WHEN SERAFINA and Giovanni Ferrarelli left San Giovanni in Fiore for Canada with their three children in 1949, they were one of the first families to come from this town in Calabria that would send so many of its citizens to Fernie after the end of World War II. The family had a troubled journey, and the trouble began as soon as they got to Naples, where an official rejected Serafina’s passport because her photo was not clear. “‘Is no you,’” Serafina says, imitating the officer. “I told him, ‘Is me.’ Oh yeah. I got lots of trouble there.”
The authorities held her and her family back for fourteen days. Fourteen days of sitting in a room waiting to be called over a loudspeaker, being fingerprinted, being watched. Finally, the family was allowed to depart on a ship that was, as it happened, on its final voyage. The Su Biesca was beautiful but no match for the job at hand. She had to be towed into the dock at Genoa when her engine failed and required repair. Once on the Atlantic, she was too light for the storms that exaggerated the ship’s movement; water leaked into the luggage compartment. The voyage to New York took fourteen days. The train trip to Fernie took five. By the time the Ferrarellis reached their destination and unpacked, their clothes were mouldy. But Serafina was philosophical. “Well, what are you gonna do? You gotta come.”
POSTWAR ITALY was in turmoil. A referendum in 1946 had thrown out the monarchy and established a republic. Parties from all segments of the political spectrum—Fascists, Christian Democrats, Socialists and Communists—were fighting for supremacy. The economy was in ruins and the lack of jobs had turned Italy into an enormous reservoir of unemployed workers. Thousands had no alternative but to emigrate.
Postwar Canada was a stable country with an enormous number of jobs and not enough workers. As a founder of the United Nations and having set up a new bulk labour program, Canada had a reputation to uphold as a refuge for the desperate. But, as always, Canada was not interested in another big influx of Italians. Not only were they poor and perceived to be unskilled, but they were still enemy aliens because their country had not yet signed a peace treaty with Canada. Railway and mining companies, however, were once again demanding a new pool of cheap labour. With the Italian government, desperate for a solution to its unemployment problem, adding its voice, Canada consented to include Italians in the bulk labour program.
The original purpose of this program was to move displaced persons from European refugee camps to countries in need of their labour by paying for their transportation and giving them guaranteed employment for one or two years with the possibility, at the end, of being allowed to stay. The program was true to its name: for the privilege of labouring in harsh conditions and the possibility of staying in Canada, human beings were contracted in bulk like commodities.
The government expected the ratio of northern to southern Italians to be 70 to 30, but only 11 percent came from the north, a figure that concerned Canadian officials, except those in the Department of Labour who knew that southerners were “genuine farmers, hard working men, used to tilling the soil.”
The new Department of Citizenship and Immigration, wary of old policies that allowed large numbers of unskilled, unaccompanied workers into the country to build railways, was determined to set things right. The sponsorship program, which started in January 1948, the same month Canada opened an embassy in Rome near St. Peter’s Square, would allow Canadian Italians to sponsor both immediate and distantly related family members.
Measured in numbers of immigrants, the program was a staggering success. In contrast to the 146 Italians admitted in 1946, 3,202 were admitted in 1948. From 1950 until immigration policy changed again in 1967, a broadened definition of admissible classes brought in almost 20,000 Italians per year. The new definition of acceptable immigrants included any European who could “satisfy the Minister that he is suitable, having regard to the climatic, social, educational, labour and other requirements of Canada.”
IN REVELSTOKE, Caterina Berarducci sent for her cousin Concetta, and “after that it was just a parade [of family members].” Berarducci brought over at least six male relatives and found them jobs so that they could afford to send for their fiancées. She also found a third wife for Francesco Bafaro when his second wife died after twenty-six years of marriage. Like his previous wives, Teresa came from Spezzano Piccolo.
Pietro Aiello came to Canada as part of the bulk labour program. As many immigrants had done before them, he and a group of twelve men, which included his uncle, had waited to leave Italy until the harvest was finished in late fall. After their ship landed at Pier 21 in Halifax on Christmas Eve, the group went on to Montreal, where everyone, including Aiello’s uncle, was told to go to Thunder Bay except for Aiello himself, who was told to go to Timmins, Ontario, to cut trees. He didn’t make a fuss, however. “I said no . . . I go with God’s fortune.” But when March rains melted the snow at Timmins and the job ended, he found himself in an army camp at Ajax, Ontario, waiting for work with three thousand other immigrants. It wasn’t until June that he got another job, this time in Raymond, Alberta, working the sugar beet fields.
I wasn’t a farmer. I was a bush worker. But if I refuse to go they would cut half of my food—before nobody want to move, but they toughen the law you gotta go where there’s a job. [But] you can’t make money working on a beet farm.
He could make money in a logging camp, however, which is where he went next, but that job lasted only two weeks because he and his two Italian workmates cut more trees than the company could transport before winter came. Chasing a rumour that wages were higher in British Columbia, he paid for a bus ticket with his last six dollars, climbed on board and got off at Fernie because a fellow passenger said it was a good place to get logging work.
Aiello and Fernie clicked from the start. The drinking water agreed with him and the owner of the Central Hotel, where he rented a room, was from San Giovanni in Fiore, just eleven kilometres away from his hometown. “I jumped on him and I kissed him . . . You talk no English. We talk Italian, not even Italian dialect, ’cause not from the same town.”
But Aiello was ashamed because he had not been able to send much money home. He began saving and within a year was able to sponsor his wife and children. Then he sponsored his brothers and sisters, then people related to him by marriage. His daughter calculates that there are now a thousand people in western Canada who are here because of her father. He had to take financial responsibility for each one for five years, but he knew none of them would let him down. He gave them a little start and then they looked after themselves.
In eastern Canada, large numbers of rural immigrants were going to their relatives in the cities, where there were no jobs for the unskilled. There were, however, skilled workers waiting in Europe who could not emigrate because they had no family in Canada to sponsor them and they couldn’t pay their own transportation costs. To address this problem, Canada began the Assisted Passage Loan Scheme, which granted interest-free loans to immigrants whose services were urgently required. These changes were part of Canada’s postwar overhaul of immigration policy, which also abolished the non-preferred designation that had singled out eastern and southern Europeans for so long.
