Dear Readers,
An October collection of Italian Connections: Christopher Columbus and his discovery of America are still the man and the event we Italian Americans want to celebrate because, despite recent rewrites of history, October is still Italian Heritage Month to us.
“In fourteen hundred ninety two - Columbus sailed the Ocean blu!” If the couplet you learned in grade school about the great Italian explorer is all you remember about Columbus, let me refresh your memory with an old Discovery Chanel line: 1451: Columbus is born in Genoa, Italy, the son of a weaver. 1465: At age 14, Columbus ships out as an apprentice seaman.
He travels to Africa and England, and perhaps to Ireland and Iceland. 1479: Columbus marries Felipa Moniz Prerestrello, daughter of a Portuguese nobleman, who will bear a son, Diego, before her death in 1483. 1487: Columbus falls in love with a Spaniard woman, Beatriz Enriques de Arana; she bears an illegitimate son, Hernando, in 1488. 1492: In April, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain agree to underwrite Columbus’s expedition. Three ships - the Niña, the Pinta and the flagship Santa Maria - depart from Spain on Aug. 3. On Oct. 12, Columbus lands in the Bahamas.
1493: Columbus returns to Spain in triumph in March. Six months later, he leads a second expedition to the New World, with 17 vessels and 1,500 men, and founds a colony, La Isabela, on the island of Hispaniola. But he is a poor governor; his men mutiny and the indigenous Taino tribe revolts. 1496: Columbus returns from his second voyage. 1498: Columbus departs on his third voyage with six ships.
He visits Trinidad and the coast of Venezuela. But he is placed under arrest for his poor administration of La Isabela by its new governor. 1500: Columbus returns to Spain in chains on Nov. 25, but is released by royal decree. 1502:Taking four ships on his fourth voyage to the New World, Columbus visits today’s Nicaragua, Costa Rica and the coast of Panama. 1504: Columbus returns to Spain. 1506: Columbus dies on May 20. Columbus’s tomb is in the Seville Cathedral.
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October is the month Trieste was returned to Italian sovereignty. The Italian Bersaglieri light infantry, wearing their distinctive cock-feather-beplumed hats, entered Trieste on a windy day in late Octover 1954.
After the 1943-1947 exodus of the Italian population of Dalmatia, Istria and Trieste due to the Communist rule, the restoration of Italian sovereignty to the city and free port of Trieste brought great joy to the Italian population. The 1954 “London Memorandum” finally settled the thorny, long-running issue between Rome and Belgrade.
Under Hasburg domination since 1382, Trieste had gained prominence as the sole industrial port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Nationalist sentiments of the Italian population grew throughout the 19th century, but it took World War I to achieve the redemption of Trieste for Italy.
In 1919, Trieste and its hinterland were annexed to Italy. Unfortunately, this came at a time of great economic depression for Italy. German control was only temporary, for on May 1, 1945, Marshal Tito’s Yugoslav partisans occupied the Venezia Giulia area and claimed it for Yugoslavia.
This was a most unwelcome development for the Western allies, who arrived in the area just one day too late to prevent it being occupied by the partisans. Field Marshal Harold Alexander, supreme Allied commander for the Mediterranean and a skilled diplomat, calmly negotiated and eventually signed an agreement on June 9, 1945, with Tito in Belgrade. It resulted in the withdrawal of Yugoslav troops from Trieste and its environs.
By early 1946, the Communists were gaining strength and Winston Churchill described the beginning of the “cold war” by saying that “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” In June 1946, Italians voted to replace their monarchy with a republic form of government.
On Feb. 10, 1947, the peace treaty with Italy was signed in Paris, creating the Free Territory of Trieste. It was divided temporarily into Zone A (Trieste and its northern hinterland) under Anglo-American military administration, and Zone B, which included the northwest side of Istria, under Yugoslav administration.
By mid-September 1947, Gorizia and other parts of western Venezia Giulia were given back to Italy, while Trieste Zona B, Pola and other parts of Istria were assigned to Yugoslavia, The diaspora of the people affected by the postwar developments had started in 1943, but it gained unprecedented momentum in 1947 when more that 80 percent of the ethnic Italians left the Jugoslav zone by the thousands and the Italian government sent the steamship Toscana to Pola to ferry some of the exile to Venice.
