Preservation and Pride: Dominic Candeloro Talks Italian-American Culture

Witness a riveting journey back in time as we shed light on the incredible saga of Italian-American immigration. In an engaging tête-à-tête with Dominic Candeloro, a scholar of Italian American history and culture, we dive deep into this often untold tale. Drawing from the fascinating narrative of Candeloro's own father, an illegal immigrant who fought tooth and nail to gain citizenship during World War II, we piece together the profound impact of the war on the Italian American community and their subsequent integration into American society. 

Growing up Italian American post-World War II was a unique experience, one that's brought to life by Candeloro. We challenge the misconceptions of Italy as a war-torn and impoverished nation, and shed light on how these misconceptions played a role in influencing Italian American pride. The conversation takes an intriguing turn as we discuss the shift in scholarship in the 1960s, leading to the formation of the American Italian Historical Association and a newfound appreciation for cultural continuity. Candeloro's unexpected journey to becoming a passionate advocate for Italian American culture serves as an inspiring beacon for future generations.

Preserving Italian American family history is no easy task, but one that carries immense significance, as Candeloro emphasizes. In an era where younger generations risk severing ties with their Italian roots due to immigration challenges and a lack of media representation, Candeloro offers a ray of hope. He advocates for documenting personal stories and upholding Italian traditions as tangible links to the past. Tune in to our conversation as we celebrate the joy of tracing Italian American ancestry and explore the profound impact of discovering distant relatives. Embrace the importance of recognizing and preserving ethnic identity in American history and culture. This is a journey you wouldn't want to miss.

Dominic Candeloro has been involved in Italian American studies for the past 50 plus years. He is the author of several books on the Italians in Chicago and served as Historical Consultant in the production of “And They Came to Chicago: The Italian American Legacy.”

Candeloro was born in Chicago Heights and grew up in an Italian neighborhood, “The Hill.” He holds a PhD from the University of Illinois and has taught History at UIC, UIUC, and Governors State University. He was honored with the Studs Terkel Humanities Service Award by the Illinois Humanities Council in 1999 for his efforts in documenting and interpreting Italian American culture.

Chicago Heights Revisited
This collection of images the portrait of a lively city striving as one to assist in a World War II

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:10

This is Bob Sorrentino, from Italian Roots and Genealogy, and be sure to check us out on our blog, wwwitaliengeaneologyblog, and our great sponsors Yodoche Vita, italy Rooting and Abiettivo Casa, and I'm thrilled to have a very special guest today from the Chicago area. He's an author and been working in the Italian community, I think, for about 60 years, dominic Candeloro. So welcome Dominic, thanks for being here.

Speaker 2: 0:42

Nice to see you, bob.

Speaker 1: 0:44

So you know, I want to start with because I think I read that your I guess your parents came from Italy, correct? Not like myself or my grandparents came.

Speaker 2: 0:56

Oh yes, my mother came as a child in 1914, she's a five-year-old child. My father came as a 27-year-old veteran of World War I from Kossily in Abruzzo.

Speaker 1: 1:18

So what year was that?

Speaker 2: 1:20

1925.

Speaker 1: 1:22

So was that just before they put that? You know, with the restrictions on, or was he able to get in?

Speaker 2: 1:30

Well, as a matter of fact he was after and as a matter of fact he was illegal, and in fact he was doubly illegal he for some reason I haven't figured it out, I should, I, he was, I never asked, he never told but he went to Cuba first and stayed for a while it might have been a couple of years in Cuba, and then he took a ship from Cuba to New Orleans in August of 1935, 25 and he was. He was a clandestine, illegal stowaway and they caught him and at first in my first research I thought they caught him and let him go, but now I've found more information. They actually deported him back to where he came from. A couple of weeks later he came in on the same ship and I don't know how he did it, but they didn't catch him and he ended up in Chicago a little bit later and worked there for about seven or eight years before he married my mother in Chicago Heights.

Speaker 1: 2:55

That's so interesting, that's that's funny. So so was he able to become a legal citizen, or it didn't matter.

Speaker 2: 3:01

Oh well, it did matter. He married my mother. Maybe he married her for her citizenship. She gained citizenship, naturally, when she was born, because my grandfather was a citizen. But during the 1930s my father did apply for citizenship but they didn't let him have it. He was studying for it but when World War II broke out he was declared an enemy alien.

