Staten
Island
is the most Italian of New York City's five boroughs. People
of Italian descent account for 40% of Staten Island's
population. In a new book, "The Staten Island Italian-American
Experience" (Wagner College DaVinci
Society), an emeritus professor of sociology at Brooklyn
College and a leading authority on
Italian-American visual culture, [the author ]
writes, "Five hundred years ago an Italian discovered America; five
hundred years later Americans have yet to discover Italians."
In a country
where so many things Italian - pizza and "The Godfather," for
example - have become cultural staples, it may sound like [an exaggeration]. A visit to Staten
Island's Rosebank section, however,
should disabuse most non-Italian-Americans of any idea that they have
discovered Italians.
The sleepy
streets of residential Rosebank evoke an Italian
village. Where else in the five boroughs does the pedestrian just naturally
saunter down the middle of the street, as though there weren't even sidewalks?
An aura of deep privacy surrounds the casual disarray of Rosebank's
mixed housing. It's not like the privacy of, say, Fieldston
in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where houses are set back behind trees
along narrow roads not meant for the casual explorer. Rosebank's
is the privacy of a self-contained people whose outward contributions to the
culture mask an intense familism, as
sociologists say. And in Rosebank old customs
pervade the streets and yards.
The Italian who
discovered North America was, of course, the Florentine master mariner Giovanni da Verrazzano, working for France's King
Francis I. The Florentine entered New York
Harbor, sighted Staten Island, and,
apparently finding it inauspicious, turned his ship, the Dauphine, around. That was in 1524; 440
years later, the city named the then-longest suspension bridge in the world
after the explorer, though inexplicably (and to me disturbingly) omitting a
"z" from his name. From the time of Verrazzano
to the late 19th century, very few Italians resided in New York.
Yet Italians
stamped Rosebank early, as the house of Antonio Meucci
attests.Like Verrazzano, Meucci was a Florentine. He studied engineering and worked
as a stage technician in Florence until
1833, when he served time in prison for his involvement in the Italian
unification movement. In 1835 Meucci and his
wife left Italy for good,
going to Havana where he worked at the Gran Teatro Tacsn, then the greatest
theater in the Western Hemisphere. He was an
inveterate tinkerer, and witnessing the rapid rollout
of the New Yorker Samuel Morse's electric telegraph in the 1840s stirred Meucci's inventive impulse. In 1850 the Meuccis
moved to Staten Island, where Antonio lived
out the last 49 years of his life. He established a candle factory where, in
1850 and 1851, he employed his exiled countryman Giuseppe Garibaldi. The
leader of the Risorgimento, or Italian unification, also lived in Meucci's house, now a museum at 420 Tompkins Ave.
at Che stnut Avenue
(718-442-1608). The unprepossessing 1840s frame structure holds treasures of
both Meucci's and Garibaldi's lives.
Garibaldi
received a hero's welcome when he came to New York
following the fall of his and Mazzini's Roman
Republic after France sent
troops in aid of the pope. Americans of the time worshipped freedom fighters from around
the world the noble Greeks against
the Turks, Bolmvar and San Martmn,
and not least Garibaldi who
inspired visions of our own founding struggles. Garibaldi left New York in 1851, returned for a brief visit in 1853, and
conquered the Two Sicilies in 1860, at which time the
New York press hailed him as the George
Washington of Italy.
Yet the
visitor to the museum leaves more impressed by Meucci. His is a tragic story,
that of a brilliant inventor -a genius, no doubt, and doubtless the inventor of
the telephone who, sometimes
through his own fault and sometimes through that of others, managed to botch
most of his opportunities for fame, riches, and recognition. The Garibaldi-Meucci
Museum's zesty
presentation of the inventor's life causes the visitor to leave cursing the
name of Alexander Graham Bell, that wily Scot.
Within easy
walking distance of the museum is a magnificent artifact of Italian-American
folk religious culture, the Shrine of Our Lady of Mount
Carmel. The pious peasants of southern Italy often
distrusted the institutional church, and indulged in a form of worship based on
private shrines both large and small. The Rosebank
shrine is large. The shrine, at 36
Amity St. at White Plains Avenue, centers on a large
grotto constructed by local residents, some of them skilled artisans whose
craftsmanship shines through the found objects and humble materials the shrine
is made out of. A statue of the Virgin Mary provides a place for prayer and
meditation. "Grotto" means cave, which is an important image in
Catholic worship: We see caves in Christ's resurrection, the lives of holy
hermits, the 13th-century monks of Mount Carmel in Israel,
and the appearance of the Virgin to Bernadette Soubirous
in Lourdes in
1858. The British writer Norman Douglas once referred to the "cave
worship" of Italian peasants. Construction of the Staten
Island shrine began in 1937 and continues to this day. The great
cave on Amity Street
is Rosebank's shrine, unconnected with any parish,
and is the sign of a vigorous people who have held on to their folkways while
making their ways in America.
Staten
Island
boasts several good Italian restaurants. Rosebank is
on the Narrows, north of the Verrazano
Bridge. The hungry
visitor might wish to drive or bike north and west to Port Richmond, on the
shore of the Kill Van Kull. At 524
Port Richmond Ave., between Hooker Place and Walker Street, Denino's
(718-442-9401), which opened as a bar in the year construction of the shrine
began, serves pizza that is as singular as the shrine an only-on-Staten-Island experience.