There are hundreds of types of pasta—perhaps even about 360, says Jacqui DeBono, who runs The Pasta Project blog from her home base outside of Verona. Originally from Britain, the former journalist and English teacher became fascinated with pasta after moving to Italy about 22 years ago with her Sicilian husband. She’s chronicled her exploration of more than 100 uniquely shaped noodles, documenting their stories, recipes, and preferred sauces. One type in particular has especially captured Jacqui’s fancy: Sicily’s casarecce, shaped like rolled-up scrolls. The pasta’s name comes from the Italian word casereccio, which translates to homemade, which Jacqui says is the best way to enjoy it.
Jacqui took the time to share more about her project and this special pasta with me.
What inspired you to start The Pasta Project?
I moved to Italy 22 years ago, although I visited many times, and prior to living in Italy, I lived in Malta. Pasta is really popular everywhere, but pasta in Italy is not the same as pasta everywhere else. And I was just really impressed with how many different types of pasta—more than 360, they say—and all the different ways the Italians prepare them. It’s really so much more than what people know outside of Italy or what people are familiar with. So I decided I just wanted to share that with other people.
I am nowhere near the 360 types of pasta. I have maybe close to a hundred that I’ve made, bought, or cooked. I still have a long way to go.
I try to divide the recipes between Italy’s 20 different regions. The pasta you find in Sicily, you won’t find here in Verona. Everybody more or less sticks to their type of pasta, except for the things that have become sort of popular throughout the country, like spaghetti.
Spaghetti was invented in Sicily, but it’s eaten throughout Italy, and it’s obviously eaten in many other countries. So, some types of pasta have gained popularity elsewhere. And there are types of pasta that never really got out of the region. You’ll only find them there.
Why iscasarecceone of your favorite pasta types?
Apart from the fact that it’s Sicilian, I like it because it’s one of the prettiest traditional flour and water pastas. And it’s very versatile because of the shape. It looks like a little scroll, and sauce gets stuck inside. So, it looks nice, is easy to make, and is very versatile. You can eat it with ragù, and you can eat it with pesto.
Jacqui DeBono uses a pasta press or ferro (pictured here).
What is the difference between homemade and commercially producedcasarecce?
For homemade, you can make it two ways. You can use the traditional ferro, which is a very fine iron rod that many traditional pastas, particularly in the South, were made with. Or you can make it with a pasta press.
Commercial pasta is made in two ways: with a bronze die, which you’ll find the more traditional artisan pasta makers use, or Teflon dies, which big pasta makers, like Barilla, use. They don’t have the same texture as the bronze-die pasta because they tend to be smoother.
When you make it yourself, it’s not as uniform. Obviously, with commercial pasta, every piece is perfect. The word casarecce comes from casereccio, which means homemade. It’s not perfect, but I think homemade pasta tastes better than commercially produced pasta. It has a nicer texture. You can taste the wheat.
What are some tips for makingcasarecce?
The only real tip is to use the right kind of flour. And what I discovered quite recently is that although we tend to call it semolina flour, it’s actually semola rimacinata, which is re-milled semolina flour. So, if you get semolina flour in the States, it’s not going to be exactly the same as the similar semola rimacinata because that’s finer. And that’s the flour that all Italian dried pasta is made with. In the States, it would be called durum flour, not semolina flour, because semolina flour is coarser than durum flour. So it’s important you have the right flour because otherwise, you won’t get the right texture and consistency.
What’s your favorite way to eatcasarecce?
The one I really like is with caponata. Caponata with pasta is not a traditional combo. Most Sicilians eat caponata as a side dish or as a starter with some bread. But more recently, it’s become quite popular to put it with pasta. And I really like that; it’s all the flavors on one plate.
It’s also really good with pestos. You can cook it with ragù, but I think it’s so much nicer with vegetarian or vegetable sauces.
How a Journalist Found History, Home, and Heart in Sicily
As an Emmy-nominated international journalist, host, and producer, Eszter Vajda traveled the world to pursue stories and subjects. But it was actually a trip back home to Massachusetts, where the Hungary-native grew up, that led her to Sicily.
“There are no coincidences,” Eszter reflects.
She had interviewed Merrimack Valley-based radio host Tom Zappala of The Sicilian Corner a few times, including for a story on Lawrence, Massachusetts’ Feast of The Three Saints (patterned after Trecastagni, Sicily’s Saints Alfio, Filadelfo, and Cirino Festival).
One day, Tom called to see if Eszter could fill in as host for his show. The scheduled guest was Tom’s brother, Alfred M. Zappala, a Northeastern Law School professor, who had just returned from Sicily.
“I really had no idea what Sicily was about,” Eszter says. “We did an hour-long interview on the radio. I’ve always been very passionate about history, so it struck a chord with me.”
Alfred described Sicily’s important strategic location in the Mediterranean and the many peoples and cultures that passed through and influenced the island. And Eszter wanted to know more.
She invited him to appear on her TV show. The interview ended, the lights and microphone were off, and the crew was ready to go home. But Eszter and Alfred kept talking.
He invited her to lunch, and they began discussing a plan for Eszter to spend a month making a few videos in Sicily.
Eszter arrived in Sicily in June 2014, intending to stay four weeks and produce seven videos. She ended up staying five months, and the videos took on a life of their own. The couple split time between Sicily and the U.S. while Alfred was still teaching. He retired in 2016, and they officially became island residents.
Today, you can catch Eszter and Alfred’s popular video series, You, Me & Sicily!, on YouTube, sign up for one of their Sicily tours, or consult the couple for your own Sicilian vacation. Additionally, the two are deeply involved with the Sicilian Project, which raises money for academic grants to provide English-language education to students in Sicily—Alfred as Chairman of the Board and Founder, and Eszter as Public Relations & Social Media Director.
Eszter shared more about their work and what she ultimately hopes to give back.
Ortygia, Sicily
How do you approach capturing the essence of Sicily in your video series?
We literally zigzag the island. We’ve covered the island up and down. There are very few must-see places in Sicily that I haven’t been to. And we don’t mind going back.
Festivals are a very important part of Sicilian culture. Every town has its own patron saint, and it’s a big deal. It’s multi-generational; the kids, parents, and grandparents go together. I went to the Three Saints festival in Lawrence before I went to the festival in Trecastagni. The religious feel, the excitement, the fireworks… It’s very different here. So we do that, of course.
There’s a lot of food and cooking because you’ve got to have that. Then maybe there’s an event we’ll cover, like an art show or music. We’d like to be very diversified.
Inevitably, something, like a natural disaster in Etna, happens, and we cover it. Obviously, we were doing that during COVID.
We do a lot with the history. We’re very fortunate to be aligned with a lot of professors from the University of Catania, and we’ve had [retired professor of Italian and Chairman of the Department of Modern Foreign Languages at St. John’s University] Gaetano Cipolla on at least a half-dozen times. So, a lot of that, sharing the history and the culture, is really just providing what we think would be good information for the people.
For example, we published a video about the new Italian citizenship rules because Al does dual citizenship. There were 200 comments on it. Italian citizenship is trending on Google. So we’re focused on that. We stay on top of these types of things.
We take people to the markets and introduce them to the people, not just the produce. We feature the vineyards, and you meet the family behind the wine. We do that a lot. We feature a lot of family-run businesses. There’s even a playlist. “Family-Run Businesses.” That’s very important.
Eszter in Taormina
What makes your private and group tours unique?
What makes them unique is that we live here. You’ll go to places we frequent. We take you to restaurants where the owners are our friends. The owners of the hotel you’re staying in are our best friends. We’ve vetted the vineyards and have been going there for years and years.
We have made incredible connections. We have drivers and guides and hotels all over the island. We visit vineyards, do olive oil tastings, go to the Sicilian cart museum, and ride boats. We offer a basket of experiences.
For the private tours, I work one-on-one with the families multiple times to make sure that it’s what the family wants. And 99.9% of the time when a family comes, it’s because they want to come to Sicily and see an ancestral home. So those are some very special tours.
We keep our group tours very small, so they’re very personalized and customized.
