Looking Back

By the time I met Giorgio Pandone he was a very old man, but he was still chugging up the staircases to visit his paesani and sell jewelry and insurance. Tall, bald, paunchy and stately in his gray three-piece suit, with a gold watch chain spanning his ample vest, he looked like an Italian Alfred Hitchcock. He had lost a fortune in the crash of ‘29 and worked the rest of his long life to pay back what he owed and make a comfortable home for his daughter and himself after his wife died. Zi’ Giorgio (as my parents and …

My great-uncle Tony (we called him Zi’ Toni) had little use for fripperies of any kind. After losing all his teeth, he never bothered getting dentures, but his hardened gums attacked all foods with impunity, including steak and hot cherry peppers. I remember once he reached down into his big jar of peppers and gave me one to bite into as a joke. After failing to put out the fire in my mouth with a glass of water and chunks of bread, I had to resort to scraping the inside of my cheek with a wet dishrag. Always decked out …

In the shadow of the church where I was baptized, the defunct Our Lady of Pity on East 151 Street in the South Bronx, squatted the residence and professional office of Pasquale DiCarlo, MD, the general practitioner who had delivered me. Since old Dr. DiCarlo didn’t subscribe to newfangled notions, he never insisted on appointments for visits. Besides, many of his patients were Italian immigrants who hadn’t yet acquired a phone. On the shingle outside his office he might well have inscribed the motto, “Walk right in, sit right down.” And sit we did, my mother and I, perched for …

It’s been more than three decades since I last saw Aunt Achilla and Uncle Tony’s second-floor, three-room apartment on Hoffman Street, but its image often surges into my mind. Their building was on the corner of 187th Street, in the heart of the Arthur Avenue (or Belmont) section of the Bronx, a neighborhood often called “The Real Little Italy of New York City.” For the longest time, they didn’t have a phone, so we showed up unannounced, though they more or less expected us on Saturday nights or Sunday afternoons. Besides visiting my mother’s aunt, however, our frequent visits had …

When I was off from school and my mother had to go to John’s Grocery down the block in our South Bronx neighborhood, she often left me with Jenny, who lived two flights beneath us on the fourth floor and became my surrogate Italian grandmother. Childless old Jenny had an unflagging delight in children, and I became the solace of her identical days. She always begged to let me stay even after the shopping was done, so my mother would retreat upstairs, while I spent a few hours preening myself in the mirror of Jenny’s love. Besides teaching me how …

Nothing caused butterflies to blossom in my stomach more luxuriantly than my father’s weekend home-repair sessions. Not only couldn’t I go out to play but I soon heard myself being ordered to fetch him an awl from the tool chest — and I came back with a file. Or he’d tell me to get him a plane, and I brought him a plumb line. Or he asked for a Phillips screwdriver, but all he got was a regular one. Sometimes he’d tell me to hold something straight so that he could hammer it or screw it in somewhere or saw …

By the mid-1950s, people of Italian descent largely owned and managed the Highwood shops that dotted the main streets. Those who owned or worked at the establishments could speak Italian to their customers if needed. Not all, however, were from our region in Italy. They all spoke Italian but in dialects unique to their towns of origin. The Napolitano and Sicilian dialects felt harsh to our ears — they had a staccato sound — whereas the Tuscan dialect had a rhythmic flow whose singsong-sound was more pleasing. Immigrants from Piandelagotti spoke their own dialect, substantially different from even the mountain …

As I grew up in Highwood, visiting my friends was like being in my own home: the same foods were served, I sat on the same style furniture, and I saw pictures of relatives on their walls posted in a fashion similar to mine at home. The promotional calendars of the local Italian insurance firm hung right next to the pictures of the pope in all our kitchens. My friends’ parents spoke broken English with the same Italian accent as my parents. They imposed identical rules and doled out similar discipline. We all saw each other at Sunday Mass, after …

Twenty-eight miles north of Chicago, Highwood was home to a large, Italian-immigrant community from the early 20th century up to the late 1980s. Many families from our home province of Modena settled there. As is usually the case in mass immigration, it started with families calling connected families, who in turned called others to their new home. Highwood was a place that offered plentiful job opportunities for men with trade backgrounds — that was because of Fort Sheridan. Fort Sheridan was home to the United States Fifth Army, a base supporting 5,000 military and civilian personnel at its peak. It …

The bus to Pisa from Piandelagotti negotiated the tight turns down the mountainside. With every passing kilometer my parents knew there was no turning back. They stayed to themselves. My mother kept crying while my father was stoic, and my sister and I remained silent. Pisa would be the first stop. There, we would change buses to continue on the final bus leg to Genova, the Italian port city. We stayed the night in a hotel near the docks.  Early the next day, we boarded the Andrea Doria, the principal Italian, luxury ocean liner. All travel arrangements had been made …