Buon Natale

In celebration of the season, I've gathered together some of the sights and sounds of Christmas in Molise. Especially for those of us in the diaspora, it is my hope that these will either remind us of – or acquaint us with – the traditions of our people. I have had the great fortune in my life to realize that the forces which bind us are strong enough to span the distances across oceans and the even greater and more perilous distances across time. I would like to thank Alfonso Notardonato of Pizzone for the use of his photographs. His devotion to his beautiful land continues to enchant.

The Christmas Story is portrayed each year in the streets of Pizzone. These are scenes captured by Alfonso in 2012. (All photos used by permission.)

Zampognari play in the streets.

Pizzone becomes Bethlehem.

Mary and Joseph arrive.

La Stella Cometa, the Star of Bethlehem.

They have seen La Stella Cometa.

The Manger.

Mauro Gioielli is a musicologist and singer from Isernia. He performs the ancient songs of Molise, often accompanied by traditional instruments played by Il Tratturo, the group named after the centuries-old trails used for the seasonal transhumance – the moving of sheep between the highlands of Abruzzo and the pastures of Foggia to the south. Here he sings a song of the Christmas Star, “Stella Cometa.”

In a live performance in the church of Alfedena in 2010, Signor Gioielli performs with Il Tratturo a Christmas concert: Il Tratturo in Concert, 2010.

I Zampognari, the groups named for the traditional bagpipes of the area, the zampogna, perform in the towns and villages throughout Molise during the Christmas season. Here is a group performing in the snow in the Campobasso town of Montefalcone nel Sannio:

In Pizzone, the streets and squares are decorated for the season.

On Christmas Eve, La Vigilia di Natale begins. In Pizzone, in the small piazza in front of the thirteenth-century Church of San Nicola, wood is stacked and set ablaze. Called il rito del fuoco, the ritual of the fire, the fire burns through the night, the event culminating at midnight with the ringing of the church bells.

Midnight and the ringing of the bells as recorded in Montefalcone nel Sannio:

To everyone, I wish a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. And to my French readers: Joyeux Noël et bonne année. And, of course, in Italian: Buon Natale e felice Anno Nuovo! May all experience the best during this season of peace.

Newsboy

The Sherman House.
Photograph: Chicago History Museum

Emiddio helped support the family during the early years in Chicago working as a newsboy. I imagine him living as the hero in Horatio Alger, Jr.’s novel, going each morning to buy the morning papers – the Tribune, the Times, the Herald, the Inter-ocean – then taking them to his spot outside the Sherman House, keeping an eye out for the prosperous, those likely to buy one of his two-cent papers. He would have friends, other boys from the ages of seven to sixteen, who kept all hours here, staying out on the streets despite the weather and the darkness until all their papers were sold. For some, to go home with unsold papers would mean a beating. The boys were different races, different ethnic backgrounds – there were Chicago boys as well as Irish, black boys and other Italians. They worked side-by-side, played pranks on storekeepers, sometimes went too far and had to dodge a policeman or two, and on a good day, sold all their papers early and walked together to the Saratoga on Dearborn Street for a twenty-five cent bowl of oyster stew. The rich stew, made with butter and cream and thickened with flour, was as delicious as it was rare and warmed them as nothing else could on cold, gray winter days.

Arriving the first week of May, the family settled in on the Near North Side in a tenement on Indiana Street – now Grand Avenue – between Orleans and Franklin. Italians crowded into these tenements along the Chicago River – here and on the Near West Side. Others had come before, paesani from Pizzone and San Vincenzo. Just three months earlier, in February, several Di Cristofanos and Foscos had arrived along with Antonio Rossi. At Christmastime, after a frigid crossing, going ashore at Castle Garden on Christmas Eve, other Foscos had arrived ahead of their kinsmen along with Francesco and Nicola Di Vito and Antonio Di Silvio. In May of 1890, Filippo Di Cristofano arrived in the company of Domenico Di Vito, Nicola Gallo, Giuseppe Grimaldi, Domenico Rossi, Antonio Santucci, the fox Antonio Volpe, and, finally, Antonio Di Iorio, a distant relative of Cristina’s mother Felicita Di Iorio. Even earlier, in April of 1888, Pasquale Di Silvio had beat them all through the “Golden Door.”

Antonio Di Julio with one of his
daughters. Photo taken on
Halsted Street in the 1890s.
Photograph from the collection
of the author.

