Relative Strangers: Italian Protestants in the Catholic World - Hardcover

Cicero Jr., Frank

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0897336151 ISBN 13: 9780897336154

Publisher: Academy Chicago Publishers, 2011

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Frank Cicero, Jr. is a senior partner with the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis LLP in Chicago and has litigated numerous major cases in federal and international courts. He received his J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School and holds degrees from Princeton University and Wheaton College. This is his first book.     

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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 discomfort for all classes. In still or calmer conditions, the smoke and noxious fumes from the ship's two huge stacks enveloped the passengers. The noise of engines and other machinery, of lifeboats swinging on their davits, and of other fittings and equipment was a constant presence. Common to all passengers, these conditions were much worse in steerage. In the lower reaches of the ship, the noise and motion were louder and inescapable. The crowded, airless hold made the sickness of many a misery for all.

Typically, a steerage berth was an iron bunk with a mattress of straw and no pillow. Sometimes in large rooms, sometimes in smaller cabins, the space was cramped and there was little privacy. With no room for storage of hand luggage, travelers lived and slept with it in their bunks or hanging from any available support. Floors were normally of wood, which was swept every morning and sprinkled with sand. Few washrooms were provided; all were used by both sexes. Passengers were issued tin plates or bowls, utensils, cups, and some cans for washing, food service, or laundry. Floors were wet and littered. The number of vessels to use for seasickness was always inadequate. Even without serious seasickness, by the end of a crossing everything was dirty and disagreeable. On rough passages, the floors were often filled with vomit. Passengers would spend as much time as possible above on the open — but also crowded — decks. There the steerage passengers could observe the relatively spacious and luxurious surroundings of the first- and second-class travelers.

La Savoie reached New York on Saturday, April 23, 1904, a week after departure from Le Havre. Arrival day was always busy, turbulent, and exciting for steerage passengers. They arranged their luggage for the last time, washed in their basins with cold salt water, and made themselves as clean and tidy as possible for the fearfully awaited inspections at Ellis Island. Then they pushed up to the deck — which became nearly impassible with baggage — to witness the New York arrival. As the vessels passed into the Narrows, the passengers could celebrate the famous and awaited view of the Statue of Liberty. They could also take in the panoramic scene of the New York skyline and the many ships from all over the world docked at the Battery and around the tip of Manhattan. The impression on Giacomo and his companions, who just ten days earlier had departed the hamlets and stone huts of their sparsely populated, remote mountain valleys, can only be imagined.

It is interesting to me now to reflect on the fact that I never, ever heard my grandfather refer to the huge contrast between his homeland in the Piedmont mountains and the surroundings he experienced and settled into in the New World. Grandpa Balma died two years after I graduated from college. For some fifteen years after he gave up the family home, he lived with us several months at a time as he rotated among his three children who lived in the Chicago area. I recall no conversation about the mountains in which he grew up, his passage to America, or the contrast between life in America and his prior life in Italy. Of course, I never asked — nor knew to ask — either, and that is now a great regret.

When the arriving liners slowed on the approach to New York, steerage passengers experienced in a new way the class distinctions they had endured in their travels to Le Havre, at Le Havre in their sorting and separation, during the voyage, and probably through much of their lives as the poor classes in their homelands. In the grand era of immigration through New York, arriving ocean transports did not go directly to Ellis Island. Indeed, they did not go there at all. The vessels docked at the Battery on the tip of Manhattan. There first- and second-class passengers disembarked and were expedited on their ways. To speed up the process, small cutters bearing uniformed immigration officers often came out to the ships. Inspectors boarded the ships, reviewed the list of first-cabin passengers, conducted perfunctory interviews of second-cabin passengers — who also were observed by medical officers for obvious signs of illness — and asked the ship's doctor if there were any contagious diseases on board. If the answer was positive, the entire vessel was isolated at the quarantine station. Absent the need for quarantine, the ship docked and the first- and second-class passengers departed.

