Chapter Text
Signore Luigi Rossi and his family arrived in New York City from the Taormina, Sicily countryside in the summer of 1907 with little more than the clothes on their backs and a few dollars to their name. He and his wife, Constanzia nicknamed "Stanzie", had sold practically everything they owned to book passage for themselves and their five children upon the America bound ship Le Libertad, then stayed in the Hell's Kitchen area of Manhattan's Little Italy with relatives for a couple of months until Luigi, formerly a cook at the Italian army base in Sicily, secured a job at a popular Italian-American restaurant downtown and was soon able to secure a home for his family.
Work was steady for the first year however over time the restaurant where Luigi worked didn't always need him every night so his pay was quite meager and only barely allowed him to house, feed and clothe his growing family, let alone save much. His wife had become pregnant not long after arriving in America, and again the following year (with twins no less!) so he knew he'd need a lot more money and soon.
The Rossi's tenement apartment was on Spring Street in a corner unit on the ground floor. The side entrance led outside to an alley perpendicular to Mulberry street, one of the main neighborhood thoroughfares, and there was heavy foot traffic from the scores of Italian, Black American, Irish and Jewish laborers who worked in the many warehouse factories, lumberyards and brickyards adjacent to the Little Italy community.
Luigi soon hatched the idea to sell cold drinks during the day to the workmen passing by his home on their lunch breaks and on their way home to make a little extra money before he went to work at the restaurant in the evenings. His wife Stanzie agreed it was a good idea and offered to make a few dozen garlic knots for him to sell for a few cents each as well. Garlic knots were small balls of buttery yeast bread dough twisted into knot shapes that somewhat resembled miniature croissants, which were then brushed with virgin olive oil and sprinkled generously with sea salt and minced garlic before being baked until golden brown and crispy on the outside yet soft and chewy on the inside. Bits of cheese, chopped onion, peppers and small pieces of sausage or pepperoni could be added inside as well and they were a cheap but delicious snack.
The simple menu was an overwhelming success and since the garlic knots were quite delicious, filling and very inexpensive they quickly became a staple among their rapidly growing clientele and often sold out alongside the chilled cups of lemonade, orangeade and homemade sangria sold. On the rare days the garlic knots didn't sell out the Rossi's teenaged sons used the family's horse drawn cart to sell whatever leftovers they had around the neighborhood in the afternoons and by early evenings it was guaranteed that they'd return home with an empty cart and pockets stuffed with coins for their wares. After awhile they added pizzas and calzones to the menu as well which more than tripled their profits. Calzones (which were basically baked 'sandwiches' with fillings encased within a crimped crust,) were relatively inexpensive to prepare as well and by selling hot slices of the homemade, Sicilian brick oven pies and the easily carried calzones, business became quite profitable and it wasn't long before Signore Rossi was able to quit his job at the restaurant altogether.
They needed a bigger kitchen before long so Signore Rossi used every penny he'd saved to rent a store front unit around the corner from his home as soon as it became available and converted it into his own restaurant, and named it the Rossi Famiglia Pizzeria. It was in a great location, right across from the Abbandando Grocery store and Carmine's Barber shop, and was situated between LaRosa's Shoe Repairs and Alterations shop and Delvecchio's hardware store. He and his wife later moved into the space above the restaurant with their younger children while their oldest son, Luigi Jr., affectionately nicknamed 'Lulu' by the family, was by that time a nineteen year old newlywed. He stayed in the old apartment with his new bride, Paolina, nicknamed 'Pippa.'
By 1915 the Rossi's pizzeria had become quite popular in the neighborhood and they needed help to keep up with demand. It was around that time that Signore Rossi's younger brother Federico died back home in Sicily and he felt it was his duty to bring his widowed sister-in-law Octavia and her three young daughters to America.
Signore Rossi couldn't wait to see some of the family from the old country again, and had been informed through letters from his sister-in-law that her eldest daughter, Carmela, was a great beauty and already an excellent cook.
"Perhaps we can persuade her to work at the pizzeria before some lucky young lad here marries her," he'd joked in reply.
The newly arrived branch of the Rossi clan moved in temporarily at the family's old apartment on Spring Street with Lulu and Pippa. After getting settled in for a few weeks, Signore Luigi again made the suggestion that his eldest niece Carmela, a pretty girl of fifteen, should come to work at the family's restaurant. She was quite young and didn't speak much English at all but her mother couldn't afford the tuition at the Catholic school run by their family's church and save up for a place of her own at the same time, so her oldest girl would just have to continue speaking Sicilian dialect until she simply learned English over time in their new homeland. The widow Rossi didn't much care for the condescending attitude of the newly christened 'Italian-American' teachers at the free American school nearby either but her two younger girls would have to go. Her Carmela on the other hand had at least completed the 6th grade back at home in Sicily which was well beyond the standard 4th grade education for girls there and had attended a few weeks of the English classes at the American school in the neighborhood not long after their arrival so that would have to suffice. Since her talent was cooking and her Uncle Luigi (who was also their sponsor) had suggested more than once that she was needed at his restaurant in the kitchen and occasionally with serving the increasing number of customers who chose to eat inside instead of carrying their food out, she decided to put the idea into the girl's head. She'd be paid in meals and wages and would receive tips from the patrons served (most of which she'd be expected to turn over to her widowed mother of course,) and that income would definitely help them to get a place of their own a lot faster so it was a win-win situation, if Carmela wanted the job of course. Of course she'd do as she was told, whether she wanted it or not, however... children were to obey, that's just how it was.