A colorfully decorated boat in Aci Trezza
Tell us more about the Sicilian Project, which Alfred founded.
English as a second language is a huge problem in Sicily. Alfred wrote in one of his books (and I’m not quoting him exactly), “If someone gave me a donation, I would start some kind of an English-as-a-second-language language program that would be free for Sicilian kids.” Someone who read that book called and said, “I’m going to send you a check.”
This man, Steve Carbone, who is still a good friend of ours, sent Al a $10,000 check. And Al said, “Oh my God, I’ve got to do something.” So he made it a 501(c)(3).
We’ve had very regular classes. We had one in Brolo, we had one in Bagheria outside of Palermo, and we have them in Canicattì, Aci Trezza, and Aci Catena. We hold these classes, and they run as sort of summer camps. We play (depending on the level of the kids), we sing songs, and have conversation.
When COVID hit and we had to cancel two classes, what we started doing was handing out money to the churches. So for about two years, we did that for Easter and Christmas. Some churches had more need than others. Then, we literally restarted the Sicilian Project.
I’m so thankful we’re able to have classes now. We had four classes this past fall, and we started an adult class where Sicilian professionals who want to improve their English come and do that.
We just finished a class with 15 kids and six adults, and we were able to get guys from Naval Air Station Sigonella to volunteer because they have to do a number of hours of volunteering. So we had native speakers. I did class, and Alfred taught.
When I came here, I felt like Sicily was like a blanket. And then Sicily gave me so much beauty, food, and nourishment, emotionally and physically, that I was hellbent on being a very active member of the Sicilian Project. And not just being a board member, but actively giving back. We are very, very active.
A rainbow of umbrellas floats above a street in Catania.
What do you hope to share through your work?
First of all, we started the show to dispel stereotypes and myths about Sicilians and educate people about Sicily’s deep and wide contribution—not just to Europe but to civilization.
Bringing people to their ancestral home is probably one of the most gratifying things. Hearing the oohs and ahhs of people on my tours when they’re out seeing something beautiful or tasting something. When you are in Sicily, it is an experience for all the senses, right? You’re emotionally overwhelmed by all the senses that are stimulated. So, that’s what I hope my work does. I hope it inspires and educates more than anything.
Italian Portland: Keeping Italian Heritage Alive Through Culture, Community, and Connection
When Southern California native Christina Cavallaro landed in Portland, Oregon, one of the first things she did was seek out an Italian American organization. Remaining rooted to her family’s heritage with connections to Adelfia in Bari, Italy, and Cesaro, in the province of Messina, Sicily, was important to her. (That history even inspired two cookbooks.)
She found a group, but when it went defunct, she teamed up with another Italian-American Portlander, Tonya Russo Hamilton, a fellow author, who was in the early stages of laying the groundwork for what would become Italian Portland in 2015.
“We try to present the history and culture of Italians because we know from experience as Italians that traditions are falling apart and food and recipes aren’t being passed down from generation to generation,” Christina says. “And when people come to our social group, they’re hungry for that. They say that’s what they miss the most. People share, ‘Nonna used to cook this,’ and ‘We want to learn to do that,’ or ‘Nobody speaks Italian anymore,’ and ‘We want to learn the Italian language,’ or ‘”We are interested in traveling to Italy. What suggestions or steps do we take to make this trip a reality?’”
Italian Portland strives to provide solutions for Italian American Portlanders with various events and programs, including monthly social meetings, Italian language classes, a book club, and cultural activities like cooking classes and limoncello tastings. They’ve helped feed the homeless at a nearby church and partnered with experts to help people navigate dual citizenship and research genealogy. Members have shared their experiences of visiting Italy to provide valuable insights for individuals planning their own trips. That firsthand knowledge and tips can help travelers make the most of their time in Italy. The organization also aims to be inclusive, publishing a monthly newsletter with events from all local Italian organizations.
Christina shared more about Italian Portland’s offerings, upcoming initiatives, youth outreach, and goals.
Italian Portland’s limoncello-tasting event
What activities and events does Italian Portland host?
We have quite a bit to offer the Italian community and the public. So many people love Italians, the culture, and the food. We even have people who aren’t Italian at all who join us!
We have a book club and a monthly social club. We also offer an Italian conversation group and two Italian language classes online and in person.
We enjoy brainstorming innovative topics and speakers that appeal to the group. For example, the Italian consulate from Portland talked to our social group. We’ve had cooking classes, and a Portland State professor talked about Americans in Italy during the war. Our programs continue to interest people in the social club and the general public.
The biggest event we have coming up, that we’ve never done before, is a vendemmia. In Italy, it’s the big celebration at the end of the harvest, with dinner in the vineyard. We’re going to have tables down the rows of the vines, and we’re providing an Italian dinner, Italian Opera singers, and an auction.
We are hosting this event in early August instead of the usual September or October timeframe due to the fact that wineries and vineyards in the area will be busy picking and crushing grapes for wine during those months.
This event is a fundraiser. Its goal is to raise funds through donations and an auction to support the Italian community, including the Portland State Opera and Scuola Italiana di Portland. The talented students from Portland State Opera will perform at the Vendemmia event.
We’re excited about this event and hope it all comes together well.
Tell us more about your book club.
Our book club meetings are held via Zoom to ensure that everyone located close by or far away can participate. The member who recommends the book leads the discussion. After the discussion, we rate the book on a scale of one to five cannoli. The last book received a rating of three and a half cannoli. Our meetings are enjoyable and provide an hour of cultural enrichment.
Guests enjoy “My Big Fat Italian Wedding.”
How are you reaching younger generations?
A couple of years ago, we had an event called “My Big Fat Italian Wedding.” We put it on just like the movie. We hired a hall and had a lasagna dinner, music, and dancing. At every table, we had little confetti.
We were fortunate to have two generations in attendance at that event. We featured two couples: a young pair embarking on the journey of marriage and a couple celebrating their impressive 45th wedding anniversary.
We taught the young people traditions like the tarantella, dancing all around the parking lot. And they loved it.
Many young individuals are attending our social club to explore various activities and interests. We frequently engage in tombola games, offering opportunities for participants to play Italian bingo and win prizes. Our club strives to incorporate programs that cater to the interests of young and old. By aligning our offerings with their preferences, we aim to attract a larger audience of young individuals.
What are your goals?
When we first embarked on this journey, we faced significant obstacles. We lacked the necessary resources—both financial and human capital.
Establishing a board of directors and forming a nonprofit organization proved challenging, particularly given our lack of legal expertise. As a result, we enlisted the help of an attorney to guide us through the process.
Despite these challenges, our perseverance paid off. We successfully obtained nonprofit status, allowing us to further our mission and attract support from donors and sponsors. As a result of our efforts, our organization has grown, necessitating a move to a larger meeting space to accommodate our expanding audience.
Through dedication and strategic planning, we have transformed our initial struggles into triumphs, positioning our organization for continued success and impact in the community.
Italian Portland Social Club
What do you hope to share?
We want to share our love and passion for bringing Italians and people who enjoy Italian culture together while enriching, cultivating, and educating. If someone wanted to start an organization like this somewhere, we would tell them to appeal to the interests of the community. Number one: Don’t give up and ask for help. Number two: If you build it, they will come.
Villa Charities: Celebrating Italian and Italian-Canadian Culture in Toronto
With up to 500,000 residents of Italian origin, Toronto has one of the largest Italian populations of any city outside of Italy. Most immigrants came in the years following the second World War, adding to the significant sum who had already settled within the city’s three Little Italies.
As this large influx began to age, community members sought a way to address their changing needs. In 1971, a group of Italian-Canadian Torontans formed the Italian Canadian Benevolent Corporation. Five years later, they opened Villa Colombo Toronto, a long-term care facility for seniors.
Today known as Villa Charities, the organization has expanded its mission to fund, develop, administer, and coordinate health, social, cultural, and educational projects. The group honors both Italian and Italian-Canadian culture, recognizing that the two have evolved in parallel over time. In addition to its Columbus Centre amenities, the organization hosts a wide range of events and activities, including classes for toddlers, book launches, art exhibitions, concerts, and dance programs.
