Friday,
December 12, 2008
Vincenza Scarpaci’s "The Journey of the Italians in
The
ANNOTICO Report
Vincenza Scarpaci, a historian of the Italian-American experience
at the
A Brush with History
Shoshone
News Press
By Nick Rotunno
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Meticulously
written and beautifully photographed, Vincenza Scarpacis The Journey of the Italians in
With a
combination of intensive research and long-distance travel, Scarpaci,
a historian of the Italian-American experience at the
After laboring four years and sifting through endless
information, Scarpaci had included 35 states and 164
different locations in her book, documenting the lives of Italian-American
families from coast to coast. As it turned out, one of those locations was a
small mining town called
At a book signing Wednesday afternoon, in
the basement of Kelloggs
Growing up among the many immigrants of the boroughs
Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, Scarpaci was
fascinated by the worldwide culture of the city streets. Beginning in the melting
pot of
Clicking through slides of photographs,
the historian recounted the often-difficult odyssey of the Italian
immigrant the determined newcomer
to a strange land, forging out a life in this tough American world.
For Italians in Kellogg, life, of course,
revolved around the mines the
industry that Scarpaci called the nucleus of the
community. One of the photographs in The Journey is a black-and-white
image of Natale Truant, a Silver Valley
Italian-American hard at work inside the Bunker Hill Mine. Truant is pictured
adding steel grinding balls to the mines concentrator, one of his duties
for many years.
Another image several pages later is of
May DAndrea Truant, Natales wife. Shes tending her garden at the couples home in
Kellogg, carrying a basket of strawberries on her head. The black and white
photograph is obviously old, grainy, a snapshot of a lost time.
The Truants moved to the valley in 1928, worked hard, built
a home and a family. Their daughter, lifelong Kellogg resident Pierina L. Miller, was present at the book signing. Miller
provided Scarpaci with her familys photographs.
The Truants, and Miller after them, are a perfect example of
the books major theme: success. Scarpaci takes
readers on an immigrant journey of their own; a journey from the verdant shores
of
Following her visit to Kellogg, Scarpaci will continue her signing tour, and plans to make
stops in
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