She didn't have to be told nor asked twice however. Carmela was smart and her sensibility took over. Her mother worked long, grueling hours for a little over a dollar a day as a seamstress at a local dressmaking factory so Carmela was happy to help her. She knew how to sew but certainly didn't want to go work at the factory with her mother and she definitely didn't want to go back to the American school in the neighborhood either. She struggled terribly with English and the other youths there had made fun of her. On their first day there the other girls had scoffed at her and her sister's thick, waist length hair, pinned up high in traditional Sicilian halo braids adorned with colored ribbons, and at their starched, homemade dresses with handmade cotton lace chemises and petticoats, bone corsets, Italian woolen stockings and well worn but freshly shined leather knee-high boots hand-stitched in Sardinia. They'd worn their Sunday best and had been laughed at for not dressing in the American style. The rude boys there had called them "fresh off the boat from the old country." 'But we are all fresh off the boat from the old country,' Carmela thought to herself. 'We've all only just arrived in this God-forsaken place.' Indeed most of the families of the kids who made fun of them weren't long in America themselves and were mostly living in poverty as well but once assimilated they were elated to have someone new to lord it over.
Earning wages was much better than mastering the American ABC and arithmetic anyway in Carmela's opinion. Times had been quite hard since her father passed away that previous year and their lives got turned upside down by moving half-way across the world to a new, strange country, the rumored paradise called America.
Only it wasn't exactly paradise...
New York City at the turn of the century was nothing like Carmela's beloved village by the sea in Sicily. It was dirty, loud, over-crowded, violent, and constantly bustling with activity and a nervous energy and constant urgency that she couldn't begin to describe.
Manhattan's Little Italy, with its quarter of a million Italian migrant families living on top of one another in brownstone row homes, shanty style shacks and apartment buildings; some newer and a lot nicer than others; most however were decrepit tenements with dangerous open air shafts and crawling with cockroaches and/or mice (if you were lucky,) or bedbugs and/or rats (if you weren't,) and wasn't at all what young Carmela had imagined America to be like. People back home talked about the place like it was heaven on earth, but after being there for several weeks she still had yet to see any streets paved in gold. 'Maybe the gold is buried somewhere under all the dirty gray concrete and piles of trash,' she'd chuckled to herself on the day they were finally able to leave the Ellis Island immigration quarantine building and had finally arrived in Manhattan.
Aside from her beloved Aunt Stanzi and Uncle Luigi who'd sponsored their trip to the new world and the widow Altobello at their new church home who'd also hailed from their village in Sicily, Carmela didn't know anyone in the neighborhood. Societal norms of the time dictated that her gender, age and marital status rendered her firmly trapped under her mother's and older male relatives thumbs until she married or became an old maid, so it was nearly impossible for her to go anywhere without an escort to do anything fun with people her own age such as attending the theatre, the local opera houses or the silent picture shows so she contented herself with making her new home her world for the time being.
Unfortunately it didn't feel much like home at all, not at first anyway.
Everything there and everyone aside from her relatives was completely foreign to her. She was surrounded by other Italians in their new neighborhood so she at least spoke the language and had grown up in the culture but everything about this place was different. The language on the streets was vastly more vulgar and the people were downright rude... well not exactly rude she later learned, just abrupt and much more direct than anything she was used to... and all of their houses and stores were much too close together. The simplest things were terribly expensive and all of the buildings were so tall they looked like they were going to topple over at any minute. Horses and buggy's, mule drawn carts and even a few Model-T automobiles filled the overcrowded, bustling streets around her new home and the smells of food, spices, smoke and putrid port water, as well as factory chemicals such as paint, kerosene and tar, and not to mention the piles of horse manure in the streets, rotting garbage in the filthy alleyways and human waste in the nearby outhouses and the poorly maintained sewage systems in some of the buildings were a constant assault on the senses whenever one opened a window or stepped outdoors. There were even houses of ill repute, liquor bars, opium dens, and gambling houses in the neighborhood and it was all overwhelming and disappointing at the same time to say the least, especially in her first few months in America.
Everyone seemed to be in a terrible hurry every minute and they all talked much too fast and much too loud and she constantly felt like people were staring at her or laughing at her especially people at that school.
Carmela quite quickly and easily got over the hazing from her peers however. She might have been a bit shy but she wasn't weak by any means and couldn't care less after awhile and although a little afraid of riding on the subway, and initially shocked by the interested looks of the single young migrant workers loitering around in the neighborhood who often gazed at her with something like lust in their eyes, her only real fear was of someday getting lost in the huge, maze like neighborhood where all of the streets and all of the buildings with their cramped, walk up apartments all looked exactly the same to her. That wasn't likely however, she never went anywhere by herself, not yet anyway.
Living in that tiny two bedroom apartment with her Cousin Lulu, his wife Pippa and their identical twin sons, Baby Lu and Little Lorenzo, as well as her own mother Octavia, and her two younger sisters Francesca (aged 14) and Anunciata (aged 10 and nicknamed "Nucci" by the family,) wasn't what she had imagined either. She missed her old house in Sicily. She missed her father terribly. She missed sharing a bedroom with just her sisters and the luxury of having her very own feather bed. She now had to share a pull out couch in the living room with her mother, her sister Francesca (who snored like an old man) and little Nucci (who had recently started occasionally wetting herself during the night due to her fear of walking to the wash room for their entire floor of residents all the way at the far end of the hallway.) Her baby cousins Baby Lu and Little Lorenzo were adorable but they were terribly spoiled and wanted to be held constantly and they both suffered from colic and it almost seemed like they delighted in taking turns crying half the night most nights. To add insult to injury, while the twins' mother Pippa was more than grateful to get some help with the babies and the never ending drudgery of doing laundry, cooking and cleaning her home, she'd already begun hinting that she would be glad when her husband's family members would be able to vacate her abode.
So on the following Monday morning Carmela hugged her sisters goodbye as they headed out to the American school and she walked in the opposite direction with her Cousin Lulu to begin working at the family's restaurant.