I spoke with Villa Charities Executive Director of Cultural Programming Giulio Recchioni, who shared more about the organization, its offerings, and its aims.
What inspired the founding of Villa Charities, and how has its mission evolved over the years?
It was founded by a group of community leaders who put together their willingness to leave a mark in town and have a structure where Italians could gather and be at home away from home. The first structure that was born was Villa Colombo, which is currently a nursing home for seniors.
In the beginning, when the bulk of the migrants were here and aging like everybody else, there was this idea: What do you do once you reach an age when you’re not independent anymore? Are you going to be dispersed through the English-speaking nursing homes throughout Ontario?
They decided to create something that was not there before, a structure that could be the reference point for the entire Italian community here in Toronto. And 50 years later, this is still what we do. Today, the Columbus Centre is the largest Italian cultural center in Canada, and we’re still quite well respected within the community. We are still the center of what happens to the Italian-Canadian community.
Villa Charities hosts a Summer Sagra event outside of its Columbus Centre.
What makes Villa Charities unique in what it offers?
Several organizations work with Italian culture in Toronto. Some of them are government-owned. But what really makes us different from everybody else is that we deal not only with Italian culture but also Italian-Canadian culture.
We not only recognize Italian culture but also try to bring modern, contemporary Italian culture to the public’s attention while also catering to Italian Canadians and representing their culture and values. It’s a culture that crystallized in the fifties and then evolved on its own, far away from the culture of Italy.
Progress in technology allows us to be close to Italian culture nowadays, but up to 30 years ago, what we see today to watch Italian television, take a phone, and speak to our people in Italy was kind of unusual, if not unthinkable or very expensive. So, the Italian-Canadian culture grew and became something different—looking at Italy but from far away.
Members roast speducci at a Summer Solstice event.
Tell us more about your events and activities.
We have a wide range of events, as we have to cater to the biggest number of people possible. We truly have an approach from cradle to rocking chair. We have events for toddlers; we have Italian classes for toddlers where the teacher sings so that the toddlers get used to the Italian language. We have book launches, and we manage an art gallery, so we have art exhibitions. We work with musicians to do concerts. We have a dance school.
We offer quite a wide variety of programs. The Columbus Centre has a gym and swimming pool with a variety of activities typical of a community center.
During summertime, we have large events outside. They’re inspired by the idea of the sagra in Italy. So we have chosen in the past an aspect of Italian cuisine. For example, in July, we have what in Canada is called speducci [grilled meat skewers], originally in Abruzzo, they’re called arrosticini, so we celebrate those in July. Then, in August, we celebrate Ferragosto with a very large outdoor party.
We make tomato sauce with our seniors in September and distribute it to the public. We also offer a plate of pasta to complement the tomato sauce. Then, in October and November, we have events that speak to the art of wine making. So we press grapes in October together with a local Italian-Canadian winery. And then, in April, we have a little taste of the wine we made ourselves.
We echo some of the most popular Italian holidays and make them our own. For example, we have a Sagra della Castagna in November, when in Italy it’s a tradition to have vino novello e castagne [new wine and chestnuts], because that’s when you bottle the first wine to see how it is and you get to taste it. We can’t quite do the same because Canada’s alcohol laws differ from Italy’s. But we did keep the part of the castagne. So we cook castagne and distribute them for free to the community during the event.
Food really attracts people more than anything else, so we have these events as a community-building exercise. They’re quite fun to attend, so it’s a pleasure to keep presenting them and offering them to the community.
Members celebrate the preparation of their own wine.
What do you hope to share with members and the community?
Italian culture in Toronto is quite lively. A wealth of Italian activities and organizations are bubbling up. It’s wonderful when people see what’s happening and attend.
As a person who organizes events, it’s nice when you spend so much time and energy creating something and you see a lot of people recognizing the event coming and having a good time. At the end of the day, Italian culture is all about changing life for the better, and that’s what I would invite them to do. Just come out and participate in what’s happening in the city. There is a lot of Italian stuff going on.
She Built a Brooklyn Foodie Bookstore Inspired by Sicilian Roots
From a young age, Brooklynite Paige Lipari yearned for a space where she could bring together her passions for food, books, and the arts. As she grew older, she realized she also wanted to share what she loved with her community.
Following a trip to her family’s home in Alcamo, Sicily, Paige decided that the space would be a bookstore catering to gourmands by selling Sicilian and Italian specialty goods alongside cookbooks and serving as an event space for foodies and neighbors in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. And so began Archestratus Books + Foods in 2015.
I recently sat down with Paige, who shared more about Archestratus’s start, her deep connection to Sicily, the challenges and rewards of running a niche business, how she has engaged the community, and more.
Tell us about your connection to Sicily.
I’m Sicilian on both sides. My father was born in Sicily, and my mother is second-generation American. I have a very strong connection with my Sicilian heritage. We go to Sicily every few years and visit my family in Alcamo.
My family has a city house and a country house because it was four hours to Trapani by donkey, but now it’s seven minutes. They’re in the city house in the winter, and then they go to the country house for the warmer months, where they have vineyards. They grow grapes, and they sell mosto to winemakers.
I actually didn’t go to Sicily until I was 19, which felt very late. And then we started going more and more, but my nonna always brought the Old World Italian. I never really related to this sort of gold chain/ white shirt Italian American—that just wasn’t in my family. I grew up with a nonna who always had some wine on the table with some fruit and cheese. We always ate raw fennel after every meal.
She was very much into agriculture and would grow things all year long. The food was unique compared to other Italian American restaurants we visited. And she was my first anchor in that culture.
Archestratus specializes in vintage and new cookbooks.
What inspired you to open Archestratus, and what led to the naming of the bookstore?
When I was really young, I loved books, and there was this closet where I would sit and read by myself. And I was a latchkey kid with two working parents, so I started cooking for myself really early.
I kind of knew in the back of my mind that I wanted a bookstore. I also love design and making spaces feel warm and cozy. And then I love the arts, so the idea of having people perform in this space, doing conversations and talks, and keeping that intellectual stimulation.
It wasn’t until I went to Sicily for the first time, when I was 19, and met my family, that I completely broke open this obsession with Sicilian food and, of course, Sicilian cookbooks. I fell in love with them, and it changed my life.
When I came back, it was kind of my way of connecting with them and also preserving my heritage because my nonna was starting to have dementia. The recipes were all in her head.
When I learned about Sicilian cuisine, my creative juices just flowed so hard in that direction. I could never really put my finger on why it was different or what it was about until I went there.
Sicily’s so beautiful and unique, and it’s amazing to me that now it’s getting its flowers as far as how it is its own place. But 20 years ago, when I started out making this food and getting really passionate about it, nobody knew. No one was talking about how it’s influenced by Spain and North Africa, and there are a lot of Middle Eastern flavors, and there’s the Couscous Festival and all that stuff.
I was passionate about spreading the word.
Where did the name Archestratus come from?
I read Pomp and Sustenance by Mary Taylor Simeti and read about Archestratus, and I immediately felt a connection with him. He was kind of wild in what he wrote, and he was deeply mysterious; we don’t know much about him.
I named the store first, and then all these answers revealed themselves later. He was a poet who was more interested in places and simplicity, enjoying himself and having a good time. Food was all about that and gathering.
Cookbooks are documents of places, times, and people. I’m interested in how food is a way of seeing the world and bringing people together.
How do you select the books for your collection, and do you have any personal favorites?
I go to book sales. I love books where it feels like there’s a real voice. I know there’s a place for more prescriptive things that fill a niche. I just make sure that they’re really of good quality and were done with intention.
Some of my favorite books are Pomp and Sustenance and Honey from a Weed by Patience Gray.
Patience Gray’s husband was a sculptor, and they would travel around the Greek and Italian islands in the Mediterranean, chasing marble for him. So she would spend time in these places. While he was doing the work, she would go out and sniff the windows of the homes, figure out what the women were making, and write about them in a strange, esoteric, funny way.
