They came with little but the hope of starting a new life in a welcoming land. Years later the story of Italians making their home in Wales is the subject of a moving exhibition which documents what it was like to up sticks and start afresh in a new country. The exhibition at the National History Museum St Fagans - tells the life stories of those who set up ice cream businesses, fish and chip shops and cafes across South Wales.

They came with little but the hope of starting a new life in a welcoming land. Years later the story of Italians making their home in Wales is the subject of a moving exhibition which documents what it was like to up sticks and start afresh in a new country. CATHERINE JONES reports...
USING pictures, artifacts and interviews, Italian Memories in Wales – an exhibition at the National History Museum St Fagans – tells the life stories of those who set up ice cream businesses, fish and chip shops and cafes across South Wales.
Among them is 87-year-old Stefano Canale of Ton Pentre, whose father, one of a large family, was born in Casino, between Rome and Naples.
“My grandfather was the first to come over in the 1800s,” he says. “People were desperate. They had nothing. My family was living in a little place a mile from Casino and all there was to do there was grow marvellous olive oil and peppers, but you can’t live on that.
“When he moved to Wales my father, Alessandro, used to sell ice cream from a handcart. He was the first man to go selling ice cream up the Bwlch mountain when they opened the road in 1926. It was something very new for people to walk up because of the view.
“He’d have a big block of ice four feet long and 10 inches thick and smash it all up and put it around the barrel of ice cream. My mother, Maria, would boil ice cream milk on top of the old coal fire. When you think how she lifted it, they worked hard.
“When I was 10, I went out with the cart and the inspector from the council caught me because I was under age. My father said to him ‘what can I do?’ because he needed me working – it was only on a Saturday and Sunday – and the council gave me a band to wear around my arm to say I was allowed to go and sell. Then we got a horse-drawn cart and before school I had to go to the stables, about half-a-mile down the road, to feed the horse and see everything was all right. I must have been about 16 when my father paid £2.50 for a bike for me.
“I used to enjoy myself but it was hard work. It’s something how poor people lived in those days when there was no dole.”
One of four children, Stefano and his brother built up the family business to include the largest ice cream depot in Wales with 30 Mr Whippy vans.
“Walls would do anything for us because we were so big but when my brother died I didn’t want to know anything – we were really close – so we sold up and got out.
“I love going to Italy because I am a bit brighter there. People come and talk to you, you go here, you go there, and the weather is so nice, but I am really Welsh – although there’s a bit of Italian too.”
Stefano met his wife, Elina, in Italy, and their son Mario, 55, is the fourth generation to continue the family’s ice cream trade with a van.
The St Fagans exhibition – paid for by the Heritage Lottery Fund and curated by ACLI-ENAIP, a society for expatriate Italians – shows how Italians became respected local and national figures and wove their own culture into the traditions of their new homeland.
Many businesses blossomed, particularly the cafes, thanks to the industry and charm of their owners who brought over family and friends from Italy.
Some came to work in coal mines, iron works and the tinplate industry and some prisoners of war stayed in Wales as farm workers.
I always felt at home and always admired the Welsh, says Pietro Sidoli.
Pietro Sidoli, who will be 83 in August, came from Italy when he was 10, but can trace his family’s links with Wales back to his grandmother who arrived to find work.
“She went back to Italy, married, had my father and then he had his children who all came over and I was the last to arrive,” says Pietro, who is one of six children.
The family settled in Caerau, Maesteg, where the young Pietro – who now owns a traditional ice cream parlour on Porthcawl sea front as well as several cafes – started school.
“During the war I had to move to Abercynon but I used to come back to Caerau. At 10, I would go myself selling ice cream off a horse and cart.
“We had a tub with ice around it so the ice cream could keep cool all day. I was the last one to sell ice cream off a horse and cart in Wales.
“It was wonderful. If I was given the chance to choose over again what I did, and I could pick anything, I am telling you the truth when I say I would want to do the same thing all over again.
“I used to meet so many people and get to know their culture. You can’t buy these sorts of things.”
Pietro’s family came from the Bardi region of Italy.
