, but it does not make him sentimental. He may grow garlic, all manner of vegetables, several types of lettuce, grapes, various kinds of berries and herbs—camomile, rosemary, sage, basil, oregano—but he doesn’t grow flowers because he can’t eat them. His love of gardening is a reflection of the importance Italians place on freshness in the food they eat, but growing food is something Italians have been doing for centuries. Gardening is a modern shadow of an agricultural past, a past that most Italian immigrants had to ignore if they were to find a place for themselves in the railway-centred economy of British Columbia at the turn of the twentieth century.