Can you share some highlights of the community spirit at your bookstore?
We started the Archestratus Cookbook Club in 2015, and it has always been successful. We pick a book every month, and then everyone shows up with one portion of a dish. Then we all just have this feast, take a little bit of everything, and try other dishes from the book to see if you want to buy it.
Our bake sales are probably the most incredible. We held a bake sale for the L.A. fires and raised $9,000 in three hours, which was matched by a corporate sponsor. We also held a bake sale for Joe Biden, one for Planned Parenthood, one for Ukraine, and one for Palestine.
We usually have around 80 bakers, and then it gets people to come. It’s such a great model. You spend $20, but then if it’s a big sale, that $20 can turn into $200.
What’s been your biggest business challenge?
The pandemic was a challenge, but it wasn’t my biggest challenge. In a bizarre way, I almost felt like I was ready. I already wanted to expand and had been researching more food vendors.
During the pandemic, we were a bookstore cafe, and I was already starting to think we were outgrowing this space. So, I was already researching vendors for fresh milk and eggs and trying different things. And so I had set up all these connections, and then the pandemic hit, and I was like, well, I could do a grocery pickup.
On March 19, 2020, we did a grocery pickup, which was one of the first weekends. By April, we had one day when we had to pick up for 220 people. They would come up on the street with their order, and then I would fulfill it. So I had this bizarre flow happen with the pandemic, and we were O.K.
My biggest challenge after the pandemic was when we expanded, and then I realized, “I don’t like this. I don’t want to do this. I don’t like having a bigger staff, and I don’t like dealing with this landlord.”
I thought I would love it, that this was what we needed. But then I realized we needed to be smaller, more flexible, and lighter on our feet.
I did this big thing, saying, “We’re doing this.” Then, I had to pull back and make that hard decision to contract.
Every decision I make is pretty public, but I was not doing the thing that I know I love. I love making food, and I love cooking, but it was not making me happy anymore at that level. Facing that and just financially getting through that and out of it has been extremely challenging, and I’m still dealing with the effects.
What are your upcoming plans?
I know that people want recipes, and I want to share them. And so, figuring that out is going to be 2025, and starting to do that. I know there will be a newsletter, so I’m going to start writing one and sharing some of these recipes.
Another more community-driven thing I want to do this year is create a community zine and start making a cookbook with everybody, especially coming out of these bake sales. We have such a network of people who love to develop recipes, cook, and have family recipes. We started doing that before the pandemic, but it never got off the ground. And this is the year I want to make time.
What do you hope people take away from a visit to Archestratus?
I hope that they get inspired to be more of themselves. I hope that they see that we’re operating on a frequency of not giving a shit, and I hope that they go off and they do whatever they want to do.
How Friends of Isola delle Femmine Creates a Lasting Bond Between California and Sicily
Frank Bruno grew up in Pittsburg, California, hearing his grandmother’s memories of Isola delle Femmine, a fishing village outside Palermo, Sicily. But he knew very little about the place and didn’t think much about it. That was until 1992, when his friend, Vince DiMaggio, shared that he’d returned from his godparents’ wedding vow renewal in the same town. Vince had spoken with Isola delle Femmine’s then-Mayor Vincenzo DiMaggio about possibly having a Sister City relationship with Pittsburg.
Frank and Vince weren’t alone in their ties to Isola delle Femmine; most of Pittsburg’s Italian American population shared that connection. As President of the Pittsburg Chamber of Commerce, Frank was in a good position to take action. He asked Pittsburg’s mayor, who agreed to the proposal, and then he reached out to officials in Sicily.
When Isola delle Femmine’s mayor came to Pittsburg, he saw its iconic fisherman statue, sculpted by local artist Frank Vitale, whose grandparents came from Isola delle Femmine. He wanted one for his town, so Pittsburg community members raised funds to make it happen.
The sculptor still had the mold he used to build a replica that the Americans sent to Sicily. Today, you can find that statue at Isola delle Femmine’s Piazza di Pittsburg, named for the town’s original sister city.
That would have been the end of the story: a lasting connection made in honor of shared heritage. Frank moved to Novato, California, in 1997 and lost track of many of the people who were involved until 2017, the 25th anniversary of the Isola delle Femmine-Pittsburg delegation’s first visit.
Frank and Vince returned to the fold, and a group from Isola delle Femmine joined the community for a reception. Two years later, Frank, Vince, and Vice President Mary Coniglio co-founded Friends of Isola delle Femmine with a mission statement to preserve, protect, and promote Sicilian-American heritage within Isola delle Femmine’s California sister cities, which today number three after the 2017 and 2019 respective additions of Monterey and Martinez.
Frank, who serves as Friends of Isola delle Femmine’s President, shared more about how and why Isolani emigrated to the U.S. and first landed in Pittsburg. We also discussed the organization’s events, outreach, and evolution, as well as its challenges for the future.
Friends of Isola delle Femmine 1994 trip – Sal Caccaroni, John Buffo, Vince DiMaggio, Sculptor Frank Vitale, Frank Bruno, Mary Coniglio, Rocco Battaglia, and Vince Coniglio
How and why did Isola delle Femmine residents find their way to Pittsburg?
Back in the 1860s, when Garibaldi unified Italy, it did little to help the people in Sicily. They were still starving, and there was no work. One story was that they were so hungry they resorted to eating wheat plaster from the walls.
In 1862, two brothers from Isola delle Femmine with the last name Aiello came to New Orleans, where a big influx of Sicilians lived in the French Quarter.
They were trying to make a living fishing and cooking. After a Yellow Fever outbreak, they left Louisiana for Oregon, where they fished for salmon before seeing an advertisement from California. The state was looking for fishermen to come and help fish the delta to feed the people who came in for the Gold Rush. So the Aiellos got on a train and ended up in what is now called Pittsburg, California, on the Sacramento River. They started fishing and called for their family, saying, “Here in Pittsburg, the weather is like home. The fishing is abundant, and we’re making money.”
A lot of people started to come, and many of them worked and stayed here. Then, a lot of them went back home. Pittsburg was the fishing area, but there was seasonal fishing. So when the seasonal fishing went to the wayside, they went to Martinez and Monterey, and many of them stayed there while others went back to Pittsburg. So that was the influx, which is why we have three Sister Cities with Isola in our organization.
Describe your cultural exchange and promotion efforts.
Back in 1994, we started a student exchange program. We only did it twice. We sent high schoolers back there, and they went to school. Isola delle Feminine sent college students here, which became a vacation for them. And I said that’s not what we really wanted to do as a student exchange program.
My idea, and we’re trying to start this now, is to have something similar to what I’m involved in with the Rotary Club: a group study exchange. There would be dentists or any occupation that is here that wants to go. We would supplement, coordinate their stay over there, and have a little bit of money to help them there. But they would pay for their trip. They would go over to Isola and the Palermo area and vice versa.
We can do it with contractors, dentists, doctors, and many professional business people who would come back and forth. As for the cultural heritage stuff, we’re working on doing what I call an ancestral fair, having an area where folk music and heritage stuff are going on, and then having booths.
How have you connected with younger generations?
We’re giving scholarships to our members’ children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren who are going to college. We give out six; two years ago, we gave out 10. They would have to qualify normally by having a grade point average acceptable for college and writing a statement about what it was like growing up Italian. Then we have a picnic and give out our scholarships.
One of our roadblocks is passing on our cultural heritage to the younger generations. It’s very difficult. They’re proud to be Italian American, but that’s where it ends. Now, all of us old-timers look at this as memories. Growing up in Pittsburg was one of the greatest childhoods anybody could have. I mean, it was just full of family everywhere.
We have functions, but not many younger people have come. Instead of trying to decide how to capture the younger generation and have them tell us what they’re looking for, we’re going to have a discussion and invite a number of our younger members who are 40 or 50 years old to ask them.
If we’re going to succeed as a cultural heritage organization, we need to replace these people. I can’t do this forever.
Scenes from Friends of Isola delle Femmine picnics
Tell us about your events.