But Canada was still wary of Italians. Their home country was tolerant of Communism, and the Canadian government had been afraid of that extreme left-wing ideology since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. The discovery in 1946 of a Soviet espionage ring active in Canada had seemed to confirm the country’s fears. The RCMP, with its power to block immigrant visas, was excluding refugees from countries under the control of the Soviet Union and subjecting suspected Communists from France, Italy and Britain to strict security checks.
The Communist Party had two million members in Italy just after the war, not quite enough to defeat the Christian Democrats but enough to attract almost one third of the votes. The Christian Democrats’ victory had reassured the Canadian government enough for Ottawa to open an embassy, but for at least the next decade, the RCMP and consular officials would watch carefully for security risks as thousands upon thousands of Italians made the journey to Rome to apply for admission to Canada.
In the villages of the Natisone River valley, close to the Yugoslav border, the metaphoric postwar dividing line in Europe between countries with Communist governments and those without—the so-called Iron Curtain—was very real. Guardhouses overlooked the steep valleys; security guards patrolled the villages; residents had to block the light from their windows at night. From one of these villages, a woman barely out of girlhood took a bus to the nearest city and boarded a train for Rome. She was bringing her documents and medical records to the Canadian embassy in the hope that she would get permission to emigrate to British Columbia to join her fiancé.
A friend who used to live in her village met her when she reached Rome and took her home for the night. The next morning, the friend’s nine-year-old son guided the young woman to the embassy to complete what she had every reason to believe was a routine procedure. But when the official behind the desk saw which village she was from, he refused to give her the necessary papers and accused her of being a Communist. In a loud voice, he said, “We want honourable people in Canada.”
The young woman was devastated. She stumbled out of the embassy in tears. Her guide showed her the way to St. Peter’s Basilica, where she cried and prayed for what seemed like hours. Not only was she not a Communist, she wasn’t even old enough to vote. She would never be able to join her fiancé; she couldn’t telephone her parents for advice because there were no telephones in her village. When she climbed on the next train going north, she was heartbroken.
A few days later, the postino told her there was a letter for her at the post office in the next village. Inside the envelope were her travel documents. She has never found out why the official changed his mind, but strong in her memory is his rudeness and the terrible feeling she had when he accused her of being a Communist. She also remembers the beautiful East Indian woman she saw in the basilica, dressed in turquoise green with a ruby in the middle of her forehead. She was the first Asian woman the young Italian had ever seen, and she had almond-shaped eyes like some of the statues of the Madonna she had seen all her life.
By 1957 there was a backlog of 52,000 people with Canadian relatives eager to sponsor them but who had yet to pass RCMP scrutiny. Adding to the delay were the Canadian bureaucrats who still believed the old stereotype that Italians were poor farmers and the special interest groups that were pressuring the government to restrict the number of Catholics admitted and restore the non-preferred designation for Italians.
The Canadian government continued to be more interested in “the sturdy men of the industrialized north over the peasant men of the south.” But service in the armed forces had shown the men of the south a world beyond their country’s borders, and they continued to emigrate in large numbers.
SOUTH OF Prince Rupert, on the ragged west coast of British Columbia, there was a desperate need for skilled and unskilled workers at the head of a deep channel that reaches eighty kilometres into the mainland. It was 1951 and an audacious and controversial plan was about to come to fruition. The proposed Aluminum Company of Canada Ltd. (Alcan) aluminum smelter at Kitimat, with its huge need for electrical power, would require nothing less than a full-scale rearrangement of large stretches of geography to reverse the flow of the Nechako River, drain several lakes in Tweedsmuir Park and bore a sixteen-kilometre-long tunnel through the Cascade Mountains. Providing a stable foundation for the smelter on the mud flats of the river delta would involve bringing gravel down a six-and-a-half-kilometre-long conveyor to the head of Douglas Channel, which itself required dredging to remove accumulated silt and gravel that had washed downstream with the Kitimat River.
A grandiose project such as this required a huge workforce, and, as with the railway projects of the past, many of the workers would be the poor people of Europe. Italians were not the largest group of the forty-seven nationalities represented in Kitimat, but by the time the smelter was in production, more than eighty Italian families had settled in the town.
There were Italians, too, among the single men who had come early in the construction phase. To house these construction workers, Alcan had moored the paddlewheel steamer Delta King at the head of the channel. Single men living on a boat in the middle of the wilderness with no road out, unlikely to speak one another’s languages, working hard all day with nothing to do in the evening but gamble, drink and fight—this presented a problem for the company, which chose to tolerate the gambling but limited the drinking and fighting by deducting the cost of any damage from the offenders’ paycheques.
Tony Rigoni had read about the need for workers in the Italian edition of Reader’s Digest. He was nineteen and a trained carpenter, but because he couldn’t speak English, he was hired as a labourer. His roommate on board the Delta King spoke only Norwegian. Those were the loneliest years of Tony’s life.
Italo Sguazzin was luckier than Tony. His brother, Ermes, who had been lured away from a CPR crew by the big money Alcan was offering, was already in Kitimat to greet him when he arrived. Italo liked to say that he came to Canada to buy a motorcycle, but it was hunger and unemployment that had driven the experienced stonemason to leave his close-knit family in San Giorgio di Nogaro, Friuli. His brother returned to Italy when he had saved enough money to buy a house; Italo stayed in Kitimat and married Cynthia (Cindy) Le Blanc, an artist and schoolteacher from Saskatchewan.
An Italian man marrying a non-Italian woman was not as rare as it had been when Bruno Mellado married Mary Anne Thompson in 1871 in Nanaimo or even when Daniele Gigliotti married Teresa Mulligan in Fernie after World War I, but it was still unusual. In the 1930s in Powell River, when three of Fidês Prissinotti’s cousins married outside their ethnic group, the Italian community felt sorry for them, but the number of Italians who had done the same thing was growing. By 1941, 41 percent of Italian Canadians were married to non-Italians, a higher percentage to have married outside their ethnic group than among most other nationalities, including the English and the French. The three Quarin brothers were never told to marry Italian, and all of them married non-Italians.
It is the Italian side that seems to win out in many of these marriages. Many of the most committed members of Italian lodges are the partners with no Italian blood in their veins. Teresa Gigliotti had fought to run her kitchen according to her Irish traditions, but when she cooked Italian, her husband supervised her to make sure she got it right. Cindy and Italo Sguazzin have blended the best of both cultures. She has more education than he has, but he supported her decision to do postgraduate work and took over the kitchen duties. Perhaps the partnership works because his parents taught him to be tolerant, a tolerance that was obvious when he, a man from the north, thought nothing of living with a family from the south when he first moved to Kitimat.
To have done so was unusual. The problema del Mezziogiorno that had divided northerners from southerners for generations was still present. Cindy Sguazzin became aware of it at a dance in Kitimat when someone asked a woman from Calabria to dance without first asking her father for permission. The northerners in the hall, ever looking for a reason to laugh at the old-fashioned southerners, started stamping their heels and shouting “Terroni, terroni,” an epithet that translates as “clodhoppers” or “big dirt guys,” to which southerners respond with “Polentoni,” to remind northerners that they have been poor, too.
Even the location of the geographical line between north and south was a subject for disagreement. Most Italians said that the dividing line was at Rome, where the peninsula has been divided along the Via Salaria since the days of the Roman Republic. But as far as an educated man from mid-twentieth-century Veneto was concerned, the line was at Bologna. Everyone south of that city in Emilia-Romagna was a terrone, according to him. He turned off the radio whenever the station played a traditional southern song such as “Funiculi Funicula” or “Come Back to Sorrento.”
Despite the vast amount of money spent in an attempt to bring the southern standard of living up to that of the north, the south still struggles today, and when the Italian consul general in Vancouver said in 1999 that north-south animosity no longer exists, he was being diplomatic. People from the south still say northerners aren’t real Italians, and people from the north can’t resist telling jokes about southerners.
At the southern tip of Italy, Sicily’s Mount Etna periodically threatens to erupt. During one such period of activity a banner appeared over the Grand Canal in Venice that said, “Forza Etna.” Urging a volcano to erupt is as offensive as the joke that made the rounds after the 1980 earthquake, centred in the south in the region of Basilicata, that killed up to three thousand people and devastated over one hundred towns. “The north sent a shipment of trousers to the survivors,” so the joke goes, “but they sent them back because the pants had no pockets.”
Northerners point proudly to how quickly they had recovered from their own massive earthquake in Friuli four years before. At that time, Il Terremoto was the worst earthquake Italy had seen in sixty years. It killed almost one thousand people and damaged twenty towns and villages. Generous government grants have paid for the rebuilding of the towns and villages and the roads connecting them and provided thousands of jobs in doing so. Family homes long abandoned by emigrants have been repaired and modernized for the use of visiting family members from afar. Villages are reborn and tourists flock to rent the houses, spend money in the stores and “live like real Italians.” Northerners have a right to be proud of this accomplishment, but their criticism of the south, which has been slow to recover from its more serious earthquake four years later, denies the complex nature of the problems there.
“Southerners are much friendlier than people north of Rome or even Naples,” says a former emigrant who has returned to Calabria. “They’re all Austrians and Germans in the north.” In Liguria, a sophisticated restaurateur says, “The south is a different country—very beautiful but not like us.”
The story of postwar emigrants, whether from the north or the south, is one of contradiction as they move to the New World, embrace its ways and prosper, but preserve the food and tradition of their Italian childhood even as the Old Country leaves those traditions behind. Modern British Columbians of Italian origin who emigrated after World War II, successful professionals and business people, still eat baccalà, handmade sausage and salami and still make their own wine in the old way.
Fred Luvisotto, a retired teacher, remembers the smell of baccalà. It was how he knew, as he was walking down China-town Hill toward his Nanaimo home, that his nonna was cooking it for supper. Eating salt cod had been a tradition in his grandparents’ house in Friuli, where it was poor people’s food—the cheapest meal available for Roman Catholics whose religion required them to eat fish on Friday, back in the days when everyone did what the priest told them to do.
You either loved baccalà or you hated it. Fred found the smell sickening and so did his mother. But for those, like Fred’s father, who loved it, baccalà was comfort food. Fred’s nonna bought the cod in hard, dried slabs from the butcher and soaked it for a couple of days in several changes of water to get rid of most of the salt. Then she pounded it for tenderness, cooked it in tomato sauce until it flaked and, adding her own special touch, put in sardines for extra flavour. That fancy restaurants in Europe and North America now serve refined versions of the salty cod would have made Fred’s nonna shake her head in disbelief.
When it comes to making wine Italian style, red is the only colour, according to Tony Sedola. As a younger man, he had a licence that allowed him to import thousands of cases of California grapes—preferably Zinfandel—every year to British Columbia for Italian home winemakers. Now he makes wine for himself and his guests. Every fall and winter he and various of his friends make their own wine according to a method that is a blend of art, science, superstition and tradition.
They crush the grapes in wooden winepresses about the size of a wringer washer, slatted and stubby, that reside for the rest of the year in a corner of the back garden. They leave the stems in for the tannin and let wild yeast do the fermentation. They measure the specific gravity by watching for when the crushed-grape mash starts to sink and the juice starts to rise. They wait for a falling moon to rack the bottles in November, January and April and are careful not to let the wine start fermenting again when the weather threatens to get warmer. They store their wine in demijohns, decant it into recycled bottles of all descriptions and offer a visitor “a glass of juice” at every opportunity.
TONY SEDOLA’S father was a decorated veteran of the Battles of Caporetto and Monte Grappa who resisted the urge to join two of his brothers when they emigrated to Nanaimo. Giuseppe Sedola was a stern taskmaster in all things, especially when Tony, as a teenager, joined him and the other carbonai in the woods outside the village to make charcoal. It was one of two sources of income, the other being hay; neither earned enough money for the village to survive unless the men went to Austria for several months every year to make bricks and dig coal. The route to Austria or anywhere else outside Platischis was over footpaths through the woods, and Tony did his part in transporting the charcoal to where they could sell it.
Walk back and forth . . . We had no transportation. In those days we walk like deer . . . We were all alpine. Goes with the territory. That’s how I got the angel wings [protruding scapulas], because [we] packed during the war everything on our backs.
Tony is a small, serious man who moves like a dancer and sings in a clear tenor voice. As a young man, he heard music in everyday things: in the bells from other villages, in the call of the owls as he lay awake beside the dome-shaped charcoal pit to make sure it was not burning too quickly inside; in the pinging sound of well-made hot charcoal as he pulled it finished from the bottom of the pit; in the pee vick, pee vick of the civetta, the bird that calls when someone is about to die; in the to, to, loo, to, to, loo of the CNR train as it sped across Canada, bringing him to his uncle on Vancouver Island.
