Philadelphia became the most important port, if not the most important city, in the newly formed United States.

The initial large contingents of Italian immigrants arrived during the long struggle for the formation of the nation state of Italy, and were welcome for their talents, and worked effectively in commercial, scientific, and artistic areas, and became an important part of the Nucleus of the city.

The "accepting" attitude toward Italians soon changed.
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A Book Review by Prof. Emeritus James Mancuso
BUILDING LITTLE ITALY:
PHILADELPHIA'S ITALIANS BEFORE MASS MIGRATION (1998)
by Richard N. Juliani
University Park, PA; Pennsylvania State University Press.

"Rocky made South Philadelphia, one of the largest neighborhoods in Philadelphia, famous," says a real estate ad. Sylvester Stallone, the creator of five ROCKY films would expand on that.

In conjunction with the filming of ROCKY III, in 1982, United Artists film studios placed a bronze statue of Rocky Balboa on the platform that topped the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  The statue was removed to a sports venue, but when United Artists asked to have it returned to the Museum of Art's entrance for the filming of ROCKY V, there ensued a debate about where the statue should be placed.  During discussions Stallone was willing to say that he had done more to make Philadelphia famous than had Benjamin Franklin.

Whatever one thinks about who made South Philadelphia famous, one must agree that the Italian-American community is, indeed, famous.

Richard N. Juliani does a fine job of gathering evidence to demonstrate who made that community, in the first place.

When one thinks of the formation of a large city's "Little Italy," he/she is very likely to think of the waves of immigrants that left Italy at the end of the Nineteenth and the beginning of the Twentieth Centuries.

Juliani draws his readers into an exploration of the prelude to the settling of thousands of Italian immigrants in the area south of Philadelphia's central hub.

To give a foundation to that exploration, Juliani reminds his readers that Philadelphia was the most important port, if not the most important city, in the newly formed United States.  Thus, any commerce with foreign traders would flow through Philadelphia.

Additionally, Philadelphia was home to the new nation's most active concentration of scientists, scholars, and artists.

The citizens of post colonial Philadelphia welcomed Italians who could work effectively in cooperation with commercial, scientific, and artistic inhabitants of the city.  In that way, a nucleus of Italians began to form and many of them prospered.

As could be expected, the major part of the first contingent of immigrants left Italy from the northern end of the peninsula. Records show that many of the members of that contingent originated in Liguria.

Though one might mistakenly expect that Juliani's book focuses too narrowly on the Italian-American community of the Philadelphia, a reader will find that Juliani does an exemplary job of laying out a very broad context in which the formation of the South Philadelphia community took place.

The initial contingents of Italian immigrants arrived during the long struggle for the formation of the nation state of Italy. In Philadelphia, with its deep connections to the struggle for independence and the formation of a new nation of The USA, those early immigrants found very sympathetic supporters.

Juliani also gives a solid account of the ways in which the early immigrants formed the social institutions that were in place when the major wave of immigrants took place.

Of course, Juliani also gathered the data that allowed him to present stories of individuals and their families as they adjusted to and made their way into the society of The U.S.A.

One of the most interesting threads in Juliani's book deals with the ways in which attitudes towards the Italian immigrants shifted from early admiration and acceptance to disdain and intolerance.

Juliani reiterates the ways in which anti-immigration attitudes developed as members of the established society of Philadelphia began to feel uncomfortable in the presence of people whose practices and ideologies differed considerably from those of the established society.

Ironically, some the features of the Philadelphia society that welcomed the Italian immigrants who brought to the city the high culture of Italy were brought to bear to foster the development of negative attitudes toward the mass migration.  Esteemed scholars accepted the eugenics movement's propositions about the inferiority of "races."

Popular writers circulated tracts in which they expressed their concerns about
the potential degradation of the society of Philadelphia as a result of the influx of Italian immigrants.

As I read Juliani's account of the anti-immigrant attitudes, I expected that he would have referenced the anti-immigrant position expressed by the Philadelphian to whom Sylvester Stallone compared himself.

Benjamin Franklin, who also worried about the degradation of the Philadelphia society as a result of the influx of immigrants, had written a tract in which he outrightly claimed that the people of the Anglo-Saxon "races" clearly carried characteristics that were more positive than those carried by the people of the Mediterranean area, and warned against the immigration of the "inferior races."

As should happen, when closing down a very good book, I was left with a number of questions that were stimulated by reading Juliani stacks.

How does the development of the Italian-American community in Philadelphia compare to the development of Italian-American communities elsewhere?

How was the settlement of the Philadelphia Italian-American community related to the tremendous influx of the Italian immigrants to central and western Pennsylvania?

Did the Philadelphia Italian-American community continue to draw immigrants from the north of Italy?

On account of its breadth, its careful scholarship, and its lively prose, a reader interested in Italian-American history will profit from reading Juliani's book.