Carmine’s cousin Giovanni had found a place for his family a few houses down Indiana Street from Carmine and Cristina. A cousin to both Carmine and Giovanni, Antonio Di Julio, was also here, along with his wife, Angelamaria Grimaldi, and their two daughters, Santa and Cristina. Angelamaria was six months into another pregnancy that May. She would come to term during Chicago’s hottest months.

The tenements were mostly quickly and shoddily built wooden-frame “cottages” or two- or three-story multi-apartment buildings, often on unpaved, muddy streets, with small, gloomy courtyards crisscrossed with lines hung with washing. Often apartments opened onto garbage-strewn back alleys. Sometimes the courtyards contained a “rear house,” occupied by more tenants. The narrow passages between the structures were dark, often damp, and sometimes impassable due to the accumulated garbage. In winter, the snow would pile up in the passages.

Turn-of-the-century tenement showing
the wooden garbage boxes attached
to the street.
University of Illinois at Chicago photo.
Public Domain.

The children played where they could – in the alleys, on the boards of the wooden sidewalks, or in the streets. Just blocks away, toxic black smoke rose from the smokestacks of factories on the river. The smoke was so thick that sometimes it shaded the sun and left an acrid and unbreatheable haze in the air. The soot settled everywhere, in winter turning the snow into a gray, gritty slush. The apartments themselves were sometimes a single room with a tiny kitchen. A wooden partition or blanket strung across the room provided privacy for the parents. Privies were in the alleys, as were open wooden boxes for the manure collected from the horses on the streets. There were chickens loose in the courtyards and in the streets. In the heat of the summer months, the combined smells were overpowering and unhealthy. Disease coursed through the tenements as more and more immigrants crowded into these neighborhoods. What city services there were could not keep up with the ever-increasing population in the river wards. There were cases of cholera, of dysentery, diphtheria, whooping cough, and typhoid fever. As recently as the early 1880s there had been a typhoid epidemic which killed more than 2,400 people. Smallpox killed 1,500 during the same period. The children, often out on the streets to escape the crowded apartments, were particularly vulnerable.

Children playing in a garbage-strewn alley on the
Near West Side.
University of Illinois at Chicago photo.
Public Domain.

For many of the immigrants from Molise, the green heart of Italy, whose native landscapes and architecture and customs had been shaped through millennia, this was beyond their imaginings. Coming from a land of high mountains and deep forests rich with deer and camosci – the Abruzzo chamois – and boar and wolves, and even a bear related to the American grizzly, many could not take in this urban, frantic world of Chicago – a city which had grown from 4,170 people in 1837 to 1,250,000 in 1891 and which had sprawled from 10.7 square miles to 181.7 square miles in the same period, a city of commerce whose combined transactions totaled nearly 1.4 billion dollars just the year before in 1890. For some, it was too much. There were those who would become virtually unable to leave their apartment, sitting by the window to watch the clouds in a clear patch of sky. There is an account of a sickly Italian boy who in warmer weather kept a vigil over the blooms of a flower box outside the apartment’s single window, sitting all day in his chair, breathing in the caustic air through the open window.

The Rush Street  Bridge, 1890.
Public Domain.

Mornings, Emiddio would escape toward the city center, easily walking the few blocks to the Rush Street bridge. Heavy traffic signaled the start of the day. Amidst the din of horses’ hooves, of the iron-rimmed wheels of wagons and carriages on the wooden planks of the iron bridge, Emiddio crossed carefully, the horses and wagons passing closely enough for him to feel in the cool morning air the heat of the animals. Once across the bridge, he would leave the river with its barges and its smokestacks and its factories and head towards the Loop. He would learn that the financial district on Dearborn and outside the fine hotels and restaurants were the most profitable locations to sell his papers. He would know what times of the day were best for each location. He would learn the routes of the cable cars. He would sometimes take his younger brother, Vincenzo, to get him out from underfoot, and together they would come to know the city and its people – from the street types and tradesmen to the businessmen and to the fashionable ladies shopping with their servants. He would come to know the neighborhoods of Little Hell, of the Near West Side and Maxwell Street with its pushcarts and its market, known pejoratively as “Jew Town,” due to the Eastern European Jews – generically referred to as “Russians” – who had settled there.

The corner of State Street and Madison Avenue, 1897.

Edison Studio. Public Domain.

On August 2nd, Cousin Antonio’s wife gave birth to her baby. She would have been born in the tenement apartment, the air through the open window hot and foul. The women of the family would have been present, including Cristina. A levatrice, a midwife, would have been found. Antonio and Angelamaria would name the child Assunta Maria.

