From Italy to the North End

Anthony V. Riccio

Description

As a young boy, Anthony V. Riccio listened to his grandparents' stories of life in the small Italian villages where they had grown up and which they had left in order to emigrate to the United States. In the early 1970s, he traveled to those villages—Alvignano and Sippiciano—and elsewhere in Italy, taking photographs of a way of life that had persisted for centuries and meeting the relatives who had stayed behind. Several years later, he found himself in Boston's North End, again with camera in hand, photographing an Italian American immigrant neighborhood that was fast succumbing to the forces of gentrification. In a race against time, Riccio photographed the neighborhood and its residents, capturing images of street life, religious festivals, and colorful storefronts along with cellar winemaking sessions, rooftop gardens, and the stark interiors of cold-water flats.

Taken together, the photographs in From Italy to the North End document the arc of the Italian American experience on both sides of the Atlantic. Even as they forged new identities and new communities in the United States, Italian American immigrants kept many of their Old World traditions alive in their New World enclaves. Although elevators have replaced walkups and fancy Italian restaurants and upscale boutiques have replaced mom-and-pop storefronts, the "old neighborhood" and its Italian village roots survive in these photographs of la vita di quotidianità.

Sujets

• Photographie
• Techniques photographiques
• Photographie Créative
• Technique photographique

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 25 juillet 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438467016
• Langue: English