Steerage passengers also debarked, but they immediately were loaded onto ferries that took them to Ellis Island. There the immigrants dragged their luggage ashore and proceeded to the vast reception hall. They were examined for disease or other infirmity, and their baggage was inspected. If they cleared the process, they were taken by ferry back to Manhattan or to New Jersey to continue on their ways. If they were not cleared, they either were interned on the island for observation or for time to cure their medical condition or they were transported back to the ships on which they had come to return across the oceans to their ports of departure.

During the peak years for immigration — particularly in the last two decades of the nineteenth and the first two decades of the twentieth centuries — arriving transports often had to wait offshore for days before a berth became available to discharge their steerage passengers. Frequently in those cases, cabin-class passengers were taken ashore by small ferries while steerage passengers were left to wait in their squalid accommodations.

Giacomo and his companions were fortunate to have an expeditious passage through the New York arrival procedures. La Savoie docked promptly. They were taken by ferry to Ellis Island and passed through the immigration processing quickly. Then the weary travelers were met at Ellis Island by New York City friends, including the husband of one of the women on the voyage. A number of Waldensians from the Piedmont valleys, including three ministers, one of whom was from Prali, were living in the New York area. They had organized a Waldensian church that held meetings at the Church of the Strangers at Eighth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street. Church members regularly went to the Battery and to Ellis Island to meet and welcome immigrants and visitors from their home communities in Italy, help settle them if they were staying in the New York area, and assist them on their way if they were traveling on to other places in the states.

From Ellis Island, Giacomo, his immigrant traveling companions, and their New York friends returned to Manhattan, where several of the newly arrived intended to stay. The two Giacomos heading for Chicago visited with friends from the Waldensian community, attended Sunday services at the Waldensian church, and on Monday were assisted onto the train to Chicago.

* * *

Six months later, my grandmother Margherita followed, making the long journey from Italy to Chicago with their eleven-month-old daughter, Elena. In the spring of 1904, shortly after Giacomo's departure, twenty-eight-year-old Margherita had left the remote and isolated mountain community where she had lived her entire life. She first relocated some twenty miles down the valleys of the Germanasca and Chisone rivers to stay with friends in the larger community of Pinerolo. That historic city, some forty miles southwest of Turin and less than thirty miles from the French border, had for centuries been a fought-over stronghold in wars between the kings of France and the rulers of the House of Savoy. In 1904 Pinerolo was the prosperous center of economic life for the rugged and sparsely populated Valdese valleys southwest of Turin. In later years, as transportation improved, many residents of the small mountain towns — towns like Prali and Rodoretto, from which my grandparents emigrated — passed some or all of their winters in Pinerolo and their summers at their old family homes high in the mountains.

Later in the summer of 1904, Margherita and baby Elena relocated to Turin, the capital city of the Piedmont region, where she resided with friends until she left for America in October. By then, Giacomo had settled into his work in Chicago and had established his earning power in a reliable job. After an initial period of loneliness and depression that had caused him to consider moving back to Italy, he had become fixed emotionally on staying in America and had sent money back to Margherita to pay for passage to Chicago.

Margherita made the trip alone with her eleven-month-old baby. Leaving Turin the first week of October, she and Elena also traveled by train through the Alps and across France to Lyons and on to Paris and the port at Le Havre. In Paris, she had the comfort of staying with friends from the city's sizeable Waldensian community, including many émigrés from the same valleys she had called home. Early on Saturday, October 8, 1904, her friends assisted her to the port at Le Havre. Thereafter, she was left alone with Elena to find her way aboard the ship, establish them both in a bunk, and prepare for the long voyage.

Margherita and Elena sailed on the French Line passenger steamship La Lorraine, a sister ship to La Savoie. During the week-long voyage, Margherita endured all the usual privations of steerage-class passengers, compounded, of course, by the fact that she — undoubtedly like many other young women on the vessel — was a nursing mother with an infant to care for.

Margherita and Elena Balma arrived in New York on Saturday, October 15, 1904, almost six months to the day after Giacomo's arrival. They also were met at Ellis Island by friends from the Waldensian church in New York. After a short stay in the city, Margherita and Elena left by train for Chicago.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Academy Chicago Publishers
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0897336151
• ISBN 13: 9780897336154
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288