Speaker 2: 3:32

And then I now have new records that have just come through of a number of hearings that took place in downtown Chicago to investigate his status. And since he was without papers he was they prevented him from getting it. They set up something for him to go to Canada and to apply for citizenship to the US Consul there, but somehow there was a problem with his employment and they did not certify it. So he did not get his citizenship until 1947 and we're pleased that it happened. But it was a big rigmarole and it was a big worry factor.

Speaker 2: 4:26

All during World War II he was going down to downtown Chicago for several hearings and they were, they were threatened. He stayed in. He stayed out of trouble because if he were deported then my mother and the rest of the family would be very adversely affected. And there was some ruling that if you were. If your deportation meant gross negative consequences for American citizens like your wife and children, then they would hold up on that, all other things being equal. But he had a good record, but he had to get people of votes for him and they sent out investigators who took testimony from neighbors that he was a good person, hard worker and all that sort of thing.

Speaker 1: 5:25

Wow, that is so, so interesting. That's a fantastic story. You know my mom's parents. They were both enemy aliens when it first started and by the end of the war they had four sons in the service. Thankfully they all came back and but my uncle, who was left behind. He had to come through Canada in the late 40s, early 50s.

Speaker 2: 5:52

Yeah, well, I always say the World War II was the most important thing that happened with Italian Americans, because first of all they were rejected as enemy aliens and then just a few months later that was dropped because they needed to draft the million Italians who served the World War II. They served, and the most. The average service was about 30 some months and that was 30 some months of American intensive Americanization. And then once they got out of the service they got the GI Bill and they were veterans, so they got bumped up in the middle class in some respect. So it was bad and then before it got better and it got significantly better in the 50s and 60s.

Speaker 1: 6:47

Yeah, I know it absolutely and you know my dad. He enlisted, he was in the army, he wanted to be a combat photographer but they told him he didn't have the background yet as a photographer. But they told him they were going to send him to a signal car school in not far from where I live now I'm with New Jersey and that the life expectancy for a combat photographer was six months so he would get his chance. And but what happened was I rethink that? No, he still wanted to do it and as soon as he went into school he became. He got a I think it was a technical sergeant rating and but he had a puncture deatrum so they discharged him and because all the photographers in New York, or most of them, were in the service, he became a photographer at the Daily News very quick and he did that until after the war when the photographers came back. And then he was a news wheel photographer for WPIX and then later on he was back to doing photography for the for the New York Daily News.

Speaker 2: 8:04

Yeah well, we haven't had a full scale war since World War II, but that sent all of society into a whirlwind that a lot of things were possible, both good and bad for the participants.

Speaker 1: 8:23

Yeah, absolutely. So what did your father do? What was his? What was his?

Speaker 2: 8:29

Oh, he was a construction laborer all the rest of his life. Fairly low status. He was a member of the laborers union that famous for its corruption and all that Las Vegas hotels, whatnot but he ended up getting a pretty nice pension in the 1970s and 1980s when he retired. So, as bad as they were, they were a benefit to him and the family in his retirement.

Speaker 1: 9:21

Yeah, well, you know those, those I say this all the time you know my uncles were. They were all hardworking men, good family men, and you know I'm very proud of that, you know.

Speaker 2: 9:35

Yeah, well, it was humble work and he never did speak English properly. And he he some funny stories that I often tell my father. I was when I was about 12 or something I was helping my father fill out his time sheet for the week and where he worked, and all that. And he said well, on Tuesday I worked in the whorehouse, he worked in the whorehouse. And it turns out he worked in the warehouse and then he'd go on.

Speaker 2: 10:19

He couldn't tell the difference between Tuesday and Thursday. He said on the second Tuesday I worked. He thought there were two Tuesdays in the week Tuesday and the second Tuesday he worked in another places. So, and he never could tell the difference. He'd look at television when sports was on. He said he couldn't tell the difference between basketball and football and baseball. It was all the same to him. So he never really Americanized to that extent. He was always an outsider and one of the one of the feelings that I had was growing up was that my contemporaries had more Americanized fathers who knew about sports and that sort of thing, not my father. He had a garden, he spent all of his time working in the garden and they held up the sports world. He had no use for that.

