Relative Strangers: Italian Protestants in the Catholic World - Hardcover

Cicero, Frank, Jr.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0897336151 ISBN 13: 9780897336154

Verlag: Academy Chicago Publishers, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Italian Protestants? Few people seem to have heard of them, but the author's mother's immigrant Italian family was Protestant while his father's were Catholic immigrants from Sicily. Relative Strangers describes the author's search for the religious roots of his parents' families in northern Italy and Sicily. He traces the history of the Waldensians, the Protestant sect which began in Lyon, France in the 12th century, often suffering persecution, but surviving to this day both in Europe and America.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Frank Cicero Jr. was born and raised in Chicago. A graduate of Wheaton College, Princeton University, and the University of Chicago Law School, he is a Senior Partner at Kirkland & Ellis. He is a member of the Societa di Studi Valdesi, a "learned society" sponsored by the Waldensian Church in Torre Pellice, Italy. This is his first book.

Frank Cicero Jr. was born and raised in Chicago. A graduate of Wheaton College, Princeton University, and the University of Chicago Law School, he is a Senior Partner at Kirkland & Ellis. He is a member of the Societa di Studi Valdesi, a "learned society" sponsored by the Waldensian Church in Torre Pellice, Italy. This is his first book.

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Relative Strangers

Italian Protestants in the Catholic World

By Frank Cicero Jr.

Chicago Review Press Incorporated

Copyright © 2011 Frank Cicero Jr.
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-89733-615-4

Contents

Title Page, 
Are All These People Really Italian?, 
Part I, 
Emigration, 
Childhood and Youth, 
Waldensians, 
Part II, 
The Road to Sicily, 
Montemaggiore, 
Valledolmo, 
Part III, 
Two Grandparents; Three Families, 
Witnesses to History, 
Troubles in Buffalo, 
Part IV, 
The Fastest-growing City Ever, 
First Days in Chicago, 
The First Italian Presbyterian Church, 
Family Life in Chicago, 
Bridging the Divide, 
Those Who Stayed Behind, 
Epilogue, 
Photo Gallery, 
Acknowledgments, 
Notes, 
Sources, 
About the Author, 

CHAPTER 1

Emigration

At first light on the morning of April 13, 1904, Giacomo Balma said good-bye to his wife and five-month-old daughter and began the long trip to America. Joining in the tearful farewells were a few neighbors who shared the cluster of stone huts perched high above the headwaters of the Torrente Germanasca, a turbulent mountain river. Winters were harsh and long in the upper Alps of remote northwestern Italy. The deep accumulation of snow still filled the meadows and covered the mountains down to timberline a few dozen meters above Balma, the small hamlet where Giacomo had lived with his wife, Anna-Margherita, for eight years.

Giacomo loaded his wooden trunk and a few other possessions in the back of his old horse-drawn farm wagon and began the last trip he would ever make from Balma. He bumped slowly down the rutted and rocky pathway to Rodoretto and then down the switchbacks of the gravel road that descended the steep sides of the valley a thousand feet to the Germanasca River. At the junction of the Rodoretto road with one from Prali, he was joined by other young men and women from that hamlet, nestled further upstream on the edge of the river.

Giacomo transferred his baggage to the larger wagon and horse team that carried passengers on the valley road, said good-bye to the friend who would return with the farm wagon to Balma, and resumed the trip with this new group the dozen miles down the Germanasca River valley to the Val Chisone, where they would catch the train. By midafternoon, they were aboard for the two-hour ride to Turin. There, early that same evening, they boarded the overnight train to Paris. From Turin, the train followed ancient routes, crossing the French frontier through the Tunnel of Frejus, traveling across Savoy through Chambéry, on to Lyons, and from there to Paris, where they arrived on the fourteenth.

Paris at that time was home to many recent emigrants from Prali and neighboring communities. After staying the night with friends, on the morning of the fifteenth the group moved by train on to Le Havre, the major French port in Normandy west of Paris, where they would board the ship for America the next day.