Almost all twentieth-century Italian immigrants to British Columbia travelled across Canada to their destination by train, but Pietro Aiello arrived in Fernie by bus. From then on, Fernie felt as if it was the right place for him, not the least because there were so many Calabrians settling in the mining and logging town. Not long after he arrived, he had to have an emergency appendectomy, but he felt at home in the hospital because there were nurses and other patients who spoke Italian. Then his nephew arrived unexpectedly from Quebec, saying he had dreamt that Aiello was in hospital. Being from Calabria, Pietro did not question this apparent miraculous coincidence.
To say that a person from Calabria was superstitious would have been an understatement, even after World War II. To say that he or she believed in ghosts, witches, spells and werewolves would be merely to confirm the normal state of affairs. Many Italians were superstitious, but every aspect of a Calabrian’s life was governed by the threat of and response to curses. Women were especially attuned to the subtleties. To cure a cold, Fernie’s Calabrian women prescribed sniffing coal dust. Almost any disease could be cured by rubbing the oil that dripped from the framework holding the bells in the parish church on the affected part of the body or boiling a skein of twine and jumping three times on it. If a stranger jostled them in the street or looked them in the eye, they got out of his way or held their middle and ring fingers down with their thumb and thrust the index and little fingers forward for protection.
Only this mano cornuta gesture could ward off the crooked eye, or malocchio. The tradition of the bad or evil eye, its cause and cure and its many variations is also known in cultures as diverse as Jewish, Spanish and Persian. In southern Italian culture, however, it was important not to confuse malocchio with its close relative affascina, even though the causes, cures and terminology were complicated and varied with the individual. Rosa Gentile tried to explain the affascina, or the curse, in this way:
It’s like you have a beautiful house and I’m envious of it. I can place a curse without even realizing and I get jealous and jealousy can make you ill—mere jealousy. You don’t even have to be conscious of it. And you don’t have to speak it. Just the thought.
Fortunately, she knew how to lift the curse:
You take something that belongs to you and [give it to another person] and that person will do something in secret because she won’t tell us what she does. She’ll say a prayer. And then that curse is lifted.
Pasquale Perri was skeptical.
There’s lots in Fernie. Lots of people who do the affascina here . . . Like I said before, I not want to be the guy who’s “Oh no. It’s kind of baloney,” but I do not accept it either. I don’t want to discourage a lot of people that they believe it. Go ahead. Believe it.
According to the elderly Calabrian women of Fernie, a sick child could be cured if the parents brought an article of clothing to a woman with these powers. Yawning seemed to play an important diagnostic role, and people with dark eyes seemed to be more susceptible to the crooked eye. Only some people had the ability to counteract it and very few seemed to be able to distinguish between affascina and malocchio. This mixture of religion, fear and envy, while occupying the minds of a generation of post–World War II Calabrian immigrants, seems now to be dying with them.
The best way to make good things happen, according to Pietro Aiello, is to work hard. When he brought his family to join him in Fernie in 1953 and they moved into an old house on First Avenue in the North End, he expected them to work as hard as he did. His wife, Giuseppina, got a job and he got two; seven-year-old Mary took care of her younger brother and sister and made meals. There wasn’t much alternative for Mary. Even as more Italian immigrants arrived in Fernie, most of them from Castelsilano and surrounding villages, Mary was isolated because her father didn’t believe girls should play with boys.
I spent my youth working in the gardens weeding and helping with the harvest, sawing wood and chopping it. Straightening nails. I don’t know where my father got these huge barrels of bent nails. He used them when he remodelled the house . . . He made me help him—I helped dig. I was up the scaffolds.
When she was in high school, Mary was a waitress at the Diamond Grill, but when her father visited her at work and saw three young men drinking coffee at the lunch counter, he made her come home with him right then. He allowed her to get a job as a telephone operator only because there were no men working at the exchange. By this time, however, Mary had met a handsome young man in spite of her father. Five years her senior, Nick Giuliano had arrived recently from southern Italy looking handsome in a hand-tailored suit and a vest that laced up the side, a style he had seen on television. But when he offered to escort Mary home after her evening shift, her father wouldn’t hear of it. When they eventually decided to get married, she was nineteen. They moved into their own apartment, but after two months, they moved back into her father’s house at his insistence.
In the twenty-first century, Mary Giuliano is a mother and a grandmother, a city councillor, a community worker and host of her own cable television program, The Mary G Show, on which she interviews writers, fundraisers and politicians in her upstairs kitchen. But like so many first-generation immigrants, she preserves the traditions taught to her by her mother. And, like many Italians, Mary believes that restaurants are all right for other people, but she prefers to cook at home no matter how many are coming for dinner. She prepares the food and feeds her guests in the basement kitchen—the one that’s not for show.
On a June evening after one of Mary’s dinners, the deep golden light of the setting sun etches the bare rock of the mountains that border the Elk River Valley to the east, north and west and makes an irregularity on the side of Hosmer Mountain look like a horse and rider. This is the famous Ghost Rider whose image is tied to the legend of the Ktunaxa grandmother who cursed the Elk River Valley after William Fernie reneged on his promise to marry her granddaughter in the closing years of the nineteenth century.
The curse declared that the valley and all its inhabitants would suffer and starve before dying by fire and water. First Nations legends, word of mouth and the diary musings of Father Coccola, who was the Fernie parish priest in 1904, have enhanced the legend of the curse. It explained the mine explosions, fires, floods, epidemics, heavy snowfalls and rock slides that have marked the valley’s history. The curse is blamed even for the 1918 influenza epidemic and the Great Depression.
And when scapegoats were needed to explain the disasters and the image of the Ghost Rider, fingers pointed at foreigners and at Italians and the Black Hand in particular. Instead of fading with time, the legend thrived until 1964, when the sitting mayor agreed to participate in a curse-lifting ceremony on a North End soccer field. Against a background of drumming and dancing, Mayor James White smoked a peace pipe with First Nations people dressed “like Indians from a movie” with “long headdresses and . . . loincloths.” That Fernie has now become a prosperous tourist destination seems to be confirmation of the power of superstition in the Elk River Valley.
IN HER protected and work-heavy childhood, Mary Giuliano was unaware of the Italians who had been living in Fernie for half a century before her family emigrated. All over British Columbia, the Great Depression and World War II, during which there was almost no Italian immigration, separated the thousands of new arrivals from the established Italian communities. The new immigrants either came with family or had plans to bring their extended families to join them. Thanks to Mussolini, they had a little more education—at least grade five—and many more had trades. Separated by a generation and having lived their lives under entirely different regimes, the two groups would naturally struggle to find common ground.