Speaker 1: 11:28

Yeah, well, that was probably smart, I suppose. But as a kid I could see what you mean. So now I know you've been active in the Italian American community for, like I said, I guess, I guess 60 years or more.

Speaker 2: 11:45

What kind of stuff it means especially yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 11:48

so what spurred that on? I mean, what got you so excited about that?

Speaker 2: 11:53

There are a lot of things. When I was growing up, it was in the shadow of World War II, and when anybody referred to Italy they usually used the term war torn, war torn Italy. This sort of thing happened. They're starving there. My mother and father were making up packets to send to Italy. We were sending spaghetti, we were sending coffee. We were sending our old shoes and our old clothes. What the hell kind of a country was it that needed our old clothes and needed to have food from us, who we were really? We considered ourselves poor, and so nobody at that time traveled to Italy. None of the immigrants traveled to Italy in the 50s. They didn't want to go back. And why would they ever want to go back? Everything about America was so much better. That was the thought of it.

Speaker 2: 13:04

Italy was not a place to admire. Being an Italian American was not a plus. In schools the teachers did not say oh, how wonderful your parents speak Italian to you at home. How wonderful you could have two cultures. You know how wonderful the Italian culture is, the Renaissance artists and all that. Nobody ever said that. No teachers ever said that to me. I went to school that was mostly Italian American kids, and we had a culture within our own group. We weren't really proud to be Italian. We knew Italian, maybe we knew most of the cuss words, but there was no desire to learn Italian language. Our parents were not equipped to teach us Italian, although I think my father had a little bit better education in Italian schools. He went to the fifth grade and he was in the military, got some training there, but it was not really possible.

Speaker 2: 14:18

I went to Northwestern as an undergraduate and out of scholarship and I took French classes. French was kind of a chic in the mid fifties because the American GIs had spent some time in France and French culture was and French language were considered respected and respected. I loved it that time. I should have taken Italian. My whole career would have been so much better if I had some formal education in Italian. I could always understand basic household conversation in Italian, but the rest of it no, and there was no big effort to teach me Italian on the part of my parents or anybody else. But I had studied Latin in high school and in college. I guess I was a sophomore.

Speaker 2: 15:33

I went to see Ladolce Vida and I saw him. Different Italy than I had ever imagined. There's nothing more, except for there are some segments of La Dolce Vida that did treat the village life. But the modern part of Italy in the movie La Dolce Vida were really striking to me and I said, oh, this takes, there's another look. And I saw the movie four or five times and I brought friends to see it and it is a landmark in my life.

Speaker 2: 16:08

I got much more interested in Italy and then in graduate school, pretty far along, I trained as an American historian in the 20th century and I focused on Chicago. I did a biography for my dissertation of Lewis F Post, who was an editor of a progressive newspaper in Chicago from 1898 to 1914 or something, and during when I was in the latter stages of my graduate student career at the University of Illinois in Champaign, rudolf Vecoli joined the faculty. He was hot, hot stuff at that time. He had recently written an article challenging Oscar Hamlin, the Harvard historian, who had talked about the brutal filter that all the ethnic groups had gone through, all the immigrants had gone through, that had decimated their cultures and melted the immigrants. Vecoli he was at the University of Wisconsin for graduate work and he had done this dissertation on Italians in Chicago and his research showed a much slower melting, and in fact in many cases almost no melting, of the people that he interviewed and that he visited and instead he emphasized that Oscar Hamlin had greatly overemphasized that brutal filter. And so this was the beginning of a new appreciation for the continuity of ethnicity. And this is about the same time that the book came out about New York. There was a shift in the scholarship on immigration away from the old melting pot toward an appreciation that ethnicity has still played a very big role in American politics, american economics. So he was at the forefront of this and this was in the mid-60s.

Speaker 2: 18:57

He came to the University of Illinois and I worked as his research assistant for a while and in 1966, I think in December of 1966, he went to the American Historical Association meeting and at that meeting there was a side meeting with a bunch of very prominent Italian American scholars and they formed the American Italian Historical Association and he was the first president of the organization. Little was I to know that. I did a little bit of research on other ethnic historical associations and the kinds of things that they did and with the outcome for him was that any association that he had it would not be so phyliopiaticistic that was the term, phyliopiaticistic it wouldn't just be a PR organization for the Italian Americans but be a real academic organization. That just happened to focus on Italian Americans, and the fact that a lot of the people were Italian Americans shouldn't change their points of view or influence things too much. They were to be scholars first.

Speaker 2: 20:36

Anyhow, in the 1970s I had an opportunity. I was at a seminar on what's a quantitative history at the Newberry Library in the 1970s I guess it was 1977. It was 1976 or 1977. That is in the summer and I had accepted a job in Lubbock, texas, to teach American history. It wasn't a very good one but it was reasonable. I accepted that job.

Speaker 2: 21:20

But then a word came that the University of Illinois, chicago, needed a person to teach Italian American history and culture and I made a very hurried way. I went and applied for it. They offered it to me. I gave up Lubbock, texas. All my life and the life of all my kids would have been changed if we'd have gone to Lubbock but we didn't to a state in Chicago.

Speaker 2: 21:51

And the rest is history Teaching at the Chicago Circle campus, which happened to be an area that was raised, an Italian American neighborhood that was raised in order to build a university, so the university had sort of a guilt complex. In any case, a club called the Italian American Executives of Transportation put up the money I think it was like $20,000, to pay a professor, which turned out to be me, to teach Italian American history. And I did it for about five years there and in the middle of it I got involved with the American Italian Historical Association and they had begun a project to do a major history of an Italian American, italian Americans, in one of the big American cities. I eventually became the executive director of the, wrote the grant proposal and became the executive director and we got about. We had about $300,000 to document and share the history of the Italians in Chicago and that turned out to be a project with a hundred oral histories that were typed, taped and delivered, that were. We did a major collections effort and with about 20 or 30 different workshops around the city and the Italian community to collect photos, documents and memorabilia. Ultimately we put together an exhibit at the Chicago Public Library Cultural Center downtown and we had money. The money wasn't coming out of our ears but we had money to hire people to do the interviews. We had money to hire people as assistants for this and that and to run exhibit design and all that, and that was a fantastic period of activity.

Speaker 2: 24:23

Every night I was out in the community at one a club or another, asking them to give us their stuff. And we did create an archive of Italian American history in Chicago that is, at the University, uic, and so that was a very stimulating thing, and I don't know of any other, but it was a public programming and an academic effort. It wasn't just here's a couple of $200,000 to do something that's totally academic, that will result in the publication of a book or two. This was reaching out in the community. And well, we got some criticism from the academics for not being so strictly academic and we got some criticism from the Italian American people for being too academic. So we were right in the middle there. Any case, after that the family went to Italy for a Fulbright year and that was a fantastic thing.

Speaker 2: 25:41

And into the 1980s I stayed close to the American Italian Historical Association. I served in various places and I ran four conferences that took place in Chicago. I was, as I said, I was the president, I was the vice president, a newsletter editor and whatnot, and in 2000, I was appointed as the executive director of the organization and in that position I did a lot of different things. I helped with create conferences in some major cities we hadn't attended, and we did an exhibit in 2005 at the at the National Archives in Rome about immigration, not to be forgotten, and we I got materials from 10 different American cities and scholars in those cities mostly photographs to illustrate the Italian experience in their towns. So I've been involved with the Italian Cultural Center in Stone Park since the 19, since about 1977. Yeah, and I've probably organized 1,000 programs, whether they were 10 or 15 people together or conferences for 350 people over three days at a major hotel, on Italian American studies, and it's been fun. It's a lot of work In a mixture of scholarship.

Speaker 2: 27:47

I've written some things I'm really proud of. I've written a lot of press releases. I've created a lot of flyers for events. I've I've been editor of a couple of anthologies about Italians in Chicago. One is called Reconstructing Italians in Chicago, and that was that started as a conference in 2008 that took place in Chicago and then, in 2014, we put together a book on Italian women in Chicago. That was a big success.

Speaker 2: 28:31

And again, I've written a number of well, there must be a number of Arcadia books, mostly pictures on the Italians in Chicago. For a while I was I was assistant to the mayor of Chicago Heights and we did the history of Chicago Heights as one of the first Arcadia books that came out in 1999, I think, and since there are Chicago Heights is heavily Italian that ended up being a lot about the history of Italians in Chicago, and then the Arcadia people did first they did just picture books, then they did something that turned out to be like interview books or oral history books. Then they did these more, these heavier narrative books. So I've got a couple of narrative books in the Arcadia series. All together I've done eight or nine Arcadia books, some with co-authors, but mostly myself. So it's been a lot of work. I enjoyed it though, so it wasn't such hard work.

Speaker 1: 30:02

Yeah, no, it's fantastic career and you know what's interesting about what you said is, around the same time, anthony Riccio and I don't know if you ever heard of Anthony yes, yeah, he passed away a couple of years ago. I don't know if you know that, but he was doing virtually the same thing, interviewing Italian Americans or Italians that immigrated to the United States, who came in the early 1900s, who were now in their 70s, and he's had several books on the oral histories, which was the way they communicated. Right, they didn't write, they did it orally.

Speaker 2: 30:41

Yeah, well, I met him. I went with my wife to a conference that took place in Boston and I made my business to go and visit him. He worked for what? Yale, the Yale Library, and yeah, he's done some of the some similar things, some of it much more serious than the stuff that I've done, and we had a good friendship and, as really said, to see him go and actually, you know, he had a nice job at the Yale Library, but he should have had a job as professor of Italian American Studies at Yale and since Yale is in a community as so heavily Italian American, they should have been one of the leaders in Italian American Studies.

Speaker 1: 31:45

Yeah, you know, I met him. Just you know I found them. I guess I was just sometimes I just Google things and look for people and he looked interesting and he was just so gracious and I met a couple of really good friends through him. But he was such a wonderful guy and he kind of helped me with some ideas about the book that I wrote. And just a sad, sad loss for the Italian community, the Italian American community. But I'd like to ask you, what's your concern about the future for the third and fourth and fifth generation Italian Americans now who are so disconnected, you know, unlike us who grew up hearing Italian and being around family? What are you worried about?

Speaker 2: 32:36

Well, I have some, a nephew who lives in California. His son is an all American kid. He is I don't think he's anywhere the only. I don't think he has any real awareness of his Italian background. Oh, there's some stuff about Italian food and Italian food traditions that this family keeps. I think that's wonderful. And they visit in Italy. And when they visit in Italy he played soccer with the guys in the town and made a connection there. But I don't think he has any relationship to the I don't want to say poverty, but to the darker side of being an immigrant, to the challenge of being an immigrant. These are all the sort of positives of the Italian culture that he participates in, but none of the pain of being an immigrant, part of an immigrant experience, and so they'll never know it. But I well, the reason for the Italian cultural center here in Stone Park and Casa Italia and all that is to try and perpetuate some of the Italian culture and appreciation, that sort of thing, and carry on some of the traditions. But I don't know if that will succeed. The idea of having Italian American endowed professorships well, they, I think we have to show the flag among academics so that they don't forget us all together. The recent I mean the university's interest in minority groups today does definitely not include Italian Americans.

Speaker 2: 35:08

I always felt that we were part of the underclass or whatever. Although I know that times have changed and Italians have prospered economically in a very fantastic way, I still feel I feel like the Italians did maybe in the 1920s, when Socco and Vanzetti were the object of the left wing or the intellectuals. Save Socco and Vanzetti was the thing For Italians, those noble Italian workers. You don't hear that anymore. Italians are tough guys, they're the mafiosi, they're all very successful, they're right wing politicians they're what not? But there's certainly not people to be sympathized with and to try to understand. You hear on public radio, you hear people talking about social problems. Italian Americans are never social problems. They're never part of the solution, they're never part of the well. They may be part of the problem in not wanting to change, but we are not favored by the intellectuals, we're not a favored minority group. Anyhow, that thing has changed the one glimmer of hope.

Speaker 2: 36:45

I discovered family history and I have been working on my family history for the past two years, starts and stops. I probably did twice the work because I delayed so much, but I put together from photos, documents, memorabilia and from research in genealogy. I put together something that's like a scrapbook-y history of my family and I went back to my grandparents and maybe we've got names of my great grandparents. That's a little hazy back there, but we have a pretty good accounting of the people who were important in my life. Now it's not a great history of the Candelaro and Giannetti family. My mother was a Giannetti, her father was a Candelaro and I have put this thing together.

Speaker 2: 37:53

I published it on Amazon and you of course, know that Amazon does not charge you any upfront costs to publish on Amazon and it's a very reasonable cost to buy authors' copies. All you have to do is jump through all their hoops, and they got a lot of hoops, but you can produce a printed book and it looks like any other book, and I did it and I left a lot of blank pages because I didn't know everything and I'm never going to know everything. Nobody's ever going to know everything and there are other people in the family who might know. Let them fill in the blank pages, let them get back to me, and you can always update an Amazon book by sending up another upload, and I think this will give our young people no reason at all not to know who their great grandfather was. It's in the book and there's a little bit of description of them and list.

Speaker 2: 39:05

Sir, what's it? Family search will give you almost instantaneously 20 documents about any person whose name you put in there. They'll then give you, lead you almost immediately to 20 different documents that were crucial in that person's life. You could use that. Family search will help you create family trees. Does it with some precision. You've got to learn a little bit of family search. It's not totally easy, but things are a lot easier to do now than they used to be and you could all do it all at home in your underwear.

Speaker 1: 39:48

Yeah, that's for sure. Yeah, and I always tell people to, if they're just starting out, to go to family search first. First of all, it's free and, like you said, I like the way they build out the family. But in an ancestry I think it's easier to look at. My book Farmers and Nobles is about. It's a little bit about my family history, it's a little bit about how I did my research and it's a little bit about some of the fantastic stories that I've heard when I'm interviewing people, because I don't think anything is an accident. I think we're meant to find stuff.

Speaker 2: 40:28

And well, also an important thing, that we've encouraged people at the Cosnitalia Library to write their autobiographies or and one good way to do it if you say, well, I can't sit down and write anything is to just do an iPhone video and upload it to YouTube and then YouTube does a transcription. Now it does copy all the ums and ahs. You do have to go through and kind of reconstruct the grammar a little bit, but you've got. You know, you talk for an hour. You've got 20, 25 pages of a transcript of a text in which you're telling your story. So you can recreate, you can create a book by just talking with YouTube.

Speaker 1: 41:33

Yeah, that's a great idea, you know, and I didn't even think about that. That's a fantastic idea and the way to do it and I guess for people that don't like to type, it's a quicker one.

Speaker 2: 41:45

It's a little bit tricky, I think YouTube keeps changing their rules or their format what you're supposed to click on to access the transcription but the transcriptions are getting better and better.

Speaker 2: 41:59

That's one of the positives of AI to do better transcriptions and voice to type. So there are a lot of ways which people can tell they write their own stories. Now these stories might not be best sellers, they might not compete with the literature that maybe are professional writers of Italian background who do Italian studies, but they can save the history of our family, maybe the ordinary stuff that was going on and maybe some of the extraordinary stuff that happened in some families. There's always some little bit of excitement. And then there's their newspaper articles or clips that you could get about just anybody in the family. I found my sister when she was in high school was part of the Future Homemakers Association and they had a state conference for high school kids and she attended it and that got into our local newspaper and I was able to find this clip and put that reproducing in our family history. If you had a good local newspaper, like we had in Chicago Heights, you can find those kinds of articles and those kinds of gems that talk a little bit about your family.

Speaker 1: 43:39

Well, and I found my father was born in Scotch Plains, new Jersey. I still don't know why, how he wound up being born there, but I found the local paper there from the 1920s and I actually found obituaries from some of my great grandparents in Italy in this little tiny mid-New Jersey newspaper from 1927.

Speaker 2: 44:04

Yeah well, the Chicago Heights star used to report on little league games, on the winning pitchers who got three hits or four hits, and so you can recreate those moments from the past in your family With. Sadly, those newspapers are gone. You probably have to search people's Facebook pages to find those kinds of references today.

Speaker 1: 44:38

Oh yeah, probably. And to your point, I found that my aunt, my father's sister they had things in there Like she motored to Brooklyn, new York, for vacation for two weeks in the summer of whatever 1920, something. It's so amazing. So I used to spend a lot of time at Chicago. I worked for Chase and I used to go there no, five, six times a year, sometimes for as much as a week, and I'm ashamed to say, as a New Yorker, that some of my favorite Italian restaurants were in Chicago.

