Travelling in steerage, the Italians came to American shores, a part of the huddled masses immortalized by Emma Lazarus in the poem The New Colossus. Clutching their meager worldly goods in their sacchetti, parcels often odd in shape and size, and valigi, suitcases whose durability was sometimes reinforced by twine or rope, they entered the gates of Ellis Island. Like so many other immigrants, they disembarked with fear and trepidation, some of them ill, but all fiercely determined to build a better life than they had had in the poverty-stricken "deep" South, the Mezzogiorno.
The meridionali, as southern Italians were often called, also brought with them a rich history of religious and civic festivals. For hundreds of years, these feste offered the only escape from the misery of daily existence that had been imposed upon them by myriad negative social, political, religious, and geographic forces. Since their descendants do, in fact, have a better life in America than did their immigrant forebears, the feste serve now to preserve Italian identity. An awareness of the difficult environment and history in which these festivals developed adds depth to the picture of Italian heritage provided by their current traditions.
The Mezzogiorno, where the standard of living was appreciably lower than that of northern Italy, includes Sicily, Sardinia, Calabria, Apulia, Basilicata, Campainia, Abruzzi, Molise, and the part of Lazio that is south of Rome. These regions of Italy degenerated into feudalism and dire poverty following the end of the benevolent rule of the Normans under Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, in the thirteenth century. By the latter part of the nineteenth century the starkness of living became such that the common greeting among the natives of the various communities often included the question Che si mangiato oggi? (What have you eaten today?") or even more tellingly, Ha mangiato oggi? ("Have you eaten today?").
Northern versus southern cultures
Bounded on the north by Switzerland and Austria, on the northwest by France, and on the northeast by Yugoslavia, Italy is a peninsula covering an area of 116,000 square miles. It is a country whose roots were established in 753 B.C. in Rome by the legendary Romulus. The Roman Empire once encompassed most of Western Europe, the Balkans, the Near East, and North Africa, and thus its laws, customs, language, and civilization were transmitted throughout this vast territory. After the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 A.D., the peninsula was overrun by waves of barbarians who eventually were absorbed and converted to Christianity. Between the sixth and the tenth centuries, Latin, the common language of educated people, soon combined with the many vernacular languages of the mixed population to produce a new language, Italian, which is still the official language of Italy today.
Between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, the emergence of city-states laid the foundation for independence and self-government. Political weakness and foreign domination after 1494 militated against the unification of those city-states. Continued intervention from France, Spain, and Austria from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries further thwarted that unification.
Thus Italy remained a divided country. Not until 1861, during the period of II Risorgimento (the
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