Idana Cividina was still a teenager when her family left their pre-Alpine village in Friuli to join her father in Kamloops in 1952. She didn’t understand at first why the older Italian community resented them, but she did later. “They came here before the war and it took them that long to achieve a place where they were considered equal, but us coming in droves like that, we brought them down again.” With their suffering and endurance, the old-timers had smoothed the way for the newcomers only to see the newcomers receive higher wages and get better jobs.
They used to call us names and they used to say Mussolini let us do this and let us do that, and I have to say I was never short of food [in Italy]. Never, never, never. And they thought we were going without shoes, but we had better shoes there than what they had here.
The newcomers, especially those from rural areas, may have had sufficient food during the war, but they resented the lack of appreciation for what they had endured under Mussolini.
As a young man in Italy during World War II, Giuseppe (Johnny) Campagnaro had been luckier than most. He had been educated for the priesthood and had trained as a bricklayer. After the war, the contractor he worked for in Bassano del Grappa, Veneto, wanted to keep him on staff, but there was very little construction work. Campagnaro had been about to join the army when “the Canadian embassy came around. They says, ‘Skip the army, go to Canada.’ . . . There were signs all over: ‘Go to Canada’ this and that.”
Campagnaro and five of his friends decided to take Canada up on the offer of an assisted passage loan, but the travel agent said there were only five places left on the boat. One person would have to fly, and no one volunteered. They went to a restaurant and each one put ten thousand lire, about sixteen American dollars in 1954, on the table. The one who agreed to fly would get all the money. Campagnaro talked to his father, who said,
“Pick up the sixty thousand. You already going to start making money. You go to the boat, you gonna be seasick for fourteen days. You fly there you be like a king...” Other guys, when they went home their mothers and fathers say, “No, no. The plane will go down.”
Campagnaro and sixty-four other men in their twenties flew from Milan to Montreal in a Canadian army airplane with stops to refuel at Shannon, Ireland, and Gander, Newfoundland. The entire trip took twenty-four hours. Their accommodation in Montreal was on the St. Lawrence River in what Campagnaro called “a clandestine jail” with a fence and a steel gate. Men like him with proper documents were free to come and go, but men travelling without passports were confined to their rooms.
From Montreal to Winnipeg, Campagnaro rode the CPR courtesy of the Canadian government, which paid for everything but his meals. When he arrived in Winnipeg in mid-September, he asked for farm work, but “‘No,’ they say, ‘Italians no farmer. They have no orchard here. No vineyard. Here we just got wheat and cows.’” After a few days of washing windows, Campagnaro was told to go to Edmonton.
Where Edmonton is? What we gonna do there? So I start reading book I [was] supposed to read before I came to Canada. “Edmonton, Alberta. Cold.” What I’m going to do with my bricklaying system? I can no lay brick on the frost on the snow.
In Edmonton an official counted six men off, including Campagnaro, and said they were going to work on the CNR and would need heavy parkas, boots and gloves. They boarded a train that was heading west and had already been in the B.C. mountains for several hours when the train stopped in the middle of nowhere. It was dark outside, not a light to be seen. The conductor said, “‘One, two, three, four, five, six—out you go.’ I say, ‘Where are we at? I don’t see no light here. No houses.’ He say, ‘You’ll find.’”
Suitcases in hand, they jumped from the train to be greeted by the roadmaster of the Tod Mountain extra gang. Following his light down the track, the new members of the repair and maintenance crew came to a shed with six bunk beds inside. In the morning, they found out what their work would be: cutting ice into blocks to provide refrigeration for passenger trains bound east and west.
When they finished the work twenty-two days later, the crew had to go to Kamloops to get their paycheques before moving on to Prince Rupert. When they passed a building site on the way into town, Campagnaro couldn’t resist having a look. Within minutes, he had a job laying bricks and his railway career ended.
The contractor said, “You want to work?” I say, “Okay.” You know you are twenty-one, you go from one corner to the other with those men . . . your mind is lost. You don’t speak English. You like [in] a dark all the time. I was not thinking. To me it was like destiny . . . So this guy took me to Italian lady. She give me room and board. I was like home then. So no problems . . . And I work for the guy for thirteen years.
Campagnaro also got a second job working after hours with Arturo Cividina, who had a very angry daughter, sixteen-year-old Idana. Her father said she was too old for school and should get a paying job. Since she couldn’t speak English, the only work she could do was the kind she had learned at home: clean house, wash clothes and can tomatoes. All her earnings went to her father to save until she turned twenty, after which she got to keep some of her money for herself. A year later, she married Johnny Campagnaro. They started building their own house, lived in it until they finished it, sold it and started another, setting a pattern that lasted for most of their married lives.
ANTONIETTA LUONGO had known her husband-to-be all her life when she married him by proxy. They came from the same village near Salerno and had the same last name, but Modesto had left her behind when he emigrated in 1954. Their proxy wedding in the village two years later was a proper affair with a best man, a maid of honour and all the trappings except the groom, who had suggested it in the first place because getting married in Vancouver would have cost too much.
Not being a traditionalist, he didn’t object to Antonietta getting a job after she joined him, although many of Vancouver’s Italian men, especially those from the south, did not want their wives to work outside the home even if the men’s work was only seasonal. Italian women in the major cities in the United States had been working as seamstresses in factories since before World War I, but only a small number of Vancouver’s Italian women did, many fewer than among their counterparts in eastern Canada.
In her well-appointed home in Burnaby, Antonietta, now an elderly widow, sees it this way:
If they notta work they gotta family or they got people board in their home or they work out. They go to work in the morning, come at night. For some maybe they have big kids [to babysit], for others they have maybe a mother home, sister home. They help each other. If people see someone do this and that—they don’t like . . . They talk behind you. They say, “Look, she do too much.” That’s not their business.
Her first job after she arrived in Vancouver was on the assembly line in a chicken processing plant, but her inability to speak English made her very unhappy.
I find when I come, because I don’t know the language, I was work with the Italian guy[s]. They kill chicken and they put in a can. It was a dirty job with the water and dirty stinking . . . We separated the meat . . . Something [I was] never used to and one day I start to cry and one woman she say to me, “Why are you crying? You quarrel with your husband?” I say, “No. I [get] along with my husband. I no [get] along with the country.”