Extrait

From
ITALY
to the
NORTH END
From
ITALY
to the
NORTH END

Photographs, 1972–1982
ANTHONY V. RICCIO
F OREWORD BY J AMES P ASTO
Cover credit: Mailboxes on 22 Sheafe Street, 1981. © Anthony V. Riccio.
Published by
S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS , A LBANY
© 2017 Anthony V. Riccio
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
E XCELSIOR E DITIONS is an imprint of S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Jenn Bennett
Marketing, Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Riccio, Anthony V., author.
Title: From Italy to the North End : photographs, 1972–1982 / Anthony V. Riccio.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2017] | Series: Excelsior editions
Identifiers: LCCN 2016053169 (print) | LCCN 2016057159 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781438466996 (hardcover : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9781438467016 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Italian Americans—Massachusetts—Boston—History—20th century—Pictorial works.
| Italian Americans—Massachusetts—Boston—Biography—Pictorial works.
| Immigrants—Massachusetts—Boston—Biography—Pictorial works.
| North End (Boston, Mass.)—Ethnic relations—History—20th century—Pictorial works.
| North End (Boston, Mass.)—Social life and customs—20th century—Pictorial works.
| Little Italies—Massachusetts—Boston—History—20th century—Pictorial works.
| Boston (Mass.)—Ethnic relations—History—20th century—Pictorial works.
| Boston (Mass.)—Social life and customs—20th century—Pictorial works.
Classification: LCC F73.68.N65 R53 2017 (print) | LCC F73.68.N65 (ebook) |
DDC 305.8009744/61—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016053169
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To the people of the North End who accepted me as part of their community, welcomed me into their homes, and trusted me to tell their unique Italian-American neighborhood story in print and image.
CONTENTS
Foreword by James Pasto
Acknowledgments
PART 1
Italy, 1972–1975
PART 2
The North End of Boston, 1979–1982
PART 3
Stories and Reflections
FOREWORD
James Pasto
Richard Alba has argued that Italian Americans are in the twilight of ethnicity. A formerly thick ethnic identity built on deeply lived practices—verbal, culinary, religious, and occupational—is being replaced by (at best) what Herbert Gans calls a “symbolic ethnicity,” built on more abstract notions of heritage, ancestry, and occasional ethnic celebrations. If Italian American ethnicity is in its twilight—and it is hard to argue against Alba—then the Italian American neighborhoods that made their mark on the American landscape and mind, either as fact, fiction, or myth, are most certainly in that deepest moment just before the end of twilight—their dusk. There are three main causes of this. The first was the out-migration to the suburbs that was only partially offset by the influx of new Italian immigrants after World War II. The second was the urban “renewal” program of the 1950s and early 1960s in the form of an outright demolition of whole neighborhoods that seemed to particularly target Italian sections of major US cities. The third was gentrification. Many Italian neighborhoods had disappeared by the early 1960s; others clung to ever-shrinking space into the 1970s; while a few persist today, in attenuated form, “saved” by gentrification and centered around one of the most persistent elements of Italian culture—food. However, as Hegel reminds us, it is with the falling of dusk that “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings,” and it is thus only now that we can begin to understand and fully appreciate these neighborhoods for what they were —through all the romance and beyond all the slander.
Anthony Riccio’s From Italy to the North End helps us do this. The book is a visual Rosetta stone of Italian American life in the North End of Boston in the late 1970s and early 1980s, providing clues to help us to understand the cultural logic of what made Italian American neighborhoods the extraordinary places they were. The book stands in a long tradition of urban images. Here we could list the iconic photographs by progressive reformers such as Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine in New York City, depicting arrivals at Ellis Island, crowded slums, and child labor. There are also the equally iconic images of Jules Aarons and Leslie Jones in Boston, showing urban window-watchers, street-corner societies, and child-filled streets. But whereas Riis, Hines, Aarons, and Jones were on the outside looking in, Riccio is on the inside looking out. Moreover, while Riis and Hine gave us the dawn of Italian American ethnicity, and Aarons and Griffin gave us its midday, then Anthony Riccio’s photographs reveal its evening; its buona sera , the beautiful sunset that, as Levi-Strauss suggests in Triste Tropiques , brings with it a “complete synopsis of all that has happened.”
Riccio is a visual storyteller who shows us the last generation of Italian-born living in their Italian American urban village, with their children and grandchildren, carrying on the daily rituals and annual festivals that they created here. Riccio calls these elders the “last custodians of the small village ethos transported from southern Italy.” I call them the last of the Founders. Look at them and you will see the faces of hardworking, selfless people. People who took a risk and came to a new place and an uncertain future. See the weariness in their expressions and bodies, borne from a life of hard work. But see also the joy in the knowledge that, by and large, their children were better off than they were when they came. See something else. Something that is so evident and so bold: their dignity. It is a dignity that came both from their past—however much they were displaced from their home villages, in America they remained grounded in its peasant ways and wisdom—and their present: whatever obstacles their children might still face, they knew that those children could now do so as Americans and on American terms, because their parents had taught them to live in a new land, even at the cost of their own cultural irrelevance.
From Italy to the North End is a book for all people about a place all people can feel in these photos. Those who grew up in the North End will see familiar scenes and familiar faces. They will be reminded of those days in that place. Italian Americans who grew up in places like the North End will no doubt see resemblances to their own special Italian place in America. Non-Italians living in the North End today will see the past that created the space that many still feel to be very Italian, and understand how it came to be. Those outside of the North End, whether they be in America, or China, or back in Italy today, will see something familiar too, perhaps a humanity that they share in a facial expression or store front or a face that reminds them of someone they knew. Yes, a book for all people.
Before writing this I spoke to Anthony about, among other things, his goals for taking these photos. He was not trained as a photographer, but learned it in the small villages of Italy and the streets of the North End. He did not come to the North End to take photographs. But he found that the Founders of the North End wanted their stories to be known and remembered. As Anthony put it:
Most were working-class people, hardworking people. They were very selfless people. Very dedicated. They only wanted not to be forgotten. That is the only thing they wanted. They knew they were going to go into the sunset, but they didn’t want to be forgotten. They said the same thing my father told me: “Anthony if I die and you forget me, then I’m dead, but if I die and you remember me, then I’m alive—so don’t forget me.”
Anthony did what they wanted him to do. He did not forget them. He kept his promise and kept their trust. Because of that we can now remember them—indeed, we can never forget them. The photographs are now documents. They are remembrances of the past and cultural treasures for the future.