Two weeks later, in Italy, it was the time of Ferragosto, the August festival celebrated since the time of Augustus. There would be festivals in San Vincenzo and Pizzone, in all the villages in the mountains of Molise and in all of Italy. The celebrations would culminate on the 15th and include the Feast of the Assumption commemorating the Virgin Mary’s Heavenly birthday, the day of her bodily ascent into Heaven.

Monte Meta with pilgrims on its slopes, 2013.
Photograph by Alfonso Notardonato.

For the young and for the more robust, following the Assumption, a pilgrimage was made across the Meta massif to the Valle di Canneto and to the Santuario Madonna di Canneto. The appearance here of a shining Lady to a young shepherdess established this valley, already sacred in pagan times, as a holy place. By the year 1475, a document now preserved in the archives of the abbey of Montecassino granted indulgences of one-hundred days to the pilgrims who visited the shrine here. From all directions the pilgrims came. Cristina’s maternal grandparents, married in 1815, perhaps first saw each other here, each having travelled miles of rugged Apennine terrain – her grandfather Pietro Di Iorio from Pizzone to the east of the Canneto Valley, her grandmother Serafina Ferri from San Giuseppe to the south.

The hamlet of San Giuseppe, now a part of the commune of Picinisco.
Photograph by the author.

Madonna di Canneto.
Photograph by Alfonso Notardonato.

The pilgrims visited the shrine, paraded in procession. Some would travel the last distance to the shrine on their knees. Some would walk the distances barefoot. Some, having seen the effigy of the Madonna – made of lime wood and dating possibly to the twelfth century – would walk backwards as they left the santuario, not wanting to turn their backs to Her.

Antonio and Angelamaria’s daughter would live through these days of August. But as autumn began, she would become ill. The particular disease which caused the illness has been lost, but on October 12th the little girl died. The location of her grave and the circumstances of the funeral also have been lost. The family would have been there – Antonio and Angelamaria, Giovanni and his wife Rosa, Carmine and Cristina. Emiddio, too, would have seen Assunta Maria laid into earth, where she would be left to lie alone, the family’s first casualty in the New World. Later, her parents, her siblings would leave America. In a few years, they would make a home in France. Manifest Destiny would continue to remake the American continent, but Antonio and Angelamaria would continue to think of the little girl they lost and left behind on the edge of the American frontier.

The Barge Office

The Barge Office in the Battery, New York City.
Public Domain.

Herman Volke, a locksmith from Saxe-Weimar who had just crossed the Atlantic aboard the Hamburg-American steamer Columbia, was among the first half of the 734 steerage passengers to board the transfer boat William Fletcher and to come alongside the Barge Office dock. It was April 19, 1890, and Volke, at shortly before ten o’clock in the morning, would become the first immigrant to be registered at the new, just-opened immigrant depot in the Battery of New York. As he was giving his name and age to the clerk, he was handed a five-dollar gold piece and heartily congratulated by the superintendent. Volke and his wife, both grateful for the welcome, shook the superintendent’s hand enthusiastically and expressed their thanks in German. Then, heading towards Pittsburgh along with the dog and cat who had made the voyage with them, they disappeared into their history.

Construction was still going on inside the Barge Office on this first day of business, but this didn’t seem to cause any problems. Nugent’s bar and lunch counter was bustling. There was only one detention this day. A cable from Liverpool had preceded the arrival of a William Henry Hopkinson of Lincoln, England, with the news that Hopkinson had abandoned his wife and children and taken passage on the Germanic with a young woman named Ellen Kelly. Travelling as Mr. and Mrs. Hill, they were detained. Eventually the couple admitted their actual identities. Hopkinson protested that he had left his family with money and was simply on his way to Kansas City to find work. Kelly, who is described as “young and pretty,” had friends in Hartford and would easily find work there. The superintendent allowed them to land.

Another view of the Barge Office.
Public Domain.

There were other stories of the heart. Christopher Kruisler, for instance, who had immigrated several years before. A Bavarian from Würtemberg, Kruisler was a diminutive man who had become betrothed to Marie Epple, also from Würtemberg, before he had come to America. Kruisler saved the money he had earned as a cigar-box maker and sent for Marie, who arrived at the Barge Office on July 9, 1891, after a crossing on the SS Rhynland. Kruisler had been waiting behind the wooden railing which separated the passengers from those waiting to meet them. When he saw Marie, he excitedly began to dance. Marie was unable to hide her disappointment upon seeing Kruisler. According to The New York Times, “The fair Marie thought that he would grow, perhaps.” They reported,“Evidently the climate of America had done nothing to increase his stature, as she fondly hoped that it would.” After Marie was admitted, and they were finally brought together, Marie told Kruisler that she had changed her mind. There would be no wedding. She said that she “was content to remain plain Marie Epple for the present.” The Times closes,“After a long and stormy interview the crestfallen lover left his faithless sweetheart and went away vowing to kill himself.”

