From a Tampa Tribune article, 1990
By Paul Wilborn, Tribune Staff Writer - 12/23/1990
SANTO STEFANO, Sicily, -- The memory is so wide it stretches across the sea; so deep, it seems etched in the genes.
CARLO MESSINA, a smiling old man in tweed coat and matching cap, stands on the dusty street of a tiny village in the Sicilian hills.
"Tampa? I know Tampa. My brother had the shoe store on Tampa Street, ANDREW MESSINA. You know him? I lived there for five years, but I came back. I was a tailor at Maas Brothers and JACK PENDOLA's. You remember Jack Pendola's?"
SAM SPOTO, a retired shoemaker, sits in a Tampa barbershop looking at pictures from his trip to Sicily. "We went back to the village where my parents were born. It was strange. I felt very at home there," he says.
ANTONINO VALENTI, a Sicilian fruit and vegetable man, stands proudly before his outdoor bins brimming with apples, oranges and fat heads of lettuce. "Look at these beautiful vegetables. The best in town. You know, my family in Tampa is in the business, too."
DOMENIC GIUNTA pauses in his garden in Ybor City, where he grows herbs and vegetables with a seed lineage that runs back to his father's fields in Sicily. "My parents came halfway across the world to a new land with nothing in their pocket. That took such courage. I don't know if I'd have that kind of courage," he says.
The link between a city on Florida's West Coast and a handful of tiny mountain villages in the Sicilian heartland is now more than 100 years old. The Sicilians who left their homeland changed the face of their adopted town forever. They became the grocers, the shoemakers, the barbers, the farmers - and later the mayors, judges, state attorneys, business leaders, lawyers and doctors of Tampa. They brought an appreciation for hard work, a fierce sense of justice, and an overwhelming loyalty to family that pushed them toward economic and political triumphs.
But the wave of immigrants also allowed the growth of a powerful secret criminal family known as the Mafia. The late SANTO TRAFFICANTE and his father, who ruled Tampa's rackets from the turn of the century, traced their roots to a village in Sicily. As generations passed and success changed the Sicilians from immigrants to Americans, the link that had been so very visible blurred and faded. But it is still there. You see it in two matching cemeteries half a world apart - the same sort of markers, mausoleums and porcelain portraits, the same narrow evergreens pointing the way to heaven.
And etched in marble and stone in Sicily and Tampa are the same names - ALBANO, CASTELLANO, CAPITANO, ZAMBITO, FERLITA, SETTECASI, GUARINO, PENZATO, REINA, NOTO, APRILE, FAVATA, VALENTI, ZITO, MASSARI, PROVENZANO, TRAINA, PARDO, ALFIERI, LETO, PIZZO, SPOTO. They are silent monuments to those who left and those who stayed behind in a handful of MAGAZZOLO RIVER VALLEY Villages in western Sicily - SANTO STEFANO QUISIQUINA, ALESSANDRIA DELLA ROCCA, CIANCIANA, BIVONA and CONTESSA ENTELLINA.
Families were ripped apart by poverty, political oppression and the dream of something better waiting in a distant American City called Tampa. At one time almost everyone in Tampa's Italian community could trace roots to these villages, a heritage that included a frightening trip across the Atlantic in the hold of a ship. Many of the first immigrants came by way of New Orleans, riding on ships carrying fruit from Sicily - it was called the Lemon Route.
Later waves came through New York's Ellis Island and came to Tampa from New York by train. FRANK SETTECASI left Alessandria della Rocca on the back of the mail truck in 1919. He rode to New York in a steerage compartment lined with bunks. Storms tossed his ship, turning what should have been a 10-day crossing into a month of torture. "I was sick the whole time; everyone was. We couldn't go on deck because the waves would carry you off. I can still smell that damn ship."
THE REBORN LAND
Hardships that drove many to leave Sicily for Tampa are now faded memories
ALLESANDRIA DELLA ROCCA, Sicily - ANTONINO CIARAVELLA remembers the way it was. Hard work. Hunger. Years when folks shortened their jackets and used the material to make shoes. When they watched brothers, sisters, sons and daughters leave for Milan, Frankfurt or Tampa looking for a better life. That was the Sicily he grew up in. He hasn't moved, but he lives in another country now. The reborn land looks much life it did when Tampa's Sicilian pioneers fled by the thousands starting 100 years ago. The village names are the same - SANTO STEFANO, ALESSANDRIA DELLA ROCCO, BIVONA, CIANCIANA, CONTESSA ENTELLINA. Narrow cobblestone streets still meander through sand-colored row houses. White laced tablecloths, washed after Sunday's family feast, still hang from balconies on Monday morning. Olives, oranges and grapes still grow on the farms outside of town.