Giacomo was thirty-three years old. He and Margherita, then twenty-nine, had married in 1896. They had lived the eight years since in the small hamlet of Balma, a cluster of half a dozen stone huts two miles by foot up the mountain trail toward France from the small village of Rodoretto, where they were married. Balma was home to no more than fifteen people.

Life was hard in these mountains. Prali and Rodoretto were at the upper end of the Val Germanasca in the Alps west of Turin, just below the divide at the summit ridge that defines the French-Italian border. It is beautiful and rugged country of steep mountain valleys formed by rushing streams. The Germanasca valley is one of the steepest, made up of sides and summits of mountains with few bottomlands. The wildest and most barren of the communes in the valley is the area of Prali and, above it, Rodoretto. Families farmed where they could to raise sustenance crops in the summer. They kept sheep, goats, and, if prosperous, a few cows, all of which were sheltered in stables beneath the open-spaced floorboards of stone huts, the families living above. Winters were very cold and snows were deep.

Families struggled to survive and raise their children. Giacomo and Margherita were not successful. In the span of a little over four years, they buried their first three children in Rodoretto's little cemetery. Their firstborn, Giovanni Stefano, died weeks before his second birthday. Their second child, born four months later and also named Giovanni, died just days after his fourth birthday and weeks after the death of his two-year-old brother, Paolo. With Giovanni's death, Giacomo and Margherita were left childless for the third time in their six and one-half years of marriage.

They decided to strike out for America, as had others from these alpine valleys. For more than a decade, many neighbors and acquaintances, known to each other from their Waldensian churches, had emigrated to the United States. Hundreds had settled a new community called Valdese in the Piedmont foothills of western North Carolina. Others settled in New York, Chicago, and other places in North and South America. Giacomo and Margherita had decided to go to Chicago, where a small colony of friends from Prali and neighboring communes in the Germanasca valley had settled beginning in the 1890s. There Giacomo also had a close friend from home, Francois Peyrot, who shortly before had emigrated to Chicago and now could offer the promise of employment.

With their arrival at Le Havre, Giacomo and his friends began the arduous experience of poor immigrants crossing the oceans. Le Havre was a crowded, busy port. Third-class travelers in "steerage" — such as Giacomo and his companions — were herded into the warehouses of their shipping line from the time of their arrival. Many lived in such company warehouses for days, awaiting the departures of their vessels. There was no privacy. Families and groups worked to keep their members together. All struggled to manage their baggage and protect their belongings.

The waiting areas on the quays were a noisy crush of people. Hawkers and sellers of all kinds loudly plied food and other wares. Children were crying. Parents and grandparents were shouting. When time came to board the ship that loomed above, gangplanks were jammed with people and baggage as the passengers pushed ahead and scrambled for accommodations.

On Saturday, April 16, 1904, Giacomo and six of the friends who had departed the mountains with him boarded the French steamship La Savoie in Le Havre. Giacomo and one other friend, Giacomo Pons, were headed for Chicago. The other three young adults and two children were bound for New York, where they also intended to join friends and relatives.

La Savoie was built in France in 1901 specifically for the huge North Atlantic immigrant traffic. At 1,168 gross tons, it was 580 feet long and 60 feet wide. It carried 1,055 passengers: 437 in first class, 118 in second class, and 500 in steerage. A modern transport ship, the Savoie typically made the crossing from Le Havre on the western edge of Europe in only seven days, contrasting with the ten to fifteen or more days frequently required by other ships departing European ports.

The rigors of the crossings in steerage class have been well documented. Indeed, they have become the stuff of legend, dramatized for well over a century in literature, film, and fable. The vessel rolled and tossed in adverse weather, causing sickness and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Academy Chicago Publishers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0897336151
• ISBN 13: 9780897336154
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Chicago Review Press; https://www.chicagoreviewpress.com/; ; 814 North Franklin Street; Chicago; IL; 60610; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar