Finding Your Way Back to Italy

Service Description

Most Italian Americans have a version of the same story: a grandparent or great-grandparent arriving at Ellis Island with nothing but the clothes on their back, working hard, and building a new life. Mix in decades of mafia movies and true crime shows, and our ancestors end up flattened into saints or sinners. Neither version tells you much about who they actually were or where they actually came from. We'll cover: 1) The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. What it was, what happened when it fell in 1861 during Italian unification, and how the political and economic fallout set off mass emigration starting in the 1870s and 80s. 2) Where people actually came from. Many ship manifests list "Naples," but most of those people were not from Naples. They came from across the south: Abruzzo, Puglia, Calabria, and Campania, each with its own history, language, and food. If you've heard a province name like Avellino, Cosenza, Catania, or Foggia, you have a real thread to pull. If all you have is a town nobody's heard of, we'll talk about how those small mountain towns still connect to a distinct regional identity. 3) Debunking the myths. Starting with the biggest one: names were not changed at Ellis Island. We'll look at how Italian immigrants actually settled, often on specific streets among people from their own region, and how labor bosses contracted entire towns to do specific work in specific parts of the United States. 4) Finding what's left. A framework for collecting your family's history when the people who remember it are gone: the foods, the holiday traditions, the words that survived even when the details didn't. The class ends with a live 30-minute Q&A. Bring your family's town name, the word nobody could translate, the story that never quite made sense. Taught by Danielle Oteri, writer, art historian, and host of the podcast Danielle Oteri's Italy. She spent 16 years as a lecturer at the Met Cloisters, served as an adjunct professor at Seton Hall University, and founded Feast Travel and Arthur Avenue Food Tours.