“I mixed with the Welsh. I didn’t find myself a stranger at all,” says Pietro, who has two sons and a daughter, all of whom speak Italian. “They used to call me macaroni or spaghetti and now everyone eats spaghetti! I always felt at home and always admired the Welsh. As far as I am concerned I feel 100% at home here.
“My father used to talk about Italy but I have never missed it. I have been back every year since the war but I wouldn’t live there for good. My home is here.”
Italian Memories in Wales runs at Oriel 1, St Fagans National History Museum until Monday, May 3, from 10am to 5pm, free entry.
‘My father ended up more of a Welshman than an Italian’
RENATO Bacchetta, 78, and known as Ron, describes himself as a Welsh-Italian. He lives in Talbot Green with his wife, Yvonne, 71.
“Both my parents are Italian and I was born in Abercynon in 1932 in the second year of my parents’ marriage. My father came over in 1914 following his eldest brother. What was happening in Italy was that land was shared out among the family and as time went on, what was left was getting smaller and smaller.
“With the advent of coal being found in the Welsh Valleys and employment for men, they didn’t come over to work in the pits but to work in cafes serving the miners. People were now earning money and the cafes became meeting points and centres for the miners but also for the miners’ wives. People would buy sweets or a bottle of Sarsaparilla and they’d have a coffee. They didn’t drink much coffee before that and the coffee machine we used, with an eagle at the top, is at the exhibition in St Fagans.”
Ron’s father, Serafino, went into the army in 1917 when he was 18, returned to Italy for two years and then returned to Wales to work with his brothers who had gone into partnership with a family called Tambini in Gilfach Goch.
“Eventually they ended up with their own shops. In the late 1920s my father met my mother, Dorinda, and they married in 1931, going on to have four children. I’m the eldest and then it was Mario and Aldo, and then Sandra born in 1946.”
Like many Italians who came to Wales, Ron’s parents came from Bardi in the province of Palma.
“My mother took me there in 1933 as a baby but then the war came and that put a spoke in it. I went back in 1948 when I was 16. It was a wonderful experience. I stayed over there for about three months. I didn’t speak fluent Italian, it’s only come later, but I could get by. When I was born, my mother being so new to the country didn’t speak English so as a baby she was talking to me in Italian. You aren’t conscious but it’s registering. So before the end of the war I started to learn Italian. When I went to Italy no-one spoke English so I had to speak Italian.
“Both my parents adapted very quickly to the Welsh way of life. I think my father ended up more of a Welshman than an Italian! He decided he was going to stay in Wales and had the foresight to become a British citizen. Both my parents became nationalised which meant when the war came they weren’t treated as alien.
“The Italians that hadn’t become British citizens were treated as though they were aliens. It was very unfortunate what happened when the Arandora Star taking Italian internees to Canada was sunk by a German U-boat and many hundreds of Italian men lost their lives.
“All the Italians – and this applied to the 700 on the Arandora Star – were part of the Welsh community and had been accepted by it. Becoming nationalised saved my father’s life. If he hadn’t, he would have been on the boat.”
Ron, who has two daughters and a son, has many fond memories of growing up in Wales, not least his mother’s excellent cooking, and looked forward to the meal on Sunday which was always Italian.
“My mother was a devout Catholic and had to go to church but it was a nice way of life. The war didn’t spoil it for me. I still had a normal upbringing.”
The family business, which started out serving snacks, drinks and sweets, became a restaurant after the war. They also opened a delicatessen.
“My father opened number three Station Street in Porth. He bought number two, and then number four and we opened the first delicatessen in Rhondda. That was before the big supermarkets came.
“You were always meeting people, the customers were from all walks of life, and we could sit and talk and pass the time of day.
“My brother and I retired about eight years ago. I am not sorry my children didn’t go into it because things have changed on the high street and with supermarkets.”
Ron, who met his wife, Yvonne, on a blind date in Trehafod, said: “We had a museum of artifacts above the cafe, including old tills and wall display cabinets, which we donated to St Fagans with a view to them replicating it one day at the museum.”
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/showbiz-and-lifestyle/
showbiz/2010/04/20/how-the-italians-found-a-new-
home-in-south-wales-91466-26274606/
 

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