But after hundreds of years of poverty and repression, these villages where almost everyone can trace a relative to Tampa have leapt into the mainstream of Italian life. CIARAVELLA, who has in-laws in Tampa, has a favorite story from the old days. "Back then, the family slept in the same room with the horse and the mule. One night, a farmer dreamed he was kissing his wife. He opened his eyes and he was kissing his mule." He laughs at his story, his eyes dancing under heavy arched eyebrows.
His son, FILIPO CIARAVELLA, laughs along with him, though he's heard this story before. It is Sunday and the two men are seated in a wide, sunny room - a combination kitchen, dining room and sitting room. The floors are marble, the cabinets custom-made, the dishwasher, refrigerator and stove are the latest Italian designs. These are the trappings of the new Sicily. Look closely at the father and son and you can see the past and the present of this Mediterranean Island.
Antonino was a farmer, sweating a living out of the rocky, terra cotta hillsides. Retired now, he spends most days at his farm, bringing home fresh vegetables, olives, and grapes for his wine. The dry earth gathers in dark flecks under his fingernails. He wears the gray wool suit, the thin olive cardigan and snap-brim cap of the "pensioneers," the old men of the village, who draw the Italian form of Social Security after age 60. A black button is pinned to his coat in memory of his brother who died in Palermo a few months before - "15 days before he died, he was sitting here at this table."
Filippo, the son, has clean hands and no black button. he is a mathematics teacher and a college graduate. He wears casual Italian sportswear - pullover sweaters, pleated slacks. He listens to the Rolling Stones on his car stereo. He and his wife, ENZA, sleep in a king-size bed plated with gold and silver, a gift from his parents on their wedding day The bedroom is so large that, even with the giant bed, there is room for dressers and the Sicilian's version of the closet - the wall-to-wall wardrobe.
"My father let me choose education instead of the farm," Filippo says. "He didn't want his son to come through life as hard as he did."
The men and women of Antonino's generation and the generation before understand how it is to come through life the hard way. Gathering on the street corners of their small towns, sitting down over a game of cards in a storefront political club, they talk about those days.
Some of the oldest remember life at the turn of the century, when Sicily's agricultural economy had collapsed. When peasants, trying to break the grip of large landholders who kept them almost as serfs, were shot and arrested. When a whole generation of young men and women fled to a city in America called Tampa.
GUISSEPE SPOTO, 96, remembers. He said good-bye to many relatives who were bound for Tampa. He stayed behind. "It was absolutely unbearable, we had no holidays. We worked every day the same way just to stay alive," he said.
A NEW PROSPERITY
If they are younger, like GUISSEPPE REINA, 76, they remember the long years of World War II that the Italian, Benito Mussolini, and the German, Adolph Hitler, brought them. They remember advancing armies moving through their houses and fields. They remember proud people reduced to begging for bread from their neighbors. "There was starvation here. People thought of little else except feeding themselves," Reina said.
Today, Reina is immaculate in an elegantly tailored blazer with a perfectly placed square of silk rising from his coat pocket. He is a local historian who sells expensive art and antiques from a plush storefront just off Santo Stefano's main street. "I must apologize for my appearance," he says. "When I was young I had beautiful hair. Now I have no hair and no teeth."
But he does have young customers who appear to have stepped from Italian fashion magazines and who can afford a gold cross set with an ivory Christ that sells for $6 million lire, almost $6,000. Expensive gift giving - for weddings, births and other special occasions - is now part of the fabric of this new Sicily.
"Before, people couldn't think to shop for art and antiques, all they thought about was food and clothes. Now, life is better. Just look around you." Looking around at these small villages, you see the same thing you see when you look at a father and son like Antonino and Filippo Ciaravella - the old and the new living side by side.
There is much that hasn't changed about this rocky Sicilian landscape. The sun still bakes the cultivated hillsides. Shepherds still lead sheep along the winding farm roads. Some farmers still ride their mules through the towns' rocky streets before first light. Street peddlers still sell everything from oranges to underwear from their mobile stores.
And in the churches, the tortured faces of Jesus and the saints, staring down from countless statues, still silently remind Sicilians that a life of pain and suffering is a sure path to heavenly reward.