Speaker 2: 45:12

Oh well, restaurants change, Italian restaurants especially. They're maybe a generation and a half, two generations at the most. Then they get smart and want to have professions that don't take up 26 hours a day like the restaurant industry does.

Speaker 1: 45:40

Yeah, yeah, no, I know exactly what you mean. I had gone to restaurant school in the late 1980s and it's a job and a half. So one last thing for you, dominic, before we go what advice would you give to people? Where people are really interested in Italian American history, where should they go and look?

Speaker 2: 46:06

Well, if they well, first of all see the Italian Americans, the special that was done by PBS in 2014,. I think it's about three hours long, but online they've cut it up into about 10, 14 minute segments or something it covers. It's a base. It's a good base for going on into all the other things. And then there are the basic books. Everyone should read Christ in Concrete and Jerry Manjone's Montelagro for a taste of that generation in the 20s and in the 30s. And there's the big book, the Rutledge History of Italian Americans. If you get on further and if you've got some academic leanings, that's a great book to read. Actually, arcadia Books has done 60, count them 60 different picture books on Italians in you name the city and we have them in the Italian Cultural Center Library and there are 60 of them and each of them has like 200 pictures of Italian American life in that city.

Speaker 2: 47:50

There are some good treatments of Italian Americans. One should join an organization and in an organization one should go beyond the social aspects that Italian American organizations and give them Italian intellectual, historical or cultural content. So go beyond that. Watch films, go to see the latest La Dolce Vita, go to see the other great Italian movies that have been produced. There must be 50 great Italian movies that have been produced since World War II.

Speaker 2: 48:37

To get a sense of it, visit Italy. Everyone who visits Italy wants to go back and they're planning their second trip. And Italy is not a one-trip pony or two-trip pony or three-trip pony. There's much more than Rome, florence and Venice. In Italy, every town my mother's hometown built their church in 1170 and they have been living there ever since, and history has been happening here and there, and every town, every place has traditions and landmarks in it there. So you can really get a lot out of visiting the Italian language, of course, the language is the key to the culture, and my one regret in all this whole thing is that I never studied Italian language formally and rigorously as I should. I've been to Italy many times and I can get along in Italian, but I am not a master of the language and in my business it would have helped a lot.

Speaker 1: 49:53

I know I feel the same way. I wish the parents had taught us. I took a couple of classes in college, way, way back, but I certainly didn't remember anything. But yeah, that's one of my biggest regrets that I don't know my language. And to your point, I tell everybody if you go to Italy, you have to go to the hometown. If you don't go to the hometown, you haven't been in Italy.

Speaker 2: 50:17

Yeah, yeah, I still have. I'm lucky that I have relatives and friends enough so that people ask me about what's the best hotel here and there. I don't know. I hardly ever stayed hotels in Italy.

Speaker 1: 50:38

You know and my dad has first cousins there that I meant that I don't even. I don't know if he knew when he was alive that they were still alive. It just blew me away to find out that my father's first cousins were still alive in Italy. They were in their 90s, obviously, but it was just shocking.

Speaker 2: 51:01

Well, we went to Italy in June of this year and we visited my father's hometown area this is, he's from Tossoli in Abruzzo, and we had an Airbnb in Orsonia, which is about 10 miles away and instead of us visiting family members, we invited them to visit us and I brought copies of the family history and parts of the family history are in Italian, especially the parts that deal with my father and so and I did treat my father's branch of the family we have a list of each one of his siblings and a little bit about them and their families and so we presented it to them. We invited all the descendants of my grandparents who were married in 1894. And so we had a nice attendance. About 30 of them came, and they seemed to be interested in carrying forward and cooperating, and so we were very pleased with the possibility of getting them to contribute to the whole project in the future.

Speaker 1: 52:25

Yeah, and I met a fourth cousin that when I first found my dad's mother's family, I had a first cousin that I found on Facebook and she was just so great in helping me to find things and putting people together and when we went to the hometowns, being there. It's just an incredible experience for people who haven't done it and are planning it. There's nothing like it, for sure. Well, listen, Dominic, I really appreciate you taking the time.

Speaker 1: 53:00

This has been fantastic, especially with the history of Italian Americans and how people can find them, and we'll have to chat some more.

Speaker 2: 53:11

Well, keep on working, keep on working.

Speaker 1: 53:13

All right, thanks, appreciate it.