The scene of our great return to Sicily is almost set. But there is one more important piece: social media. As much as I despise a lot of what Facebook does (installing analytics to spy on its users even when they aren't using Facebook, rigging the analytics to incite people to, in at least one instance, genocide, and whatnot), I have to admit that without the connections I made through Facebook in particular, this trip would not be nearly as successful as it was.
The lynchpin to this trip was my connection to Basilio Arona. He is the town historian for Troina, and more. If any of you reading this remember me through the Italian House days at William & Mary, Basilio reminds me a lot of Professor Triolo, but with a beard, and with a deep passion for very specific topics.
And for Basilio, that topic is the one I've been thinking about since I visited Troina - the trauma and loss caused by the Italian diaspora at the end of the 19th Century and into the 20th Century. For a quick refresher, Italian emigration was more or less around a couple of thousand people annually until the Unification. Then it exploded. All in all something like 16 million Italians left Italy between 1880 and 1917. That diaspora did not affect all if Italy equally. Instead, most of the population who left Italy were from the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (which is basically southern Italy). While a good percentage of Sicilians went to the United States, just as many immigrated to Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Mexico.*
(*A quick sidenote that may only interest me: in most of the countries where there is a significant population of people of Italian descent, there are tons of restaurants that serve the local version of Italian food. That has created new cuisines, such as Italian American cuisine, Italian Argentinian cuisine, etc. But the one place where this has not really happened is in Mexico. There was an Italian restaurant in Tijuana that created the Caesar salad, but one could argue that restaurant catered to Americans. In terms of everyday cuisine, it does not appear that Italian immigrants made any impact at all).
For a city like Troina, that was isolated in the mountains, where the locals had to work together to survive, the loss of even a few people would have been traumatic. And here, over a million and a half Sicilians emigrated between 1890 and 1917 - roughly 1/4 of the overall population. And that's leaving Italy altogether. There was likely another million Sicilians who moved to Northern Italy. Not because Sicily was a bad place, but because they were destitute. And so, the trauma suffered by those immigrants and their families back home must have been devastating. It is an intergenerational trauma that my family and I share.
That's why, for as long as I can remember, so many in my family have tried to remember where we came from, who are relatives where, what they ate (or currently eat), and what they wear. In my life, I studied Italian in college, and lived in the Italian Language House for two of my four years in hopes of catching a glimpse of what was lost. And I don't know of any member of my extended family who doesn't do the same.
Basilio's hope, through his Troinese del Mondo Facebook group (it roughly translates to "People of Troina from around the world), is to connect the immigrants who left Troina (and their descendants), with the families left behind. I joined the group about a year or so ago. In fact, Basilio's great uncle was on the same boat to the US as my great-grandparents. So, this is just as personal for him as it is for me.
Now, I didn't quite know all this before going to Troina, but knowing how to use social media, and knowing we wanted to connect with our family in Sicily, I posted the details of the visit on the Troinese del Mondo page. My cousin Zelinda Trovato (my great-grandfather's brother's granddaughter) did me a solid and immediately acknowledged that yes, my family was from Troina. Basilio then contacted me through Facebook messenger, asking about various aspects of the family, which I responded to.
That set in motion a whole series of events of which I was completely unaware of, but got a lot of credit for. Basilio worked hard on finding out who my great-grandparents were based on the information I provided him, and then contacted the surviving family members. The mayor sent me an invite to come and visit city hall when we got in. And plans were made. In the meantime, I put together a t-shirt for the family to wear. I sent around the mark-up as a rough draft, but then everyone started ordering the t-shirts and we were off.
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