The funeral cortege of the victims of the 1918 Protection Island Mine cage disaster, five of them Italian, makes its way up Bastion Street to Nanaimo’s graveyard. Ladysmith Archives
The owner of Barkerville’s N. Cunio Brewery Saloon (on the left) knows the whereabouts of Felice Valle, who has been missing for fourteen years. Image A-03786 courtesy of Royal BC Museum, BC Archives
Mules belonging to the legendary packer Cataline still bear the leather aparejos that could carry two hundred kilograms of goods from Yale to Barkerville. Image C-08742 courtesy of Royal BC Museum, BC Archives
With their grocery stores and hotels, Giacomo and Carlo Bossi made Store and Johnson Streets the centre of nineteenth-century Italian commerce in Victoria. Image F-01995 courtesy of Royal BC Museum, BC Archives
When Petronilla Medana wed Carlo Bossi, thirty-one years her senior, she married well. Her second husband, Lorenzo Quagliotti, was not such A good catch. Image F-02004 courtesy of Royal BC Museum, BC Archives
Did the Black Hand have anything to do with the fire that destroyed downtown Fernie in 1904? Or the bigger fire four years later? Image I-31337 courtesy of Royal BC Museum, BC Archives
Isacco Giorgetti, who brought the first Italians to Trail to work in the new smelter, enjoys A relaxing moment with his wife, Caterina, and friends. Courtesy of the Trail Historical Society
Even in 1900, Italian shack dwellers in the Gulch had to put up with the sulphur-laden smoke from the smelter on the hill above Trail. Courtesy of the Trail Historical Society
Italians living at the far end of Union Camp would sing their way home at the end of their shifts in Dunsmuir’s Cumberland coal mines. Image 11672 courtesy of Royal BC Museum, BC Archives
In 1924, Messrs. Martini, Beno, Cololigo and Piccolo pose in the backyard bocce court of 526 Union Street in Vancouver’s Little Italy. Collection of the Italian Cultural Centre Society
According to A local Italian, there is only one “white man” or non-Italian among this crew in the Powell River mill’s finishing room. Elio Cossarin Collection
Navvies of all nationalities, including Italian, line up for construction jobs on the Grand Trunk Pacific amid the rubble that will become Prince Rupert. Library and Archives Canada PA95676 J.R. Wrathall Collection
Maria Castellarin wears A white dress in this 1914 family photo that will comfort her father, Tobia, while he remains in British Columbia until 1919. Luciano and Ivana Culos Collection
A store owned by the wife of A strikebreaker in Extension is ransacked during the August 1913 riots during the Big Strike in the coal mines of Vancouver Island. Nanaimo Museum Collection o5-14
Francesco Bafaro, with the first five of his six children, married three women in succession from his home village of Spezzano Piccolo. Frank and Sheila Bafaro Collection
Augusto Bosa started his grocery empire on Manson Avenue in the Powell River suburb of Cranberry, where Italians wishing to escape company control lived. Collection of the Italian Cultural Centre Society
A war correspondent photographs Giovanna Fabris, her children and neighbours in October 1917 as they flee the Austrian army in an oxcart. Luciano and Ivana Culos Collection
While the Cumberland Italian band leads the funeral cortege of Ginger Goodwin, the province’s first general strike protests against his death, caused by A policeman’s bullet. Cumberland Museum
A few years before his death in A chimney collapse, Primo Gobbo, third cyclist on the left, is ready to race on Powell River’s Riverside Oval. Elio Cossarin Collection
At the Sons of Italy’s twenty-fifth-anniversary banquet, the lodge marks the first of A series of celebrations in the dark years before World War II. City of Vancouver Archives CVA99-3812 Stuart Thomson
By the time this photo was taken in 1942, the Italian prisoners at Kananaskis Camp near Seebe, Alberta, had been released or sent to Petawawa, Ontario. Glenbow Archives NA-4823-1
Mustachioed Carlo Emanuele worked so long for the Vancouver waterworks that when Mussolini declared war, he was not fired from his job. Collection of the Italian Cultural Society
Italo Sguazzin (centre) takes the ball for Kitimat’s Italian soccer team; ethnic rivalry was so fierce that once the RCMP had to rescue the referee. Cindy and Italo Sguazzin Collection
On Saturnia in May 1952, all the passengers from the Udine area, including Tony Sedola, standing second from left, gather on deck. Antonio and Maria Sedola Collection
With the year’s work finished, Pietro Aiello gets his passport just weeks before he leaves Italy for Canada as part of the bulk labour program. Maria Aiello Giuliano Collection
Maria Castellarin poses with her seven sons and their black-clothed grandmothers before her eldest son joins his father in Powell River. Luciano and Ivana Culos Collection
On A wintery Kettle Valley Railway construction site near Naramata, navvies face A pile of rubble with only hand tools, A horse and A cart. Photographer: Stocks. Penticton Museum and Archives