The ANNOTICO Report
"In Italy
we don't know anything about the Italian Experience in
the American West. Only New York," says Alessandro Trojani, a professor of
political science and education at the University of
Florence, who wants to let the folks back home know what
happened to all those Italians who journeyed to the American West and never
came back not just the adventurers
who went looking for gold in California, but all those impoverished men who
found their way to out-of-the-way places like Helper, Utah.
He calls his project "Italians in the Gold Rush and Beyond," which
is described on his Web site, www.IGRB.net,
as "the most complete multimedia
database of Italians in the North America from
the Gold Rush to today."
Film series to tie Italians with West
Deseret Morning News
By Elaine Jarvik
Monday, July 31, 2006
Alessandro Trojani wants to let the folks back
home know what happened to all those Italians who journeyed to the American
West and never came back not just
the adventurers who went looking for gold in California,
but all those impoverished men who found their way to out-of-the-way places
like Helper, Utah.
He calls his project "Italians in the Gold Rush and Beyond,"
which is described on his Web site, www.IGRB.net, as "the most complete multimedia
database of Italians in the North America from
the Gold Rush to today."
It's the Italian experience in the American West that has captivated Trojani, a professor of political science and education at
the University of
Florence. "In Italy we don't
know anything about the West. Only New York,"
he explained recently, in a lecture at the University of Utah
that wandered back and forth between Italian and English.
Three of Trojani's students are in Utah this
summer making a documentary, the first of several that will explore the
Italian-American experience in states that most Italians know little about,
despite the 2002 Olympics and the NBA. It was Salt Lake
City's Italian Center of the West a small meeting place with a big name and
lofty ambitions that first drew Trojani's curiosity to Utah.
Students Filippo Tofani, Giammarco
Sicuro and Simone Gallorini
are spending the next month in a small editing room at KUED-TV, where footage
of historical photos, red-rock scenery and their interviews of
Italian-Americans will be fashioned into a documentary that they hope will
eventually be shown on KUED, as well as in Italy.
Next year, Trojani will send students to either Phoenix or Denver
to make another documentary for the "Gold Rush and Beyond" series. He
hopes, eventually, that his films will help Italian-Americans all over the West
connect with each other.
Utah's
first known Italian immigrant was Giuseppe Toronto, who arrived in 1849. Toronto is believed to be
the first Italian Catholic who converted to Mormonism. He moved first to Boston
and then to Nauvoo, Ill., where he immediately handed over his life's savings $2,500 in gold pieces earned peddling
fruits and vegetables to President
Brigham Young of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The first big wave of Italian immigrants, Protestants who had been converted
to Mormonism by Lorenzo Snow, arrived in Utah
in the 1870s from the Valdesi region near the French
border. Other Italians arrived between 1890 and 1920, looking for work in the
mines and the railroads. They came from both northern and southern Italy and settled mostly in Carbon, Salt Lake,
Tooele and Weber counties.
"There were two important dramas," Sicuro
explains as he runs through grainy photos of men standing in front of mine
shafts. The first drama was a mine explosion on May 1, 1900, near Scofield, which killed 200 Italian miners, the second a
mine accident at Castle Gate in 1924.
In those days, Italians were considered "not white," says Utah documentary
filmmaker Ken Verdoia. One of two dozen Utah
Italian-Americans interviewed for the video, Verdoia
is typical of many third-generation immigrants. His grandparents came to Northern California after World War I, illiterate in two
languages, as Verdoia puts it. By the time Ken and
the other grandchildren came along, the younger generation didn't want to learn
how to speak Italian.
His family moved to the suburbs. He graduated from college and became a
professional. "I was born and raised a son of the United States, not of Italy," Verdoia
says. He has never even been to Italy.
But now his own daughters are eager to travel there and "are intrigued
with the stories of their ancestors coming to America."
The most recent wave of immigrants from Italy
to Utah
occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, when professors and other professionals moved
here. But there are still new arrivals. Some of them gather at the Italian Center
of the West, across from Pioneer
Park on 300 South.
The Italian Center
was founded two years ago by Adriano Comollo, a
first-generation Italian-American who previously taught at both Brigham Young
University and the University of Utah.
"We would like to pursue a little higher culture," Comollo explains at the mention of the word
"soccer" or even "bocce," the Italian lawn bowling game
played at the park across the street. The center invites guest speakers poets
and professors and students from the U.'s opera
program and provides a place where
anyone can wander in to watch Italian news via satellite TV or read a book in
Italian.
It is estimated that 57,000 Utahns can now trace
their history back to Italy.
On Sunday afternoons at the Italian Center, you'll find a few of them sitting
around a large table having a conversation in Italian, along with Italian
wannabes former LDS missionaries,
people who learned Italian by listening to Puccini, and tourists who once
visited Italy and fell in love with the place.
E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com