From Sicily to Connecticut
One plus One Equals Three
Paul Pirrotta
Copyright © 2010 Paul Pirrotta
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2012-10-06
Dedication
To my grandchildren Connor and Ethan, that they may
better understand and appreciate our family history.
And to Mammanina: I still miss her.
Introduction
In August 1970 I flew into JFK on a Boeing 747, one of its earliest flights from Rome, and it was a rough ride! But we did arrive and now we had to find a connecting flight to Hartford, CT, on Pilgrim Airlines (no kidding, that was the name of the airline)! Neither I nor my traveling companion, a woman from my hometown on her way to visit relatives in the Hartford area, spoke any English. We somehow managed to catch a midnight flight on an aircraft that, after the 747, looked like a toy. I was dead tired, having been awake more than twenty-four hours, and I fortunately slept the hour it took to get to Hartford, impervious to whatever additional rough weather we flew into!
Since the turn of the twentieth century, Hartford has become home to thousands of immigrants from my hometown of Canicattini Bagni, and from other towns surrounding Siracusa! Economic conditions in Sicily in the late 60’s, while improving, were still very difficult and when we received the “call” from the American Embassy in Palermo, we did not hesitate and made the decision to come to America!
My parents arrived in 1969 while I had remained home to get my high school diploma, objective which I met in July, 1970 at age 20 ( “fashionably late by one year)! My parents had rented four rooms in the first floor of a duplex across the street from my Uncle Joe! We lived in the heart of Hartford’s “ Little Italy “ which had become established in the south end and Franklin Avenue section of the city having been evicted from the prior location of Front Street by the Constitution Plaza redevelopment project some 10 years earlier!
Here we could shop at the nearby Italian stores owned by our paesani; my father, who found work in construction, was given rides to his various jobs by some of our relatives who had moved here in the mid ‘60’s; and my mother could catch a bus that would take her to the nearby town of Manchester, where she worked as a seamstress. I could go to the Italian clubs, more precisely the Canicattinese Club on the main avenue, which was well within walking distance. I knew so many people here that it was almost like being back home in Sicily!
The Beginning
The 1950’s in Sicily were a time of change, of upheaval, of economic progress! Economic conditions were very difficult, given that we were only a few years removed from the end of World War II and bartering was still quite prevalent.
I was born in 1950 , the only child of Sebastiano Pirrotta (1916-1990) and Giovanna Ficara (1924-2010) in Canicattini Bagni, province of Siracusa, in southeastern Sicily. I never met my paternal grandparents, as my grandmother died when my father was a young man and I was two years old when my grandfather died. I did grow up with my maternal grandparents; they lived in the house next door and the two homes were connected inside by an open door. Technically we were “poor,” but not in the sense we mean it today. We had more than enough to eat and drink, as most food came from self-production, and the fact that we did not have much cash was no big deal, since there wasn’t much we could buy with it!
Women’s work was still strictly at home (my mother became a seamstress) while the men spent entire weeks away from home, working on farms.The feudal land system was not yet dead, and in addition we had a class system: rarely if ever would you see farmer families associate themselves with say teachers, doctors or landowners! A town was not really a cohesive unit but an aggregation of boroughs, and it would only take something like a local soccer championship to rekindle long-simmering rivalries: A Matrice (the main church) vs. U Santuzzu, the second-most important church in town and only about half a mile away; or u vaddune (the low land) vs. San Giuvannieddu(St John), etc. I recall from very young how at times kids from the upper section of town would ”invade” our lower part of town and start a stone-throwing war, with a few injuries always resulting. In one of these skirmishes, a rock hit me on the left side of my head. I was bleeding and had to get medical attention; it scared the shit out of me and I never did it again.
Real town unity did not exist, and these mini-wars within a town paled in comparison to the rivalries between towns, in our case between Canicattini and Floridia, a larger town about 15 km from us. I don’t have any direct recollection of this, but soccer matches between these two towns invariably resulted in brawls, both on and off the field. This animosity went far behind soccer: weddings between people from rival towns were unheard of.
These conditions were at their strongest in the early 1950s to around 1960, for certainly as our generation came of age and became more educated, most of these rivalries and customs disappeared. Interestingly, when I emigrated to the U.S. I would find stronger feelings about these issues in the Italian community here, which is understandable: people in the U.S. were of the older generation, less educated and clinging strongly to their old customs. The Sicilian dialect is disappearing back home, but here it is still widely practiced! My wife learned Sicilian from my mother so that when she went back to Sicily to visit with me and she spoke the local dialect, people would marvel. Of course, from time to time she used words that had fallen out of favor; for example, she might say pisciare, which is vulgar for “urinate,” and people would laugh, but they knew she meant no harm!
Slowly the class system disappeared. The biggest impetus for this change was a development in the late 50s and early 60s that initially was considered a godsend, but over the long run turned into a serious albatross: SINCAT. The establishment of a petroleum refinery in Priolo, about 25 km from our town, created thousands of jobs and accelerated the shift from farming to industrial development. Thousands upon thousands of people from the entire province found work there, and most of these people abandoned farming to follow the future. My father was one the few who never did abandon the land. In any case, the economic structure of the entire province had changed and feudal barons were no longer as important.
The 60s were a time of great growth in prosperity as a result of SINCAT, but at what a price! Air quality became so impure from refinery emissions that at times even in our town, 25 km away and on a hill some 600 meters up, the winds blew fumes from SINCAT with a smell like rotten eggs that I haven’t forgotten to this day. Health costs over the past fifty years have been enormous, not only for the workers but especially for the townspeople of Priolo, where the number of children born with significant deformities has skyrocketed and death by pulmonary disease is too frequent. Not to mention the damage done to the beautiful coastline! The price of progress, I guess.
Two other traits are important in understanding our town and Sicily. One was the existence, well before its time, of a wireless communication system. In a small