The Statue of Liberty at its unveiling
in 1886. It would still have been this
dull copper color in 1891.
Puiblic Domain.

It was May Day of 1891 when aboard the SS Rhynland Carmine and Cristina with their children sailed into New York Bay. In Italy, there would still be snow on the Mainarde. The fields below San Vincenzo would have been burned and cleared and ready for the new crop. It was now time to plant. There would be bud break on the grape vines, the new leaves bright green in the sun. On its way to a Hudson River pier, the ship would pass the Statue of Liberty on its port side. The passengers would crowd the ship’s rails to view the American colossus, parents lifting their children onto their shoulders so they could see and remember. They would also pass Ellis Island, still under construction, not to open as the new immigrant depot until January 1, 1892. To starboard was Lower Manhattan and the Battery. The immigrants perhaps would have noticed the circular, sandstone walls of Castle Garden, the old fort which a generation ago had become an entertainment venue, hosting such shows as the famous soprano Jenny Lind and the dancer Lola Montez, former lover of both Franz Liszt and King Ludwig I of Bavaria, who danced here her notorious “Spider Dance.” In 1855, Castle Garden became the immigrant depot for the Port of New York. It would serve in this capacity until 1890. Six years later, it would become the New York City Aquarium, which for nearly fifty years would be one of New York’s most popular attractions.

Lower Manhattan and the Battery, 1900. Castle Garden can be
seen at the far right.
Public Domain.

The Rhynland would dock that morning on the Hudson, where the saloon and second-class passengers would disembark. The steerage passengers would be made to wait, held back by Red Star Line officials. They would be given a letter of the alphabet identifying their ship and a number, their number from the ship’s manifest. Carmine would be number 18; Cristina, 19; Emiddio, 20; Vincenzo, 21; and little Maria, 22. The immigrants would not be allowed to disembark here. Not quite understanding what was happening to them, they would be herded onto one of the broad-decked harbor boats supplied by the Bureau of Immigration. Aboard these boats, hundreds at a time with all of their belongings, the immigrants were ferried to the dock of the Barge Office, where they would wait on board, shoulder to shoulder, until there was room for them to disembark. On land for the first time in two weeks, they would be divided into groups according to their letter and number. They would learn to wait. Standing in line, crouching, maybe sitting on a bundle, they waited anxiously for what one immigrant described as “the nearest earthly likeness to the final Day of Judgment, when we have to prove our fitness to enter Heaven.”

A New York Times Magazine article of the time comments, “The Italian is the immigrant of the hour. The boot that is Humbert’s domain [a reference to Italy’s King Umberto I] seems to be leaking, and if you, oh! man, who reads and studies, should stand in the Barge Office day after day for a while you would think that every Italian town and village, yes, and every hillside, was being deserted in the race for the dollars of America.” The writer continues, referring to the Italian immigration as “the migration of the ‘Dago,’ as we have come to call him, and which does not seem an inappropriate term as the raw product is seen at the Battery before he has ‘squeezed through. . . .’”

Babies wail. Shouts of “Move on! Move on!” harass the immigrants, who shuffle their belongings along ahead of them. A woman loses her grip on a bundle tied up in some rags, and it comes undone, spilling its contents of a kitchen pot and other kitchen odds and ends. Gradually, the group is pushed and shoved upstairs to the area known as “the pens,” where the groups are kept together for examination. The medical examination would follow, much like the one they had endured in Antwerp. Here they would be marked with chalk and detained if there was a problem: “H” for heart, “K” for a hernia, “X” for a mental defect. The following description appeared in The New York Magazine:

Briefly, the inspection is a simple one. With health and a little money a man, no matter how great his family, is considered a desirable immigrant. The doors of the promised land fly open at a touch. Vigor and a cash capital of about $20 will carry the foreigner and his household through the lines without trouble. The vigor is evident to the doctors who scan each man, two or three watching the line in review, one for certain sorts of physical defects, another for conditions of health of another order. Thus a man is sometimes ordered abruptly out of the line. Another! Both doctors were rigid. This immigrant had an [infection] of the eyes, (the doctor noticed it by the way he walked). As to finance, the wanderer from abroad must hand up his little hoard to the Inspector for counting. With the best of the Italians who come here this consists of a few pitiful greasy bits of paper money, a coin or two, too few to even jingle.