When Antonietta became pregnant, her boss fired her, but she was able to find a better job as a hand seamstress, and this evolved into a lifetime career doing alterations for Woodward’s, the Bay and Eaton’s. She worked from nine to four with no breaks so that she could be home when her children arrived from school. “My husband he find everything clean, everything cooked, everything for to eat.”
VANCOUVER’S ITALIANS began moving east, away from Strathcona, at the end of World War II. They were buying houses along Burrard Inlet in an area bounded by Clark Drive on the west, Renfrew Street on the east and Terminal Avenue on the south. The Downtown Eastside had been the centre of Italian life in Vancouver for fifty years, but the seamy side—the prostitution, the bootlegging—which only the strong family life of the Italians had held at bay, was wrapping its tentacles around the younger generation, who were dressing as zoot-suiters and teetering on the edge of the law. Most people had “lived off the yard,” growing their own vegetables, keeping a cow, raising a few chickens and rabbits; the banning of yard animals by the Health Department was another reason why Italians left Strathcona.
The new immigrants with their higher wages and greater self-confidence wanted to live among Italians, but not among gangsters and prostitutes. It didn’t take long before they could afford to buy houses and even television sets. By the 1960s the Italian neighbourhood had expanded as far south as Broadway and as far east as Boundary Road, with Commercial Drive as the business centre.
The area was not exclusively Italian by any means—there were as many ethnic groups there as in Strathcona—but by 1961 one third of the 18,300 Italians in Vancouver lived between the harbour and Broadway. The decade of the 1950s had seen the Italian population of Vancouver almost triple until Italians represented one fifth of the city’s population. The coffee shops, bakeries and grocery stores of Commercial Drive and the A. Bosa and Company store on Victoria Drive drew Italians and would-be Italians from all over the city and the province.
Augusto Bosa still had interests in Cranberry, the suburb of Powell River where his grocery-based empire had begun. Among the locals, the best known of his enterprises was the “chicken house,” a thirty-metre-long, five-unit apartment building where seventeen-year-old Ermes Culos and his fifteen-year-old brother, Luciano, got their first jobs when they arrived from Italy in 1955 to join their father, Pietro, and their elder brother, Endi. The work was digging a ditch for a septic field through two metres of hardpan. Luciano’s first words in English were “rock pit.”
The four Culos men lived in a two-room shack in the yard of a distant relative. They did their own cooking and bought everything they needed for a proper Italian diet from what had by then become the Mitchell Brothers’ store. Pietro’s sister had emigrated in the 1920s as the fiancée of a distant cousin whose family had been in Powell River since the early years of the twentieth century. She sponsored Pietro in 1949. Ever since, Pietro had been sending the equivalent of one hundred dollars a month to his wife, Maria Castellarin, who spent a little money on good-quality flour for pasta but put most of the money into a savings account against the day when Pietro would return to Italy and there would be enough money to buy land.
As the daughter and wife of sojourning emigrants and the mother of seven sons, Maria knew how to make a small amount of money go very far. She had been fifteen when her father, Tobia, died in hospital in 1924. The doctors said it was pneumonia that killed him; the family knew he had died of the shame of having failed to improve his family’s situation through the perfidy of his brother who had spent all the money Tobia had saved during his years in British Columbia.
Maria and Pietro had raised their family in the village of San Giovanni, now a suburb of Casarsa della Delizia in Friuli. The house was stark and utilitarian, the white plaster on the exterior walls missing in places that revealed the brick walls underneath. Chickens pecked and scurried in the courtyard, two pigs lived in a sty in the middle, and two cows and two sheep occupied the ground floor of the house. Maria, Pietro, seven sons and two mothers slept on the second storey in rooms with low beamed ceilings, whitewashed walls and rough plank floors. The older boys slept in one room with their grandmothers, the younger boys in a double bed in their parents’ bedroom, where all seven had been born.
The third floor was where the family stored the beans and ears of corn that were Pietro’s share of the crops he grew on his landlord’s fields. It was here in the spring that the family fed silkworms, one of the few sources of cash they had before Pietro emigrated. Thirty days of intense around-the-clock work: the boys gathering mulberry leaves and spreading them in a thick layer on the floor to feed the voracious white worms, Maria making sure the delicate spinners of silk thread had a quiet and clean environment until they were ready to attach themselves to pieces of straw and begin to spin their yellow cocoons.
Another source of cash was milk from the cows and the sale of any calves that were born “when everything went well.” With the cash Maria paid off the store bills. For the rest of the year, the chickens served as their currency when they needed groceries or tobacco. When the loft was full of corn and beans, and the first-floor room they used for a cantina was full of white cornmeal for polenta, homemade salami and sausages, pig fat stored in the pig’s bladder and in pails, Montasio cheese made at the co-operative where Maria took her turn helping the casaro (cheese maker) and whole-grain flour to make pane nero (black or whole-wheat bread), the Culoses knew they would make it through the winter.
THE SAN GIOVANNI campanile stands separate from the church as if to demonstrate its singular importance. It is tall and graceful with a spire that comes to an elongated point in the Venetian style. As a boy, Luciano Culos used to stand at the base and look up, thinking it was the tallest thing in the world. His dream was to climb to the top and see Venice. When he returned to Italy to live after twenty-seven years in British Columbia, he visited the campanile to find it encased in scaffolding as workmen repaired the damage done by the earthquake in 1976. He climbed the steps inside the tower to the level above the belfry and then onto the scaffold, but he couldn’t quite see Venice. He could see the Adriatic, however, and he had seen what lay beyond it on the other side of the world.
When he arrived at Pier 21 in Halifax as a fifteen-year-old in 1955, the first thing Luciano had seen in the cavernous hall where immigrants showed their papers and had their baggage inspected was a pile of sausage and ham that must have weighed half a ton. It seemed as if every Italian who came through the immigration centre had brought pork to Canada. For immigrants coming from a culture where the family pigs—one for the market, one for the table—were essential to survival, it must have been a terrible blow to have to leave the meat behind in the immigration hall.
