Dear Readers,
An August assortment of Italian connections in “bits and pieces” that are too short for an entire column, but shouldn’t be left out. So … All roads lead to Rome. This popular phrase had its origins in ancient times when Romans built one of the world’s most extensive road systems, resulting in the phrase “all roads lead to Rome” – meaning that no matter which road one takes during a journey, it will finally take him to Rome if he keeps traveling. This phrase has now come to mean that all ways or methods of doing something will end in the same result, no one method being better than another.
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Bank of America’s Amadeo Pietro Giannini was born in 1870 in Alviso, near San Jose, the son of Italian immigrants. He was six years old when his mother was widowed, so he could relate to the immigrant poor and their needs. A.P. Giannini in 1904 founded the Bank of Italy, and served San Francisco’s Italian immigrants.
After the 1906 quake, his bank was the first to reopen and often gave loans based on persons calloused hand shake. He also financed California’s fledgling motion picture industry’s early films, including Walt Disney’s Snow White, the building of the Golden Gate Bridge and California’s wine, raisin and citrus industries. The character of George Bailey, the banker in Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life,” is thought to be based on Giannini. Giannni trusted hard-working poor people and he extended credit to them.
He was the type of capitalist rare today, an honest banker who really cared about the little guy. His bank, today known as Bank of America, has some 5,000 branches across the U.S. and banks in 37 foreign countries. A few years back when headquarters moved from San Francisco to Charlotteville, N.C., the new owners literally dumped any A.P. Giannini portraits and Italian connections to Bank of America were obliterated.
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Congressman Peter Rodino Jr. of Rhode Island and Judge John J. Sirica played a crucial role in demonstrating that no one was “above the law”. The “Watergate” hearings began in mid 1973 and on Aug. 8, 1974, President Nixon facing impeachment in Congress, announced he was resigning to be succeeded by Vice President Ford.
The Watergate break in scandal forced Nixon to become the first president in history to resign from office. An attempt to impeach Andrew Johnson came to a Senate vote in 1868, but failed. Connecticut born Judge John J. Sirica, who presided over the Watergate trial later wrote a book “To Set the Record Straight,” which gave a first-hand account of the trial of the president’s men and the efforts of their battery of lawyers to harass the judge into legal mistakes.
When honored by the NIAF following the publication of his book, Judge Sirica came forward to accept the award and began his remarks with: “I hardly know what to say. My thoughts go back to the days when my dad was making $15 or $16 a week as a barber in Waterbury, Conn. And my mother was running a little grocery store to supplement the income and we were living in the back of the grocery store in one room.
It’s been one struggle right after another, since that time – and all I’d like to say is this – that I hope and pray that when the good Lord calls me from this earth I hope and pray that I can feel that I have done something for my country.”
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Chipilo, a town down Mexico way, has many Italian connections. ‘Tis said that in 1870, the entire population of a small town near Venice, left Italy for Mexico. The Italian Mexicans living in Chipilo are said to be tall, blonde and blue eyed, instead of tall, dark and handsome.
“Crying Indian,” aka Iron Eyes Cody, the Indian who made Americans feel guilty about rash in anti-littering ads during the 1970s only pretended to be a native American. He was actually descended from Italian immigrants. Records show he was born Oscar DeCorti in 1904, in Gueydan, La., the son of market owners Francesca Salpietra and Antonio DeCorti. In 1924, he changed his name to Cody and headed for Hollywood to act in Westerns.
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Cavalleria Rusticana composer Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945) wrote many operas including his opera “Le Maschere” which enjoyed much success in Italy and South America. On his United States tour he visited San Francisco, and told the press “here in America they call me the composer of Cavalleria Rusticana. “It damages my reputation as a musician to be known only as the man who wrote the piece with that intermezzo,” lamented Pietro Mascagni in an interview for the San Francisco Examiner in February 1903.
One century later, Mascagni is still recognized almost exclusively as the composer of Cavalleria Rusticana, the opera that won him instant worldwide fame after its premiere in 1890. During a career that spanned over sixty years of composing, conducting, touring, teaching, writing, and fighting for Italian music, Mascagni produced 14 other operas, one operetta, songs, film music and was once called the “foremost living composer of opera.”
In 1902, at age 39, Mascagni was the unchallenged leader of the young Italian school of composers. Since Cavalleria Rusticana, his triumphs in Italy and abroad had been unmatched by any living musician. He was the author of seven operas in addition to Cavalleria Rusticana, including the popular L’amico Fritz (1891) and Iris (1898).
An experienced conductor of his and other composers’ works, he had been on the podium at the premieres of all the operas since Guglielmo Ratcliff in 1895, a tradition he would maintain until Nerone in 1935. The press and the public loved Pietro Mascagni, the great opera composer, in San Francisco. He exclaimed a few days after his arrival in February 1903: “The sunshine is so good that my heart is warm and I am happy again.” The women of San Francisco went hysterical over Pietro Mascagni as reported by the Examiner: “five hundred women turned into Jones Street and stood at the large door, lined up by the police waiting for a glimpse of his muffled figure.”
His first concerts in San Francisco, 1903, were a triumph. Those performances were not accompanied, as is the custom today, with Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, but with orchestral works as well as the Hymn of the Sun, complete with Japanese setting. The critics were unanimously positive: “His interpretation of the music carries his audience by storm,” trumpeted the San Francisco Chronicle. Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique” Symphony and Mascagni’s own Hymn of the Sun, the opening piece of his Japanese opera Iris, generated the highest praise from the critic, while the eternal Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana conquered the audience.
Pietro Mascagni’s final San Francisco concert was a benefit with the purpose of raising funds for a monument to Verdi in the city. A week later the composer and his wife were boarding the Savoie in New York, on their way back to Italy.
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Camilla Calamandrei’s award-winning documentary Prisoners in Paradise, is worth searching out on DVD if you missed it the first time around in VHS or on PBS television stations. Prisoners in Paradise is an up and informative documentary. The one-hour film chronicles the little-known story of 51,000 Italian soldiers who were captured and brought to the U.S. during World War II and features actual POW camp footage.
Despite language and cultural barriers, most of these men went on to build friendships and romances with U.S. citizens. Interviews with the men (with English subtitles) and their American wives provide a fascinating glimpse into history. Screened at six film festivals, the film won Best Documentary at the Rhode Island Film Festival. Calamandrei was inspired to produce the documentary when at age 25, she visited her uncle in Italy and learned of his own POW story.
She applied for grant (two of which were provided by the NIAF) to raise money for the film. Calamandrei was born to a Florentine father and Irish mother and grew up in New York City. She graduated from Brown University and earned a M.A. in Documentary Film Production from Stanford University in 1989.
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