20 - Over 300 years of Italians in Canada

First immigrants from Italy are traced back to Franco-Anglo wars of the 1700s

An eerie silence covers the Plains of Abraham, descending towards the St. Lawrence River. But the thunder of the cannons, the furious charge of the cavalry, the sharp orders, the cries of the wounded still pervade the air. The battalions advancing in close order for the final clash seem to appear and disappear in the cold light of the sun. The battle lasted just half an hour, but it was a bloody one. Even the commanders of the two armies, Briton James Wolfe and Frenchman Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, lost their lives. In the end, however, it was the British who cheered in victory. The day was September 13, 1759.
Since that day Canada ceased to be Nouvelle France and became a colony of His British Majesty, and the two solitudes began to coexist.
"We Italians," says Filippo Salvatore, poet and author, teacher of Italian Literature at Montreal's Concordia University, "have bridged the gap between the two solitudes; we forced the Anglophone and Francophone Canadas to talk to each other. This is the reason why Canadian intellectuals of Italian origin give an important contribution to the debate on the national identity of this young country."
Salvatore is not quoting from a book of dreams, because Italians have been in Canada much longer than the great immigration of 50 years ago. They've been here for at least three and a half centuries, ever since the St. Lawrence, a river resembling a sea, was patrimony of the French Crown, and this beautiful town of stone houses and red roofs was the capital of Nouvelle France. Italians have the credentials needed to claim this country as their own.
At that time, in the mid-17th century, the Roman Jesuit Francesco Giuseppe Bressani arrived among the Hurons.
Here he wrote his Breve relatione d'alcune missioni de' Padri della Compagnia di Gesú nella Nuova Francia ("A Short Report about some Missions by Fathers of the Company of Jesus in New France"), which is the earliest book in Italian about Canada. But he was far from being alone. In the same period two political exiles, pursued by the police of the Kingdom of Naples, also came to Canada: Sicilian Tommaso Crisafi and Neapolitan Enrico Tonti. They assumed the names of Henry de Tonty e Thomas Crisafy, and under these names they are still listed in Canadian encyclopedias. Enrico Tonti's brother, Alfonso, built a fort on the shores of Lake Erie that would eventually become Detroit.
After them more Italians came, wearing the uniforms of the French colonial army. Italians were a people of navigators, poets and saints, as well as soldiers of fortune. Historian Luca Codignola, who co-authored with Luigi Bruti Liberati a monumental History of Canada, identified several of them behind surnames, then much in use: Genoan Domenico Bregante, for instance, was Jean-Lourd; Florentine Carlo Luciniani, was called Charles de Lusignan; and barber Jean-Baptiste Botin, was surnamed Piemont (because he was a Piedmontese).
There was also Roman-born Jean-Baptiste Laverdure, whose original last name is unknown, but who probably chose his surname based on his favourite food.
Another Italian, Marquis Luciano Albergati Vezza from Bologna, officer of the French colonial troops, in May 1754 accepted the surrender offered by a major of the Anglo-American troops called George Washington, then 20 years old, after the latter had started a disturbance in Pennsylvania, at the time ruled from Quebec City.
"However, seeing Italians in Canada only as soldiers is quite misleading," says Codignola. "In the second half of the 18th century a relevant number of families from Lombardy-Venice settled in Montreal. Among them were Carlo Rusconi, Giuseppe Massimiliano Bonacina, Francesco Rasco, and Tommaso Del Vecchio, who would all establish profitable trades. In 1794 from Moltrasio on Lake Como came Giuseppe Donegani; his grandson Giovanni Antonio Donegani would eventually become an influential businessman."
In 1814 and 1815 an adventurer from Perugia, Angelo Inglesi, an actor and wine trader who enjoyed some popularity among the Catholic Church in North America, lived in Quebec City. The first Italian pasticceria-gelateria in Toronto was opened in 1831 by Florentine Franco Rossi. This, too, helped break the silence between the two solitudes.
Italians were not just traders, soldiers or bakers. Between the late 18th and early 19th centuries, painters, portraitists, and specialists in sacred art also arrived.
This is proved by the buildings and Catholic churches of Quebec City, a bit of Europe transplanted in the lands of the Hurons. To name a few, we can mention Genovese Angelo Pienovi and Gerome (Gerolamo) Fassio, Ettore Vacca, and Luigi Cappello from Turin.
But not just artists, and not only in Quebec either. In 1842 Carlo Antonio Napoleone Gallenga, a follower of Mazzini from Parma who had changed his name to Louis Mariotti in order to escape the attention of the police of his native city, was the first teacher of Italian at Windsor's King's College, in Nova Scotia. When in 1853 the University of Toronto created its courses of Italian Language and Literature, the chair was entrusted to Giacomo Forneri, a Piedmontese from Racconigi, a former soldier in the Napoleonic wars, patriot in Italy and Spain, teacher in Britain and Canada.