The ritual of pig slaughtering and the use of every part, from the skin to the fat to the bones—performed in December or January when the cold weather provided natural refrigeration—was still practised in all parts of Italy. In one snow-covered courtyard after another, several strong men would string the screaming pig up on a gallows frame or wrestle it onto a special table in such a way that when the local norcino stabbed the chest with his long killer blade, he would hit the heart or a major artery, putting the animal out of its misery and allowing the blood to drain neatly into a bucket for the making of blood sausage.
The procedure varied little from place to place. Clean the dead pig and remove the hair with gallons of boiling water before carrying the carcass into the house to remove the head and legs, cut through the skin and the twenty centimetres of abdominal fat, open the belly and remove the guts. Give the intestines to the women to wash in a nearby stream, while the men cut and sort the meat: this ground meat for sausage, this for salami, this ham for the priest, that ham for the prosciutto, these chops to be eaten right away before they spoiled.
Crush the garlic and vinegar together for the sausages and boil for a few minutes. Disinfect the intestines in boiling water for the sausage casings. Save the liver for eating and the lungs, kidneys, ears, and whatever else is left for the cotechini, or cooking sausages, those little gems that are encased in skin so thick they can’t be eaten but that add so much flavour when they boil in the soup for an hour. Use most of the meat for salami and hang it to dry in such a way that the air doesn’t get at it.
In the valley of the Natisone, Efrem Specogna, who became a norcino by default at the age of fifteen when the regular norcini were in the army during World War II, says he didn’t make prosciutto because it was too salty and too much trouble. In Calabria, Mary Giuliano remembers her relatives boiling the fat and bones to make the good-tasting frisule that took the place of butter on bread; in Lazio, the sides of pork were cured like bacon to make pancetta, and the hard skin from the cured ham was used over and over for flavour and even loaned to neighbours; in Molise, the pig had to be slaughtered during the waxing moon or the meat would go bad.
There are lodges in British Columbia where the ritual continues, but the carcass arrives at the lodge in pristine condition. The older men, who have seen this done in Italy and are now the experts, carve it into various cuts and supervise the grinding of the less tender meat and the skin and fat. The members—first-, second- and third-generation Italian Canadians—stand around a special table with sides to keep the pile of freshly ground meat from spilling onto the floor; they mix in salt, pepper, cinnamon, paprika, anise seed or nutmeg with their bare hands, and add chopped garlic that has soaked in red wine overnight. The crew stuff the sheep gut bought from Bosa’s and fill it with the meat and herb mixture. The experts fold, twist and tie it into links. Everyone works for a share of the finished product and a noon-hour meal of boneless loin pork chops and polenta.
They are preserving the culture of an Italy that no longer exists, an Italy that had been the wellspring of their identity while they lived in a new culture that treated them with disdain. In the Italy of their minds, mothers and wives still fill the churches on Sundays, every household makes wine and every community still has a norcino to kill the pigs. The Italy they visit in the twenty-first century has caught up with the Western world, has a high standard of living and streamlined indoor plumbing, allows divorce and legal abortions, has general strikes and urban guerrillas and refugees, known as extracomunitari, some with darker skin than theirs, who sell knock-off “designer” purses in the outdoor markets and do the work Italians refuse to do.
IN 1964, Italy was still poor—the second-poorest country in western Europe after Spain. But there are emigrants who tell stories about coming back to Italy in the 1950s and thinking that if they had waited for a few more years, things would have been a lot better at home and they wouldn’t have had to leave. But surveys and statistics tell a different story. In 1964, 30 percent of Italians were still illiterate and more were barely able to read. There were too many old laws still on the books and the justice system was “slow, irrational, underpaid, understaffed, underequipped and erratic.” Even as late as 1969, there were still many more people than there were jobs, and emigration was still regarded as the fast solution to the problem. Three hundred thousand people left Italy in 1966.
But by 1975 the number was down to one hundred thousand. Something had happened to slow the century-old exportation of Italy’s citizens. It was called the Economic Miracle and was attributed to Italy’s founding membership in the European Common Market in 1970 and, since 1993, in the European Union. European investment in Italian factories, especially in the north, triggered an industrial revolution two hundred years after it had occurred in Great Britain, Germany and France. Factory jobs allowed Italian farmers to leave the land without leaving their country. And even though Italian inheritance laws remained unchanged, the number of descendants wishing to remain on the land dwindled to such an extent that a brother wishing to farm was able to buy out his siblings’ shares. The world of the contadini had disappeared.
Adding to the prosperity were the emigrants who returned to visit family. They usually came in August and they spent money. The religious ones visited shrines and looked for miracles. The non-religious attended the increasing number of secular festivals especially designed to attract them. They arrived to find that the inhabitants remembered their parents as if they had left only days before, and they saw their own faces on the people they passed on the village streets.
When a successful contractor from Kamloops took his wife and children to Italy in 1969, they drove into Veneto in a friend’s new Pontiac Parisienne, bought in British Columbia and transported by highway, ship and train tunnel into northern Italy. In the three months of their stay, they tried to come to terms with the contrast between the prosperity they witnessed and the memory of how desperate they were when they had left fifteen years before. The contractor resented the fact that his siblings who had stayed in Italy had not worked as hard as he had and had cheated him out of his inheritance when they divided up their father’s estate. He looked rich to them. “I am rich,” he said. “But they was playing cards and drinking wine when I was shovelling concrete twelve hours a day.”
When Frank Bafaro took his wife, Sheila, to Calabria to visit his father’s home village in the 1970s, they rented a car in Cosenza to drive to Spezzano Piccolo along the back roads. They were nearing the village when they saw Frank’s stepmother, Teresa, walking along the road to meet them. She had returned to Italy after Frank’s father, Francesco, died. Sheila got out of the car to walk with Teresa into the village, where they received a royal welcome. She could hear the people murmur as they came out of their houses, “Americani, americani.” But when the people realized that Sheila was wearing a dress that was red, the colour of Communism, the murmuring changed to “Comuniste, comuniste,” and her mother-in-law muttered in Italian, “She shouldn’t have that dress on.”
Italian Communists say that theirs is a different kind of Communism, not like the kind that was in the Soviet Union. Historians say that Communism continued to exist in Italy because of the contempt officials had for the contadini. But that implies that the heirs of the contadini are pro-Communist. In the Bafaros’ experience, this is not true.