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Among those leaving the Communist Yugoslav zone was Lidia Matticchio Bastianich, born February 21, 1947 in nowaday Croatia. She specializes in Italian American cuisine and became a TV celebrity through her cooking shows.
Lidia was born in 1947 in the city of Pola (present-day Pula in Istria County). Istria was ceded to Italy after World War I. Later, after World War II, it was awarded to the then-recently created Yugoslavia by the terms of the Peace Treaty with Italy in 1947. This occurred just eleven days before Lidia’s birth.
The treaty provisions were not fully enacted until September 15, 1947. In the intervening period, many Italian Istrians, fearing what would come to be known as Titoism, chose to flee emigrating to Italy. In 1958, when Lidia was 11 years old, his father Vittorio sent his wife Erminia and their two children to visit the family in Italy. Vittorio remained in Istria as per a requirement that “one member of the family... remained in Istria as hostage to ensure that the family would return.”
Hours later, Vittorio fled across the border under the cover of darkness while almost getting shot by border guards. Reunited in Trieste after their exodus from Istria, Lidia and her family joined other displaced families in a refugee camp named “Campo Profughi,” which had been the Nazi concentration camp “Risiera di San Sabba” during the Second World War.
A wealthy Triestian family hired Lidia’s mother as a cook/housekeeper and Lidia’s father as a limousine driver. After two years living as “displaced persons” in Trieste, the family was able to obtain relocation placement in the U.S. The family arrived in New York in April 1958. Supported for a few weeks by Catholic Charities, which had sponsored their emigration, the family moved to North Bergen, New Jersey, near the Chevrolet factory where Lidia’s father found his first job as a mechanic.
Later they moved to Astoria, Queens, while the father continued to commute to work. Many Istrians had previously settled and clustered in specific areas of the city - mainly Greenwich Village in Manhattan, Park Slope in Brooklyn, and Astoria and Whitestone in Queens - as a result of the two World Wars and the family had a distant relative there. Her mother, “who had been an elementary school teacher, did piece work for the Evan Piccone clothing company.”
Lidia Bastianich gives credit for the family’s taking root in America to Catholic Charities: “The Catholic Charities brought us here to New York... We had no one. They found a home for us. They found a job for my father. And ultimately we settled. I am the perfect example that if you give somebody a chance, especially here in the United States, one can find the way...” [Latest news - Lidia Matticchio Bastianich will be honored by the National Italian American Foundation with a Special Achievement Award for Humanitarian Service at their 34th annual gala in Washington, D.C. on October 24.]
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Although the peace treaty with Italy was signed in Paris in 1947 creating the Free Territory of Trieste, it was not until October 1954 that Trieste was returned to Italian sovereignty.
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Discovered by a circus manager, PRIMO CARNERA, born in 1906 in Sequals, region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, was brought to the U.S. to try his hand and size in the ring. The “Preem” became a living legend in the U.S. and was loved by his fans. He became the first Italian boxer to win a world heavyweight champion title.
As his hand-picked opponents folded, “da Preem” began to believe in his own invincibility. But the cards were stacked against him - he was muscle bound and had a glass jaw. With the help of God and his backers, Carnera held the championship for one year. His downfall came when he went in the ring against Max Baer.
The boxing career of the 6-foot-6-inch acromegaloid, whose pituatary deficiency caused his abnormal size, grossed more than $3 million for his owners, but left Carnera nearly penniless and temporarily paralized. In 1947, Budd Schulberg published his novel The Harder They Fall and people in the know began to point out the similarity between Carnera and the novel’s central character.
A popular 1956 movie, “Il colosso di argilla”, with Humphrey Bogart, was also said to be based on Primo Carnera. After Carnera’s boxing career ended, he went home to Italy, married and had two children. In 1946 he returned to the U.S., this time as a professional wrestler. As a wrestler, a sport that is more show-biz, Primo Carnera was a big success, and he was much happier than all the days and nights he had spent in the boxing ring. Carnera died in 1967 at the age of 61.
The former champ has a daughter, Giovanna Carnera, who resides in Tampa, Florida. She is the co-founder of the Primo Carnera Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing financial assistance and emotional support to children in need through sport. She is also active as the National Italian American Foundation’s area coordinator.
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