Europe 24 - A Talk Given in Ruoti

The only time this talk was ever given it was in Italian, but it seems appropriate to post the English-language version just so it exists here. I have edited it slightly, but it's pretty much the talk as given. You have to imagine it on a hot summer day in a small piazza in Basilicata, in front of an audience willing to cut some slack for an American who meant well and was trying his best. They seemed to like it.

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You can always tell when someone is an American.

Americans smile at strangers in the street, which in many places in the world is seen as confusing.

We cannot imagine a beverage of less than 600ml. With free refills.

And since we live in a country where you can travel 4500km in a straight line without hearing another language, most of us only speak English. This is me, by the way. I don’t speak Italian (yet), and I hope that you will excuse my pronunciation.

One of the more interesting ways you can tell someone is an American is that we identify as our heritage. An American will tell you they are Italian even if the last time anyone in their family set foot on Italian soil was in 1907 when they emigrated to the United States.

My great-grandparents left Ruoti for the last time in 1907.

My great-grandfather was Vito Antonio.

He was born here in Ruoti on February 6, 1865, in a house somewhere on Strada Piazza. He was a farmer, and he spent a year in the Italian army. A couple of months after he left the army he married my great-grandmother, on July 24, 1890, here in Ruoti.

Vito emigrated to the United States in 1905, on the ship Roma out of Naples, landing at Ellis Island on June 15.

He went to Philadelphia and found work as a construction laborer. He must have done well because by 1907 he owned a small house at 1214 Latona Street.

Vito returned to Ruoti at least once because he is also recorded as coming through Ellis Island on April 29, 1907, on the ship Sannio out of Naples. He lived in Philadelphia after that, became an American citizen in 1924, and died on June 17, 1945. My mother remembered him as a short, bow-legged man with a rolling gait, piercing blue eyes, a bushy mustache, and bright white hair.

My great-grandmother, Caterina, was born on March 7, 1870 on Vico Picone, off of Via Roma. She came to America on December 23, 1907, on the ship Liguria out of Naples. She traveled with her daughter Maria Giuseppa who was 11 years old at the time and they met Vito at Ellis Island. He took them back to Latona Street in Philadelphia with him.

Caterina was literate, an unusual feature for any Italian immigrant in South Philadelphia at the time and even more so for a woman. People in the neighborhood would bring her letters from home and she would read them to them and then write down what they wanted to say in response.  She had bright red hair and blue eyes, she was by all accounts a very good cook, and she died on Christmas Day, 1925. To this day, my family celebrates on Christmas Eve instead.

Caterina had at least two other relatives who came from Ruoti to Philadelphia

Her brother, Rocco Antonio was born in Ruoti on January 1, 1884, and he came to the US in March 1910 on the ship San Giorgio out of Naples. He was known in the family as Zaduck because Italian immigrants in America tended to cut off the last syllable of words, so when they said Zio Rocco it became Zi’ Roc, which then became Zaduck.

When he was young Zaduck had red hair like his sister and he was known as The Rooster. He never married, and he lived on the first floor of a house on 8th Street in Philadelphia not far from Latona Street. When my mother and uncle were little he would entertain them by singing old Italian songs and teaching them to count in Italian, and he died in 1971 when I was 5 years old. 

 

Zaduck rented the second floor of the 8th Street house to tenants and shared the first floor with his nephew, Gerardo. The son of Caterina’s and Rocco’s sister Vincenza and her husband Domenico, Gerardo was born in Ruoti on March 10, 1891, and came to the US in 1921.

Gerardo died in October 1945, right after the war. Because of the legal situation at the end of WWII it was difficult for the family to get the money from Gerardo’s estate back to his mother Vincenza in Ruoti. The US State Department had to get involved at one point, and the matter dragged on well into 1948 and possibly later. They did eventually send the money, though.

Family lore says that Vito and Caterina had 11 children, only three of whom would survive to adulthood: Maria, who was born in Ruoti in 1896, Giuseppa (Josephine), who was born in Philadelphia in 1909, and my grandfather – Rocco Antonio, who was born in Philadelphia on July 7, 1912.

He was 8kg when he was born, which is pretty impressive for a man who was only 162cm tall as an adult. He used his middle name – Antonio – because Caterina did not like how Americans pronounced Rocco. She thought it sounded like “rags” (“stracci”). He generally went by Tony.

Caterina insisted he stay in school and get his high school diploma despite the criticism of the neighbors, who thought my grandfather was just lazy for not quitting school and going to work. That diploma allowed him to get a job as a civilian machinist in the US Navy Yard in Philadelphia in the early 1930s, in the depths of the Great Depression. He started as an apprentice making airplane propellers and moved up the ladder until he retired in the early 1970s as a contract writer. He was very proud that he worked in an office and wore a suit by the end.

My grandmother was Giovanna, whose family came from Rometta and Saponara in Sicily. They were married on February 18, 1939, and they moved in with Vito in the house on Latona Street, where they took care of him until he died.

My grandfather was a patient man and a talented artist who would often make sketches of his grandchildren. He loved dad jokes and the Philadelphia Phillies. When he was young he played a lot of semi-pro baseball, and when his grandchildren were young we could always persuade him to get up a wiffle-ball game on his tiny front yard. He died in 2000, but he got to meet his great-grandson and I’ll always be glad about that.

At a certain point in your life there is a little switch in your head that flips over and you say to yourself, “Huh, genealogy – that sounds like fun!” I hit this point about a decade ago and that is how I found myself in Ruoti last summer.

We parked the car and walked up to the Piazza Mercato and then into the old town.

Our first stop was the Panificio DeCarlo, where we bought a giant loaf of bread that would be most of our dinner later that night. It was very good bread. We walked around the old town, took photographs of Caterina’s home, and eventually found ourselves at the beginning of the walking tour on Via Roma. We decided we’d take the tour and then be on our way.

As we walked up Via Roma, however, we met two friendly ladies who were sitting on their front step (and whose names I never learned, unfortunately) and when we managed to say that my family was from here, this sparked a lovely conversation that eventually expanded to include their neighbors across the street and then Rosario and Sara, who speak English.

Rosario and Sara graciously volunteered to take us on a thorough and fascinating tour of the old town. We saw churches and public art, and Rosario and Sara told us the stories of these things. We went to the B&B where we were warmly greeted. It was a wonderful and welcoming experience. For our last stop before leaving, Rosario took us to meet Felice, who welcomed us, told me about his work on the emigres of Ruoti, and invited us to come back this year for the festival.

It is an extraordinary thing to be standing in a place that has such an important role in your own history.

Americans as a group are not a historically minded people. I am a professional historian. I have been trying to change that for 35 years now. To come here and walk the streets where my ancestors walked, to see where they lived, and to be welcomed – that is an astonishingly lovely thing.

I am not Italian, after all. I am Italian-American.

But I am a descendant of Ruoti.

And I am very proud of that.