BETWEEN 1948 and 1972, Italy had been second only to Great Britain as a source of immigrants to Canada. That number had peaked at 250,812 in the decade that ended in 1961, when Italians made up almost 16 percent of total immigration to Canada. In British Columbia, in 1971, there were almost 55,000 people of Italian ethnic origin. Over half of them said Italian was their mother tongue and almost 19,000 usually spoke it at home. Five years later, the number of people who claimed Italian as their mother tongue was in decline, and the number of immigrants had fallen off dramatically. By 1978, when 37,000 Italians emigrated to Canada, they represented only 3 percent of new immigrants. Italian immigrants are no longer seen as a threat to the native-born; more recent immigrants—South Asians, Central Americans—have taken their place as a perceived threat to hourly wage earners.
Older British Columbians have changed their opinion of Italians, and younger British Columbians don’t realize how badly Italians were treated. They all love to eat Italian-style food and have no idea what drove their Italian grocer or pizza maker out of Italy and what he and his father and grandfather endured while they were building railways or digging sewerage ditches. Many British Columbians have an Italian neighbour but have no idea how she suffered under the ignorant racism of bureaucrats, politicians or businessmen. They accept as normal the Italian names on established businesses or on election ballots or on the office doors of lawyers, teachers, politicians and labour leaders.
British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Angelo Branca was the most obviously successful Italian in British Columbia, but there are many others. The mayor of Nanaimo from 1957 to 1967, Pete Maffeo, who was raised by his uncle, a strikebreaker, in Extension, was appointed to the Order of the British Empire for his civil defence work during World War II. And, as if to prove that Italians’ early reputation as strikebreakers has all been a terrible misunderstanding, Ken Georgetti, grandson of Isacco and Caterina Giorgetti, is the long-time president of the Canadian Labour Congress. Georgetti grew up in the Gulch in Trail, as did Thomas d’Aquino, CEO of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, and Francesco (Buddy) DeVito, former mayor of that city. From Vancouver by way of Turin in 1966 came Anna Terrana, community activist, member of Parliament, editor, radio producer and member of many boards, including the Immigration and Refugee Board. From Powell River came the Toigos, the Mitchells and the Bosas to put their names on the construction and food maps of the Lower Mainland. From Kamloops came the notorious speeder and flamboyant provincial minister of highways Flying Phil Gagliardi.
Virtually all of British Columbia’s famous Italian families began with a railway worker or coal miner. The patriarch of the Kelowna Capozzis, Pasquale, known as Cap, who started as a navvy, founded a winemaking empire that produces the once questionable but now highly drinkable Calona wines. His son, Herbert, became a member of the legislature and was inducted into the BC Sports Hall of Fame for his work with the Vancouver Canucks, the BC Lions and the Vancouver Whitecaps.
The patriarch of the Filiponi family (also spelled Filippone or Philliponi) was a miner in Extension and a bootlegger whose wife and three sons became the owners of several Vancouver businesses, including Diamond Cabs. It was their ownership of the Penthouse Cabaret, however, where a customer could buy bootleg booze, connect with a prostitute or carouse with corrupt city officials at various times during the club’s long tenure on Seymour Street, that brought them financial success and notoriety.
AND IN Italy, some things have not changed. The family is still “the first source of power . . . the only fundamental institution in the country.” It is the basic unit of Italian society; the institution the individual can depend upon; the one that doesn’t change no matter what happens. And just as there was during the Renaissance or in the Italy of the nineteenth-century Grand Tour, there is still a vibrant high culture that now expresses itself in fashion and luxury cars where once painters, sculptors and musicians made Italy the centre of the cultural world. This high culture is still inaccessible to the ordinary populace: a Gucci suit or a Maserati is as out of reach for a teacher or grocery store owner as a Leonardo da Vinci painting once was for a peasant farmer or a charcoal maker. The bureaucracy is still impossible; politics are still crazy. Organized crime is still a massive problem and the ’Ndrangheta is now the most powerful criminal organization in the world.
But many things have changed. Italians no longer live in bondage to the church, and the power that priests had over their parishioners’ lives disappeared generations ago. A modern-day secular Italian may celebrate his saint’s day instead of his birthday, but he is reflecting his culture rather than his religion. For some, the words spoken by a devout immigrant, “Being Italian is being Catholic,” are still true, but only as a reflection of the spiritual, not temporal, power of the Roman Catholic Church.
Other changes are more tangible. Secondary roads connect even the most remote villages. Mass media and better education have made proper Tuscan-based Italian the language spoken by all, leaving hundreds of dialects to die from lack of speakers. Any farmhouses not left empty by emigration are empty now because the owners have moved to the cities. The crumbling, roofless piles of mellow pink or gold masonry are available for sale to idealistic foreigners with bestselling books on their minds. All children go to school, universities flourish and a generous social welfare system defies logic and must surely collapse when the state reaches the end of its ability to borrow money. And the country still needs someone to do the jobs Italians will no longer do.
THERE IS a seventeenth-century house set among orange and olive trees in Calabria on the Gulf of Taranto near the town of Rossano. The owner, a woman who has an aristocratic bearing, rents accommodation to tourists. She speaks no English, but her Romanian maid, Carmen, speaks Italian—although her employer allows her no contact with people living in Rossano—and enough English to communicate with the British and North American guests. Carmen is working in Italy to pay for her daughter’s tuition in a Romanian law school.
Nine people, some bilingual, most not, gather in the villa for dinner around the owner’s antique dining table, which is set with many layers of china and much silver cutlery. The owner, her daughter and Carmen, unhappily dressed in her drab Romanian T-shirt and pants topped with a frilly white maid’s apron, serve a multi-course Calabrian meal.
The antipasti and primi courses are similar to the appetizer and pasta courses served in many parts of Italy; the secundi include veal balls in cabbage, piquant Calabrese sausage and a lowly tripe dish. The owner takes pains to assure her guests that tripe is peasant food and she is serving it only because one of the guests has requested it.
The owner treats Carmen with disdain and even tries to stop her from speaking English. All through the meal Carmen pouts and grimaces behind her employer’s back, playing on the sympathies of the guests. In a reversal of the circumstances that drove Italians to emigrate, Carmen and people like her from eastern Europe, Africa and South Asia are economic migrants to Italy.
Even an economic miracle requires workers at the lower end of the scale, and Italians do not do that kind of work anymore. That work is for the Carmens of the world, the ones from countries that cannot feed their people, the ones who are prepared to work hard, far from home, and suffer racism and indignity to support their families. They are the real heirs of the contadini, who left the country that gave them birth to work for whoever would give them bread.