The writer describes the appearance of a young woman before the inspector:

There is standing before the Inspector Angiolina Felicetta with $12.15 in her little purse. She has come to join her husband, who, it is afterward found, is waiting for her in the crowd outside. He has come ahead to test America. All is seemingly propitious; the girl wife has come over to join him. She is but seventeen, a slip of a Neapolitane. A clumsy-fitting frock of green and yellow stripes sets badly on her girlish figure. The white cotton lace on it is torn and soiled. She wears carpet slippers, and on her head a gay fazzoletta di testa (handkerchief) is coquettishly entwined. Angiolina, according to American canons, is dirty. In Italy you would kodak her at once, and fresh off the steamship she has not lost her Old World charm. For with the green and yellow stripes there is a gorgeous pink ribbon about her neck and in her hand a yellow and green basket – her entire wardrobe.

After the examination, the immigrant might be approached by a representative of the Italian Bureau, a agency of the Italian government. These officials attempted to identify immigrants who might be victims of the padrone system, in which a person might have contracted his labor in return for his passage. The officials of the Italian Bureau would record the entries of as many Italians as they could in the performance of their duties. Finally, actually inside the Barge Office, were ticketing agents for the railroads. The passengers would be ferried across the Hudson to the New Jersey shore to catch their trains. Carmine and Cristina arrived during a price war on trains travelling to Chicago and points west set off by a squabble between the Central Traffic and Trunk Line Association, who booked the travel on the various railroads for the immigrants, and the Chicago and Alton Railroad which resulted in the latter being granted their own agent within the Barge Office. Dazed, disoriented, and exhausted, Carmine and Cristina would not have understood this. Nor would they have understood the crush of people outside the Barge Office. Relatives and friends of immigrants, or just the curious, sometimes numbering into the hundreds, lined the street. Brass-buttoned, loud, and carrying sticks, policemen and detectives were present to “keep order.” A relative rushing forward to greet a newly arrived immigrant would be beaten back with shoves and sticks, regardless of the offender’s sex. In later years of the Barge Office, a homeless man by the name of Cripps, who slept in a box on the pier, took up his cane to do his part to manage the crowd. According to The New York Times,

He yells as savagely as the rest, and, being fiercer of countenance, his orders are more quickly obeyed than those of the authorized guardians of the peace. Nobody dares face the glitter in the eye of “Cripps,” and before his gaze Italians, Huns, Greeks, and men of various nationalities wither away in mortal fear and venture no more in reach of his eye or cane. He, without a smile and confident of his supreme authority over all “furriners,” never flinches in his duty.

Carmine and Cristina collapsed into their seats on the train. The children, too, having survived this “Day of Judgment,” were quiet. Perhaps, Cousin Giovanni and his family were also on this train, along with some of the others from San Vincenzo. All needed to rest. All would try. I imagine Emiddio, leaning his head against the window, watching the passage of wilderness, of isolated farms, of small towns with their unfamiliar architecture. From New York and New Jersey, they would travel west through Pennsylvania, then Ohio and Indiana, through the lands of great peoples now gone: the Pequot, the Iroquois, the Munsee, and the Susquehanna, on through the lands of the Erie and the Miami. Emiddio would not have been aware of this. After the dark came, he would see nothing. All would be black except for the occasional farmhouse with a coal-oil lamp flickering orange and yellow in a window. Nothing else would break the darkness, not for miles, not until the next farmhouse seen in the distance across the flat land.

In Italy during these first days of May, across the mountains some miles north of San Vincenzo, in the village of Cocullo, continuing a tradition going back to the Dark Ages and according to some back to the snake goddess worshipped by the Marsi, the Italic tribe who joined with the Samnites against the Romans, the serpari were gathering their snakes for the festival. Only certain snakes were chosen, all non-venomous: four-lined snakes, aesculapian, grass, and green whip snakes. The feast day for the patron saint of Cocullo occurred at this time on the first Thursday in May. Promptly at noon on this day, the effigy of San Domenico would begin his procession through the village. San Domenico is believed to be a mediator between the harsh realities of the world and the people who must suffer them. As San Domenico is carried through the village, the snakes are laid at his feet, around his shoulders and arms, up his legs. Snakes wrap around snakes. Thus, the villagers pass on to their beloved saint all that endangers them. It is their hope, their belief, that he will somehow strike a deal, a deal that will grant them all a better world.