"He was the most famous among the teachers of Italian Studies of the university; it was he who gave depth and thoroughness to these studies," remarks Olga Zorzi-Pugliese, former head of the Department. "He charmed the Canadian intellectuals. A detailed biography of Forneri has been written by his favourite pupil, John King, father of the future Prime Minister of Canada William Lyon Mackenzie King."
In the second half of the 19th century Italians began to arrive in increasing numbers. They were called target migrants because they came looking for a seasonal job that could pay enough to build a future back in their Italian hometowns.
"Many of them crossed the Atlantic repeatedly," says Codignola. "It was only after World War I that they decided to settle here."
They landed in New York, at Ellis Island, the gate to the New World, then they reached Montreal, a metropolis even in the 19th century, or Toronto by train. Most of them were labourers needed by the companies that were constructing the big industrial infrastructures and opening new mines, and by the Canadian Pacific Railway, committed to linking the Atlantic and Pacific shores. They were also called "navvies", a British term designating manual labourers employed in heavy construction work.
They were "the army of the pick and shovel", and as such entered Canadian history.
They did not come here by chance. Many of them had been recruited in Italy by agents of the shipping companies or the padroni. The former worked to fill the third-class bunks of the ships bound for the Americas, the latter were the terminals of what would be labelled by Parliamentary investigations as "human trade". But industries and companies in need of non-unionized, low-wage labour turned to the padroni, whose business consisted in matching capital with manpower, and a profitable business it was.
On January 23, 1904, a parade was held in Montreal. At least 2,000 Italian workers paraded, and at the end of the rally they offered Antonio Cordasco, the city's most famous padrone, "a crown not unlike that worn by the king of Italy," wrote Robert F. Harney, illustrious historian of Italian emigration. Cordasco was thus proclaimed "king of Montreal's Italian workers."
That rally was in good faith, because Cordasco had helped thousands of immigrants, who had left not knowing where they were going, find a job and a house, manage their savings (he also owned a bank) and send money to their families in Italy. But he was no philanthropist. He established a pervasive organization with agents and sub-agents (sub-bossi, he called them) all over North America and Italy, profiting both from the companies and the workers; became sole agent and supplier of the Canadian Pacific Railways; defeated all other padroni and cut his strongest competitor, Alberto Dini, out. He had become immensely rich and powerful. It couldn't last: he, and the whole padrone-system, were eventually objects of criminal investigations.
In the grotesque "coronation" in Montreal, faithfully reported by Cordasco's own Corriere del Canada, there is something striking: 2,000 Italian workers were celebrating him. Quite a few. However, the 1911 census gave the size of the Italian presence in Canada's largest cities: no less than 12,000 in Montreal, at least 10,000 in Toronto. "In 1912," remarks Robert F. Harney, "half of Toronto's grocery stores were owned by Italians."
Of course there were also barbers, tailors, cobblers, and shop-owners. The first Italian settlement in Toronto, at the turn of the century, was the Ward, shared with Jews, Chinese and Slavs. It was located north of the railway station, in the maze of streets and alleys surrounding York Street.
The first contribution Italians gave to the city were the sewers, built by people from Sicily, Calabria and Abruzzi in the Ward, where formerly only cesspools existed.
"When they ask me where I was born," says a young concierge at Quebec City's Chateau Frontenac, "I reply that I was born in Quebec, not in Canada." Why? "Because Quebec and Canada are not the same: we were here before they came."
We and them. The two solitudes reappear from the mist of history. How strange that two solitudes gave life to a country.
But, are the British and the French the only "founding peoples"? Answering this question is not easy in Quebec City, where everything speaks of the glory of the French Crown. They were superseded by those of His British Majesty, but this is hardly noticeable. Also, does history really stop here? Who made this country take a good look in the mirror when the two solitudes began to vie for it? The narrow streets running from the Citadel to the harbour are silent.
"Immigrants are our lifeline," read the front page of the Toronto Star on March 13, 2002, after the latest census. It's an admission, but not yet an answer.
Filippo Salvatore smiles: "If this country is still in one piece," he underscores, "it is also thanks to Italian-Canadians. In the last referendum we were decisive: out votes prevented the secession of Quebec, and this despite the fact that more similarities exist between the Quebecois and us than between the Anglophones and us. We have always helped this country search for its identity, though; we do so by looking for our own. Participating to such important processes means being protagonists."

Publication Date: 2002-12-08
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=2114