We’ve had some fundraisers to fund administration, scholarships, and anything else we want to do. We’ve done pretty well.
We started with a program back in 2019 called That’s Italian. We had some opera singers, and we sang show tunes at a place called the Colombo Club in Oakland. About 565 people could sit down for dinner, and then upstairs, there is a banquet hall, bar, and stage. We had 200 people, and they went downstairs and had a nice Italian dinner. And then they came up, and we had this big show and a live auction.
After the pandemic, when the British Queen passed away, one of our members said, “Why don’t we have a High Tea but Italian style?” We had one in Monterey and one in Pittsburg. We’re finishing up our third one, which will be the last, and we’re going in another direction.
Our summer picnic was designed to be something we used to do as kids and families. Here in Northern California, we have Mount Diablo, where we had Camp Curry and Marsh Creek, and we could swim and play baseball as a family. We wanted to do something similar and said, “Why don’t we just give our scholarships out then?”
We are getting about 250 people, and we can showcase what we do and get new members out of that. We have an Italian who lives in Martinez and owns a catering company. He comes and does the pasta and salads, and then we cook sausage. The mayor of Martinez and the city council people come out, and they do the serving.
What do you ultimately want to share with your community?
There are Italians and Sicilians from Isola here in Pittsburg, California, but not many. They’ve branched out to the other areas. What I want to accomplish for the community is to bring back our pride and heritage and continue to have that. We all want to remember what our nonnas and nonnos did for us when we were growing up. We’re trying to put together a cookbook per se with all these recipes in our newsletter. But we want to do more cultural stuff to remember our grandparents and great-grandparents; hopefully, the next generation will be appreciative.
Frank Bruno with family at the celebration and unveiling of the Fisherman Statue and sister city in 1994
Una Storia Segreta: How Wartime Hysteria Silenced 600,000 Italian Americans—And the Exhibit That Finally Told Their Story
December 7 is a date which will live in infamy. It was the day Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, but that night, the Federal Bureau of Investigation also began arresting “potentially dangerous” Japanese, Germans, and Italians. And they did so before the United States was officially at war.
This response was far from last-minute. Since 1939, the FBI had been compiling lists of suspicious and allegedly subversive persons they decided required surveillance and, in the event of war, internment. Among the hundreds targeted and later interned were journalists, Italian Consulate employees, and veterans of World War I (when Italy and America were allies). Opera star Ezio Pinzo was arrested for allegedly altering his singing tempo to send coded messages to Benito Mussolini.
Internees were sent to military camps in states including Montana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Maryland, and Texas, where many spent years imprisoned. How could the government do this? Title 50 of the U.S. Code, based on the 1798 Alien & Sedition Acts, gave them the power to detain “enemy aliens” in emergencies.
The government effectively declared war on much of its immigrant population, imposing restrictions on about 600,000 Italian residents without U.S. citizenship who, on Dec. 8, had been designated enemy aliens by presidential proclamation. These “enemy aliens” were required to re-register as such; FBI agents raided homes and confiscated weapons, radios, cameras, and even flashlights. Non-citizens on the West Coast were placed under a strict curfew, required to carry “alien enemy” ID booklets, and told they would need a permit to travel more than five miles. Those who did not comply were subject to arrest and detention.
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the military to designate areas of vulnerability and relocate individuals deemed a threat to national security. More than 120,000 Japanese people, including American citizens, were forcibly displaced. What’s lesser-known: By the month’s end, the government ordered the evacuation of at least 10,000 Italian Americans from their homes in California alone. People had just days to relocate.
Why isn’t this in most history books? The question bothered San Francisco Bay Area historian and author Lawrence DiStasi, whose father came to the U.S. from Italy. He began digging through records and archives, collecting testimonials, and eventually created a traveling exhibition called Una Storia Segreta, Italian for secret story and hidden history.
His efforts and compiled testimonies induced President Bill Clinton to pass the “Wartime Violations of Italian American Civil Liberties Act,” which was signed into Public Law 106-451 in November 2000. While no reparations were distributed, the act acknowledged injustices suffered by Italian Americans during the war.
I discovered these works in June 2020 while researching my World War II-era historical novels. Later, I encountered the original Una Storia Segreta exhibit at the Pittsburg Historical Museum in Pittsburg, California, where the federal government evacuated about a third of the population in 1942. The website, unastoriasegreta.com, reproduces the exhibit.
I was delighted to have the chance to speak with DeStasi about his important work and its legacy.
Share the story behindUna Storia Segretawith us.
I had never heard a thing about these events when I was growing up in Connecticut. When I came to California in the late 1960s, I started to hear about this real turmoil in the Italian American community, specifically in San Francisco and Pittsburg, up on the Delta. I thought this was really an important story, but everybody said no one would talk about it because they were embarrassed and ashamed. There was also animosity in the community because some people had informed on others.
Eventually, we in the American-Italian Historical Association’s Western Chapter decided to hold a conference in 1993 at the University of San Francisco. And it was a sensation. Somebody at that conference said, “Why not do an exhibit?”
We had never done an exhibit before, but four of us decided that we could, in fact, do this. So, with Rose Scherini as our chief researcher, and I as the project director, and with Adele Negro then president of the AIHA Western Chapter, and a designer we found named Elahe Shahideh, who had done a previous exhibit at the Museo Americano in San Francisco, we set out to make it happen. We had panels nailed to the wall, and we managed to gather some artifacts. A friend of ours, an Italian teacher, suggested the title Una Storia Segreta, which means both “a secret story” and “a secret history.”
Opening night was an absolute smash sensation. People from all over the Bay Area wept in front of the panels. We got more publicity for that than any other effort we had ever made. It was featured on the front page of the Style section of the San Francisco Chronicle.
That started us off, and Bill Cerruti from Sacramento, with the help of Connie Ilacqua Foran, whose father had been interned and whose husband was a senator, got approval for the exhibit to come to the Capitol in Sacramento, and that was huge. The governor signed a proclamation. We had a banner in front of the Capitol that said “Italian American Exhibit.” Bill spent about seven thousand dollars to make our panels, which were displayed around the rotunda of the Capitol.
It was a beautiful exhibit, and that gave us more publicity. We started getting requests from all over California from Italian-American organizations who wanted to host the exhibit. When it went down to Monterey, where many fishermen were affected, our friend Hugo Bianchini, an architect, decided to make frames for each panel. We got the exhibit framed and put it in two traveling crates.
Hugo said, “This exhibit will be traveling for five years.” We thought he was crazy. It turns out that Una Storia Segreta ended up traveling for more than twenty years.
Una Storia Segreta panels on display at the Rayburn House Office Building
How did the exhibit inspire the passage of legislation?
People would request that I come with the exhibit to give a talk, so I went all around the country. We had it at several state houses as well, all without soliciting any organizations. It just traveled by word of mouth.
The highlight was when we displayed it in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C. John Calvelli, the chief of staff to Elliot Engel at that time, saw the exhibit in the Rayburn and said, “We can pass legislation about this.” So, he took the lead in getting the legislation drawn up and got us Judiciary Committee hearings, at which I and several community leaders spoke. We managed to get Ezio Pinza’s wife to come and testify at our hearings. She gave a very moving testimony. We also persuaded baseball great Dom DiMaggio to testify.
We also had several people from the Bay Area testify in Washington, D.C. Afterward, John Calvelli said, “We hit a home run. We’re going to get this legislation passed.”
After two tries, the Wartime Violation of Italian American Civil Liberties Act was passed and signed into law by President Clinton in 2000. That was a real success.
Attending Judiciary Committee hearings in Washington, D.C.
Was your own Italian family affected by these wartime events?
I would go around the country saying, “Can you imagine there are people whose own families were affected and didn’t even know about it?”
Well, I turned out to be one of those people. Because my father and my uncle were both classified “enemy aliens” during the war, and nobody ever talked about it until our exhibit went back east.
My sister asked my cousin, “Did you know about any of this? Can you imagine?” And my cousin Rosemary said, “Well, yes, my father was an ‘enemy alien.’ They came and took our radio.”
