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Mar 26,2006 - Apr 2,2006 |
20 - Over 300 years of Italians in Canada
First immigrants from Italy are traced back to Franco-Anglo wars of the 1700s
By Antonio Maglio
Originally Published: 2002-12-08
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Giacomo Forneri and Filippo Salvatore
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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.
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