Dear Readers,
September snippets with a Labor focus and an Italian Connection: Agricultural Arabic influences in Sicily were beneficial to the “contadini”. They helped expand the cultivation of old crops and introduced new crops to Sicily. The medieval Arabs rooted out the ruling Byzantines in 827 A.D. and ruled Sicily for over 250 years. The Arabs also controlled most of the Spanish landscape for over 500 years, until 1492 when King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella finally pushed them out of Spain.
The Arab influence in agriculture and the cuisine of Sicily is also pervasive. The Arabs changed the way crops were cultivated by breaking up the large estates of the Romans and Byzantines. They introduced small kitchen gardens which helped change the diet and cuisine of the Sicilians. Arabic knowledge of irrigation and the way water was distributed to the farmlands enabled the Sicilian farmer to grow more food and control the harvest.
The Arabs introduced many plants into Sicily: rice, hard wheat, sugar cane, artichokes, bananas, sesame seeds, pistachios, oranges and many flowers. The variety of new crops also included apples, pears, quinces, watermelon, lemons, grapes, figs, bitter oranges, saffron, eggplant and pomegranates. When the landscape blossomed the abundant gardens provided Arab chefs with a plethora of ingredients to cover the tables of rich Arab emirs with tasty, exotic dishes.
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Brooklyn Bridge, then the first ever steel suspension bridge, was an engineering wonder when it was completed in 1883. Our 21st president, Chester Alan Arthur, cut the ribbon on opening day and linked Manhattan and Brooklyn, then two separate cities. At that time it was the world’s largest suspension bridge and the first to be constructed of steel. The German-born civil engineer John A. Roebling conceived of a bridge spanning the East River while stuck on an ice-bound ferry to Brooklyn. At the time, people who wanted to get back and forth from Brooklyn to present-day Manhattan relied on a ferry service.
In bad weather, the time it took to cross increased. During severe winter days, when ice appeared in the river, the trip became nearly impossible. The frustrating experience convinced Roebling that the East River needed a bridge. The bridge took 13 years to build, required 600 workers, and claimed over 20 lives, including Roebling’s. His son carried on his work as chief engineer. Roebling possessed a wealth of engineering knowledge.
In 1841 his father had started a company to manufacture wire cable that provided a long-lasting alternative to the hemp cables that were currently in use. He built a series of wire-suspended canal aqueducts over both the Allegheny River and then the Delaware and Hudson Canal in the 1840s. His son Washington was a hands-on engineer. He oversaw every aspect of the bridge’s construction, from the planning on paper to the actual physical work. His attention to detail was astounding.
When construction began in 1870 workers first built two giant caissons, one half city block, upside-down wooden boxes divided into large chambers to keep workers dry. He spent many hours in these caisson structures during the bridge’s construction, overseeing the work and making sure it was safe. But coming in and out of the highly pressurized air within them became his downfall and that of the other workers. In late 1870 Washington Roebling col- lapsed and had to be carried out of the Brooklyn caisson.
A fire had begun inside and he had spent an entire day in the caisson fighting it. He recovered and returned to work, but in the spring of 1872 he collapsed again from caisson disease, today known as “the bends.” Although the Roeblings had previous bridge building experience, building a bridge over New York’s East River presented many challenges because the River was actually a tidal strait and tides could rise up to eight feet.
Working on the bridge and in the caissons was dangerous work, but the crucial substructure was necessary for the building of the enormous towers needed for the suspension bridge. Just as an upside-down drinking glass stays dry inside when pushed straight down into water, pressurized air inside the caissons kept water out. Workers climbed into the caissons through special shafts. Their job was to dig into the bed of the East River until the caissons rested on firm bedrock. Most laborers inside the caisson and on the rest of the bridge were immigrants.
The majority were Italian, Irish and German, along with some Chinese and African Americans. The work was dangerous and difficult, yet people needed the jobs. The average daily wage for the bridge laborers was $2.50, a decent rate compared to what immigrants might otherwise get. Unfortunately, many died or became seriously ill of caisson disease (known as “the bends”) after coming up from under- water excavation chambers. Starting on the Brooklyn side, workers excavated under the River until the job was done.
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Cinema’s Francis Ford Coppola, best known in Italy as the director of “Il Padrino” and stateside as the director of such movies as Apocalypse Now, The Cotton Club and The Godfather, recently opened a new winery for family fun. Set near Geyserville on Highway 101, the new Francis Ford Coppola Winery (formerly Chateau Souverain) offers the expected tasting rooms and vineyard tours.
But visitors can also swim in a large H-shaped outdoor pool, play bocce ball on regulation courts wrapped by tidy lawns, ogle such movie memorabilia as Colonel Kurtz’s uniform (Apocolypse Now) and Don Corleone’s desk (The Godfather), and enjoy South American-style grilled meats and Neapolitan pizzas (Francis’s favorite) at Rustic, the on-site restaurant. A poolside cafe introduces a genuine winery innovation: a kid’s menu. While adults sip cabs and zins with a sommelier, kids can sample fruit smoothies.
“The emphasis is on the whole family,” Coppola says, “and it breaks the boundaries that had previously limited what a winery could offer its guests.” (877) 590-3299, www. franciscoppolawinery.com
If you are not computer savvy, ask someone in your family who is to push the keys or mouse around and get you to the part where Francis Coppola is actually “talking” to you and explaining how he selected the menu items, “Francis’s Favorites”, for his “ristorante” Rustic (open for lunch and dinner) from the favorite dishes he discovered in his travels. He also tells you why he named his winery’s premiere wine “Archimedes” in honor of his “Nonno”, an admirer of the ancient inventor, scientist, physicist and mathematician.
Visit the website then plan to visit the Francis Ford Coppola Winery soon. Coppola, a third-generation Italian-American, is deeply involved in and close to his heritage. His paternal “Nonno” Augustino Coppola, was born in Bernalda, in the province of Matera, the region of Basilicata. His grandmother, Maria Zasa, was born in Tunis, North Africa of Italian parents.
His maternal grandparents, Francesco and Anna (Giaquinto) Pennino, were both born in Naples. Francis Ford Coppola’s own parents, Carmine and Anna, were both born in the U.S.A., his father in New York City and his mother in Brooklyn. His father worked as a composer, conductor and flutist for Arturo Toscanini, in New York City.
Francis once said that his father “was always reading as a boy, and as an adult he would tell many stories and incidents that related the Italian genius, and the tremendous achievements in all the great fields, from mathematics, music and painting, and so on. He always made a very convincing point to us that we should feel a part of a very exalted culture and should in no way feel inferior as Italian-Americans.
We ate great southern Italian food, drank wine, were the first in our neighborhood to eat pizza, listen to opera, eat cannoli and hear about the Greeks and Romans. Father was an expert on Greek mythology, and in fact on mythology in general, being a specialist in the Arthurian legends. These stories, combined with his artistry as a flutist, made him a very magical and formidable figure in our lives.”
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Diary notations from Alberto Sbrizzi’s “Revisiting My Old Class” (August 19, 2010 issue), in which he recalls the less than warm welcome accorded a bright classmate, Carlo Rubbia, then recently arrived from Istria, near Trieste, where border disputes had long simmered and Italians were often not only discriminated against but actually massacred.
This had prompted an exodus of Italians from Istria into other parts of Italy. Carlo Rubbia came to be Sbrizzi’s classmate in Lido after his family had fled to Venice. (Readers may recall my May 27, 2010 column in which I mentioned how 1945, under Yugoslav Marshall Tito, marked the beginning of martyrdom for the Italian inhabitants of Trieste, Fiume, and Istria, and how TV chef and author Lidia Matticchio Bastianich, born in Istria, now part of Croatia, told about how her family fled from Istria. Lidia put a face on the tragedy that befell Italians in Istria after Togliatti, leader of the Italian Communist Party, had encouraged the population to welcome all “Titini” [followers of Tito] as liberators).
I digress a bit to explain why classmate Carlo , who spoke with an Istrian accent did not quite “fit in”, though he could have used a little more kindness from his peers at that time. Nonehteless, as the author acknowledged, in 1984 a friend sent him a newspaper clipping with this headline: “Carlo Rubbia, Italian physicist, has won the Nobel Prize for his incredible contribution to the Unified Theory of the Universe.” Since I missed this positive bit of Italian-connected news in 1984, I belatedly looked it up to share it with you: “Carlo Rubbia was born in the small town of Gorizia, Italy on March 31, 1934.
His father was an electrical engineer at the local telephone company and his mother was an elementary school teacher. At the end of World War II most of the province of Gorizia was overtaken by Yugoslavia and Carlo’s family fled to Venice first and then to Udine. The Italian particle physicist and inventor shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984 with Simon van der Meer for work leading to the discovery of the W and Z particles at CERN. Rubbia received a PhD doing cosmic ray experiments at Scuola Normale in Pisa in 1959.
He then went to the United States where he spent about one and a half years at Columbia University performing experi- ments on the decay and the nuclear capture of muons. This was the first of a long series of experiments which Rubbia has performed in the field of weak interactions and which culminated in the Nobel Prize-winning work at CERN.
In 1961 he moved back to Europe, attracted by the newly founded CERN, where he worked on experiments on the structure of weak interactions. CERN had just commissioned a new type of accelerator, the Intersecting Storage Rings, using counter-rotating beams of protons colliding against each other.
Early in 1983 at CERN an international team of more than 100 physicists headed by Rubbia detected the intermediate vector bosons, the W and Z bosons, which had become a cornerstone of modern theories of elementary particle physics long before this direct observation. They are believed to carry the weak force that cause radioactive decay in the atomic nucleus. If you are the scientific sort visit “Carlo Rubbia” on Wikipedia.com to learn more.-