Then my daughter was looking into Italian citizenship, and I asked a friend in Washington if she could send me my father’s records. That’s when I learned that my father was actually an “enemy alien” himself. He never said a word about it. We have none of his papers or anything like that, but that was the story. That just knocked me off my feet; I couldn’t believe that that was the case, but that was why we called it Una Storia Segreta. Secret story, secret history.
A young Costanza Ilacqua Foran stands between her parents.
Which stories featured inUna Storia SegretaandBrandedstand out most?
Connie Ilacqua Foran’s father in San Francisco was interned. They interned him because he worked with the Italian Consulate a little bit.
Rose Scudero became one of our star informants because her family was evacuated and had to move out of Pittsburg. Her father could stay, but she left Pittsburg with her mother. When the restrictions were lifted, she said she was a little bit like Paul Revere, running back to Pittsburg through the streets, shouting, “You can go home now; you can go home now!” That was really moving.
Notice to evacuate from U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle
What message or lesson do you hope to share with your work?
During wartime, anything can be justified. You never know what the powers that be can make the case for.
I just want readers to know that this happened despite all the denials and attempts to hide it. History is never quite complete, and you can always find out something new.
I’m very proud of the work we did. We put this thing on the map, and it’ll never again be forgotten or hidden because over 600,000 Italian Americans were affected by this one event. It’s one of the biggest things that’s ever happened in the Italian American community.
Documentary Uncovers Era When Italians Were Deemed ‘Potentially Dangerous’
While researching my first novel, The Last Letter from Sicily, I stumbled on the book Una Storia Segreta by Lawrence DiStasi, from which I learned about government restrictions and actions during World War II that targeted some 600,000 Italians, so-called enemy aliens who were not yet American citizens. Many were placed under curfew, and some were banned from their workplaces. But what I found most jarring was the fact that about 10,000 Italian people were evacuated from their homes in California alone, and hundreds of Italian men were rounded up nationwide and placed in internment camps.
Those stark statistics inspired my second novel, Beneath the Sicilian Stars. I fell down a research rabbit hole, where I discovered the documentary film Potentially Dangerous, produced by Noah Readhead, Zach Baliva, and Naomi Baliva, which sheds light on this hidden history through interviews with historians and individuals with families directly affected by evacuation and internment experiences.
I spoke with Zach, who also served as the director, about the film. He shared how the documentary started with an entry to the Russo Brothers Italian American Film Forum, an annual fellowship opportunity sponsored by The Italian Sons and Daughters of America, AGBO, and The National Italian American Foundation, which supports projects that tell original Italian American stories.
The film would win the 2021 award, among other prizes and distinctions. And actor John Turturro signed on as executive producer. You can catch Potentially Dangerous on PBS. (Check your local listings for PBS member stations.) It’s also available on DVD and streaming.
What inspired the making ofPotentially Dangerous?
I learned about the Russo Brothers Italian American Film Forum shortly before the deadline in 2020. I wanted to enter something because I’ve worked mainly in narrative filmmaking, but I’ve also worked as a journalist and a freelance writer. So, documentary is kind of a natural space for that combination. The problem was I didn’t have a topic, and the deadline for the film forum was approaching. I thought, “I’ll fill out an application, and through the process, I’ll get to know the people involved. They’ll reject my application this year, but next year, I’ll be prepared.”
I needed a story, so I Googled “unknown Italian American story” or something. When you do that, the first search results are Larry DiStasi’s work on this topic because one of his books (Una Storia Segreta) translates to an unknown story or a secret history.
I went through dual citizenship, and my family is Italian American. I had never heard of any of this before. And so, really quickly, I got interested in it.
Oftentimes, you find a story, and it’s already been done, or there’s already a novel, or there’s already a documentary, or whatever. So, usually, when I contact people, they’re like, “Oh, somebody tried to do this already, and it didn’t work.” And with this, it was the opposite.
When I contacted Larry, he said, “This has been my life’s work, and I would kill for somebody to make a documentary about this. Please do; I’ll turn over all my research and connect you with all the people.”
I would have had nothing if Larry had not been involved or receptive or hadn’t primed the pump by doing all his research. But I just contacted him at the right time. And so he was very, very receptive.
As I was going through the research with him, I started to realize this was something I had to be involved in. And primarily when I realized that there were people detained and held within Ellis Island, that was kind of the clincher for me because I remember going to New York as a young child, and you hear, “This is where our family came through.” And just to realize that not many years later, these same people who saw this as a beacon of hope and freedom were held against their will in the same facility, to me was just this fascinating juxtaposition.
As I started doing more work, people were super receptive to being involved, and it took on a life of its own. We ended up winning the Russo Brothers Italian American Film Forum and got funded.
It was just being in the right place at the right time. And lots of credit to Larry, who is really the champion of this cause. And if it wasn’t for him doing a lot of the work over the years… He put people in a position where they were more receptive to speaking to me.
I know that when he first started interviewing people, many didn’t want to participate. And so 15 years later, when I came along, they were like, “Alright, we’ve started to tell this story, and now we want to see how far we can take it.”
Zach interviewed several individuals about their family’s experiences during World War II.
How did you approach the sensitivities of the story?
Larry had done a lot of hard work on that, but it was a weird combination of dynamics. I had to move quickly because we had a deadline. And if you didn’t hit that deadline, which was five months during COVID with an $8,000 grant, you had to pay that money back. So I was moving very quickly, but one of the most important things to do was to build trust and get to know these people, so they want to tell you these very traumatic things that happened to them 80 years ago. You can’t just fly in there and say, “Alright, the camera’s on. Talk.”
There was one very elderly woman whom I spoke to first. She was, I think, in her upper nineties, and she’s the only person who refused to participate. She said she didn’t want to appear on camera because she was insecure about her appearance. That was a little bit of an excuse. She had this really compelling story. I think she lived in a house near Pittsburg, California, with all these other people and was the one to help teach them English.
I worked with her two or three different times to try to convince her, saying, “We won’t even put you on camera; it’ll just be audio-only for research purposes.” She was the only person who wouldn’t do it, and it was very discouraging because she was the first person I approached, and I feared her reaction might be a sign of what was to come.
For everyone else, it was just moving as slowly as we could to make sure they were comfortable. And then it was also word of mouth. That helped because when I contacted people, I would say, “So-and-so sent me to you,” or “Your cousin told me that you had an amazing story, and it would be sad if we missed it.”
A lot of the work that I do as a journalist is interview-based, so I’ve done, in my freelance career, two or three thousand interview-based articles. You develop this natural ability to sit with people and learn how to make them feel comfortable and how to elicit the best responses. I didn’t just set up the camera and right away say, “So what was it like when your father was ripped from your home?”
A lot of these people are elderly and have kids and grandkids who are a little protective of them, so there were some small hurdles, but overall, most people really wanted to get the story out there, especially because they realized—not to be morbid—this is their last chance.
Still from Potentially Dangerous, dramatizing an FBI raid of an Italian family’s home.
Why do you think this aspect of history has remained hidden?
I think part of it is that they were so ashamed, but also afraid of speaking out. We featured Tony Rosati from the other Pittsburgh, whose father was detained twice. He shared that his mother was paranoid for the rest of her life. For decades later, every time the phone rang, she would worry about who was on the other end, like, “Are they listening to our conversations? Can I trust law enforcement?”
When you think of all those dynamics, you realize these are the reasons why this story hasn’t been told. These people are so reluctant to tell their stories because they’re worried about what might happen to them and that something like this could happen again.
Your executive producer is John Turturro. How did that come to be?
My main goal with the project after it was done was to just get it to the widest possible audience. In the world of film, especially today when it comes to distribution, it’s sort of like a used car salesman or loan shark world where everybody wants a piece of the money, and everybody gets it except for the person who creates the content. So you get all these offers from people. But unless you are a really big name, usually what happens is you get a very little amount of money. They put it on the shelf, and it’ll be available for five bucks on iTunes or whatever, but nobody’s really going to rent it because there’s no marketing or whatever.
The trade-off for me was that if we could get it to public television, there might still be little money involved, but millions of people would see it. That quickly became the goal, and then I realized I would have a greater chance of reaching that goal if somebody like John was involved.
John comes from a military family. His family is from the parts of Italy from which several of the story’s families came. And I had seen that he had worked with some notable Italian directors, and I just felt like, “OK. Out of all the people I could approach, he has to be at the top of the list.” And he was super receptive. He said, “I’m really busy, but anything I can do, even if it’s just lending my name to this project, anything I can do to help, I would love to.”
Without him, I don’t think we would’ve gotten to PBS, for example. He really helped us open those doors.
What other projects do you have in the pipeline?
Funding is always the wild card, and it’s heartbreaking to me because, even within the Italian community, there are many causes and initiatives that these organizations already support. They all want to screen Potentially Dangerous, but there’s no money to fund another project.
I was working on one for a while that ended up going away. It was going to be called The Last Goldbeater in Venice. I found this guy who’s like 75 years old, and he’s literally the last artisan in Europe who makes gold foil and gold leaf by hand.
Every day of his life for the last 50 years, he’s gone into this closet-sized studio and beat a bar of gold—I forget the exact number—like 30,000 times with a 13-pound hammer to make one leaf of gold foil. They use this on the most important monuments in the world, and if they use machine-made materials, it’s not the same as all this stuff.
So the story was that if he doesn’t find an apprentice by the time he retires, this very important cultural art form will go extinct, like mask-making, glass blowing, lace, and other Italian traditions. It mirrors the plight of the city of Venice, which is over-tourism and climate change.
We had a major hospitality brand on board to fund half of the budget, and then, at the last minute, they withdrew their support because they had other priorities for their marketing dollars in 2024. I couldn’t ever replace them. Then the guy retired, and the story went away. In the documentary space, this happens a lot.
Now, I have another story. I found a group of West African refugees who have all fled terrorism and war and ended up in Italy, and they’ve formed a soccer team to sort of assimilate and give them hope and purpose as they rebuild their lives in this new country.
The cool part about it is that the Italian government sponsors them as an anti-racism movement. They placed them in the lowest tier of the official Italian soccer league, and against all odds (as this underdog story), they won the Cup in their first year and moved up from the ninth to the eighth level of the Italian soccer league.
One of their players signed a contract with a Serie-A team and scored a game-winning goal in his first game, and it kind of put them on the map. And so now, a lot of Italians know that this team exists.
Unless we find a sports brand, team, or somebody to co-fund this with us and produce it, then I’m afraid the same thing will happen. But that’s the project now: to figure out if there’s a way to fund this story before it also goes away.
There are lots of stories to tell, but limited time, resources, and money to do it. And for me, it’s heartbreaking when a story that one really believes in just vanishes because of money.
Hundreds of Italian “enemy aliens” were imprisoned in internment camps across the nation.
How do you hopePotentially Dangerouswill contribute to a greater understanding of Italian American history?
It’s something I think about a lot, and not everyone agrees with me. I really do believe that because these events happened, they stopped publishing Italian-language newspapers in some places, and people started hiding that part of their personalities and that part of their identities. And that sort of contributed to my own experience in the Midwest of how my family is like, “OK. We’re Italian, we’re Italian American.” But it doesn’t really mean a whole lot to us, unfortunately. And these events had a big role to play in that. My argument is that because of what happened, we’ve been left with this caricature of what it means to be an Italian or an Italian American.
We have the mafia stereotype, and we have this very shallow understanding of the Italian American expression in the United States. My argument is that if this hadn’t happened, there would be a more robust and deep expression of Italian Americanism because they wouldn’t have had to hide certain parts of their culture to be accepted. Therefore, that expression would’ve been fuller and more complete for generations. And now you have all these organizations like the Italian American Future Leaders of America, and people of my age and younger who are trying to recapture that. But these events really played a part in that.
Preserving Monterey’s Italian Fishing Legacy: The Italian Heritage Society’s Mission to Honor a Storied Past
Known for its now-defunct sardine canneries that inspired John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, Monterey, California, has a rich history as a fishing community. Communities have fished the area for thousands of years, with contributions spanning from indigenous communities to Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, and Italian (primarily Sicilian) fishermen. The latter of whom are celebrated by the Italian Heritage Society of the Monterey Peninsula.
Founded in 1975 and currently led by President AnnaMarie Della Sala Stanton, the organization aims to honor and preserve the stories, traditions, and culture of Italian families who immigrated to the Monterey Peninsula and Central Coast of California more than a century ago.
The Italian Heritage Society has published three books celebrating local Italian American history, culture, and community contributions: Italian Fishing Families of Monterey, Italian Fishing Families of Monterey (second edition), and Italian Americans—We Don’t Just Fish!
Since 2002, the organization has recognized notable individuals connected to Monterey’s Italian Community at its annual Honoree Dinner fundraiser. In the past four years, the group has awarded $25,000 in scholarships.
Recognizing the city’s deep connection with the Sicilian community of Isola delle Femmine, from which many early Italian Monterey residents emigrated, Italian Heritage Society members Gasper Cardinale, Peter Coniglio, Peter Davi, and Sal Ferrante were instrumental in establishing a sister-city relationship between the two locales in 2017.
In December 2023, the organization launched a joint effort with the Monterey History and Art Association to present a display titled “Bounty of the Sea” at the city’s Stanton Center. The exhibit presents stories, photographs, and fishing paraphernalia gathered from various groups that have fished in Monterey Bay throughout its history.
I had a chance to speak with Mike Ventimiglia, the organization’s vice president and webmaster, who shared more about Monterey’s past and Italian contributions.
How and why did the organization start?
The idea behind it was, and still is today, to preserve the local history of the fishing industry in Monterey. We have written three books about the history, capturing the fishing industry and the people who fished in the fishing industry; we went beyond that with the last book we published, We Just Don’t Fish! It’s taking the people whose parents had ties to the fishing industry that, as the fishing industry became depleted, had ventured off into different professional organizations that still help the Italian community, the largest community in Monterey then.
The Italians realized they had to get involved in the community if they were to make changes. They felt it was very important to get involved with politics and change the course, which they did and changed for the better.
The Italian community’s predominance in Monterey went from the early 1900s to probably the 1960s and early 1970s. And then it started changing. Different people got elected to office. The Italians weren’t on the city council, so it just started diminishing. We don’t want to lose the history behind what the Italian community did for the city of Monterey.
The Italian Heritage Society at the three-day Monterey Fisherman’s Festival.
Tell us about Monterey’s connection to Isola delle Femmine.
My great-grandfather came from there, and then they left because of the hardships there at that point in time. While doing my genealogy, I realized I had six uncles who came here, and I found out more about them. But I also had two aunts back there who never came. Their father migrated to Martinez, where other Sicilians came at that time. They used to fish the Martinez Straits in the Sacramento River, and many of them came into what they called Black Diamond (Pittsburg, California, today) at New York Landing.
Before the Sicilians, the only people who really fished in Monterey were the Chinese and the Japanese. They mostly did shellfish, and salmon was a big thing then. But salmon gave way to learning about fishing for sardines.
In about 1905, they started fishing sardines in Monterey. Frank E. Booth was the main cannery owner at the time, and he called on a man named Pietro Ferrante for his expertise in fishing. Pietro realized they were using the wrong fishing nets. They weren’t using a lampara net, which is a close-fitted net. And so he recommended and brought forth what was a really small net compared to the gill net they were using. And they started getting more of an abundance of fish. Booth transitioned from doing salmon to canning sardines, which started the escalation of “How do we get more people here?”
So, Pietro Ferrante called his friends in Martinez and Pittsburg and told them they needed fishing in Monterey. People in that area were used to fishing off the coast of Africa.
Word got out that there was an abundance in Monterey, and people started migrating here. They’d send notes back to their family members and friends in Sicily. And they started migrating because they had an opportunity here.
They felt quite at home when they came to Monterey because it reminded them of their old country. It just continued to prosper and went through generations of different types of boats they used and canneries.
Women were the backbone of the Italian fishing industry because they were the ones running the households while the men were out fishing. They were the ones that basically, in the future years, were making investments in property as canneries closed and the fish industry started depleting. So they were not only doing the canning but also taking care of the household because the husbands were gone all the time.
How can the community get involved?
We’re always looking for members and community support. We get a lot of that during our fundraisers and when the community comes out to honor the four individuals we nominate to attend the annual dinner.
The support of the Italian community has fallen to a certain degree. We used to have a lot of community involvement when we were involved with the city and its politics, including the mayors and city council members, as well as many individuals serving on various city boards. That has given way to the modernization and the different needs of people in various sectors living here on the peninsula.
There are people who can’t afford to live here, but they want to. So the direction has gone towards other things, like the tourist industry. Monterey’s tourism is one of the biggest fundraisers they have. And then the events that have come into play here. A lot of city direction is geared towards that, but we always look for their support.
Branded as ‘Enemy Aliens’: Unearthing the Hidden Struggles of Italian-American Fishermen During WWII
The first week of December 1941 brought fear and uncertainty for Italian immigrants in the United States. Nearly 600,000 were labeled “enemy aliens,” kicking off a period of restrictions: forced registration, curfews, home searches, travel bans, and even internment. While Beneath the Sicilian Stars portrays one family’s struggle in California, fishermen on the East Coast faced similarly devastating disruptions, many of which remain untold.
Maria “Mia” Millefoglie discovered this darker chapter of American World War II history while delving into family history for her manuscript, and as a contributing author to Our People Our Stories, a collection of over 80 stories, poems, vignettes, and photos celebrating Gloucester, Massachusetts’ history and the resilient individuals who call Gloucester home.
Mia’s mother had recounted life in war-town Sicily, the bombs, the poverty, and how she was forced to beg for bread. Her grandfathers were banned from fishing commercially on Gloucester’s shores and could no longer send money back to their families. Other relatives recounted stories of families selling mattresses and jewelry for food. These stories prompted Mia to understand why.
Through her research, Mia learned that President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Proclamation No. 2527 branded her Sicilian grandfathers, Filippo Millefoglie and Pietro Favazza, as “enemy aliens.” What’s more, Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8970 established several Defensive Sea Areas off the coasts of the continental U.S., including areas in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and California. Fishermen found themselves barred from key fishing zones and coastal ports, designated as restricted areas for national security. Fishermen who were declared enemy aliens were barred from fishing and banned from the waterfront.
The federal government also requisitioned (or, in some cases, confiscated) fishing boats, either retrofitting them for military use or prohibiting their operation entirely. These restrictions effectively stripped many Italian immigrant fishermen of their livelihoods. Curfews and other limitations made it even more difficult for families to find alternative employment, exacerbating their financial hardships.
Mia shared more about her project, its inspiration and goals, the challenges she has faced, and the community response.
What inspiredBranded as “Enemy Aliens”?
Both of my grandfathers were branded enemy aliens during World War II. They were Sicilian immigrant fishermen who were caught in the political turmoil. Having no knowledge of this proclamation, I never asked about their experiences. One day, I remember telling my grandfather Filippo that I was going out to California. His eyes twinkled, and he said, “Ah, California, I want you to go to San Francisco.”
He named the street and said, “I used to have a fruit cart, and I used to shine the apples for pretty ladies.”
I was in my twenties then, and just thought, “OK. My grandfather liked pretty ladies,” and I dismissed it.
Later, I tracked the impact of the Proclamation and realized that after he couldn’t fish in Gloucester, he went to California, where he sold fruit from a vendor’s cart. So there was your pretty lady story.
I started piecing things together. The mystery of what my grandfathers did was intriguing to me. How did they make a living when they were banned from the waterfront? And they were banned from travel.
I haven’t figured out how my grandfather arrived in California yet, nor how he managed to find work. But he managed, and during that time, my family, including their children, my father, my mother, and the grandmothers, were in Sicily during World War II. So the families were separated, straddling two homelands.
It was really tough to survive. They had been barely surviving on fishermen’s salaries, and now couldn’t send money over to Sicily. So, it was a personal connection, and exploring just how they survived made me realize their resilience.
Jennie & Lucia in Harbor Cove, Gloucester, MA, 1937. The fishing boat was requisitioned during World War II. Photograph by John C. Adams. Courtesy of the Cape Ann Museum Library & Archives, Gloucester, MA.
Describe the project.
This will be a three-part series. I have just completed part two, and we’ll be working on part three. The work involves interviewing family members who have recollections of family stories of World War II in Gloucester, researching archives, and collecting photographs.
I hope to illuminate the impact of the Enemy Aliens Act on the families of fishermen in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and in Terrasini, Sicily. Today, I’m interviewing the grandchildren, who share their memories of their grandparents. Time is of the essence because there aren’t many of those people left. I’m delving deeply into these family histories.
What am I trying to illuminate? One, it’s very timely today. There are lessons to be learned when we apply these types of restrictions, if you will, on a selected group of people. Today, the words “Enemy Alien” have been resurrected in our administration as part of our national immigrant policy. Debates continue on due process and what constitutes a national risk.
During World War II, it is arguable whether there was due process or a registration process, but it was certainly a trying time. People were certainly interned, isolated, prosecuted, and unfairly restricted.
There was also loyalty and allegiance. Some of these immigrant families had children fighting in the service. So I’m also trying to shed light on what it was like for a mother who had one son labeled as an enemy alien, and another was serving the country. What conflicts did this cause among families? In essence, I want to capture the stories of conflict, loyalty, and allegiance in this relatively undiscovered history.
What challenges have you faced?
The challenge is really finding people who have recollections. And I feel an urgency to this work because I’m relying primarily on grandchildren. I actually do have two fishermen that I’m talking to who were closer to the source. Finding people who have experienced this period is the biggest challenge, along with navigating archives and records.
Through the U.S. Navy administration, I’m attempting to locate the list of all the boats that were requisitioned, their retrofitted details, and the dates and methods of their return. So that’s a challenge. I have tracked down several boats, and their owners are featured in the stories.
In many ways, the vessels become characters. In families of fishermen, the boat is a loved family member.
Have you encountered any surprises or particularly moving discoveries?
I was surprised and relieved to learn that the U-boats that destroyed the two Gloucester fishing boats out at sea allowed the men to get on dories.
Perhaps, the U-boat captains believed they had issued a death sentence, underestimating the strength of these men. They were out at fishing grounds, and their livelihood was destroyed. And then they were at the mercy of the sea in a dory, where they rowed to safety all the way to Maine. The men rowed for 36 hours in an attempt to survive and find shelter.
I’m thinking, “Look at the resilience and the courage of some of these people.” I found that to be truly moving.
I am reading excerpts from newspapers about the role of women. They supported the war through fundraisers, purchasing Navy bonds, and forming societies for peace. These stories genuinely touch me.
What has been the response thus far?
The first response was, “Oh my goodness, Alien Enemies Act. That’s exactly what is happening today.”
When I wrote the first series, the Enemy Alien Act was not in our vocabulary. Then, the news brings out instances of searches, detention, and deportation of illegal immigrants. We begin learning about this Act, which had previously been used by presidents only in times of war. For this series, I don’t intend to enter into the political arena, but I felt it necessary to acknowledge the Act for our readers.
I have particularly enjoyed readers sending me photographs of fishing boats, family members, wedding photographs, and more! It felt as if they were going through their family archives, saying, “Oh, this was my grandmother and grandfather during the war. And here they lived in the fort, and here they were restricted.” They were delving back into their own family histories and archives, sharing little snippets. I loved all of this.
I think it’s awakened people. We’re trying to say, “Listen, this is important history. We’re trying to let you know what your stories are; send us pictures, etc.”
There has been a positive response. It’s been just gratifying for me to hear people come forward. That’s been great.
Looking back, I’m more in awe of my family and all the immigrants who came to this country as I explore this history, and this is just another piece that builds on it. It is an incredible story of resilience, isn’t it?
