From Manoppello

 

The small, very ancient community of Manoppello in Italy sits alone on a sloping hill, some 20 miles from the unseen sea.  My grandparents, Ignazio Severini and Gioconda Iezzi, were born here.  So was my mother.

On the usual map depicting the boot of Italy, Manoppello is located vertically about halfway down, and horizontally near the far right, facing the Adriatic Sea.  If you draw a straight line from Rome on the left side of the map across the country to almost the opposite coast, Manoppello is a little to the north. On the other side of the fairly narrow Adriatic is Bosnia, Croatia and the countries of eastern Europe, so in this sense it is at the border of western Europe.

 The land around Manoppello consists of cultivated fields and woods. A snow-capped mountain formation is visible from the Volto Santo Basilica.  It is the Maiella, a plateau containing the highest peaks in the Appenine mountain range, which extends for much of Italy’s length. Manoppello is bordered by the Pescara River.  

Manoppello is officially called a “commune,” which in Italy is an ordinary classification, the smallest official unit, the equivalent of a township or municipality in the U.S.  Manoppello’s population has remained relatively stable, at between roughly 4,000 and 6,500 inhabitants since the 1860s. 

 Italy is divided into regions, all of them very old, though Italy as an official nation dates only from the 19^th century.  Manoppello is in the province of Pescara, which is in the region of Abruzzo, commonly called “the Abruzzi.”  It extends from the coast inland across mountains, to just 50 miles short of Rome. 

in Maiella National Park

Today Abruzzo calls itself “the greenest region in Europe.”  National parks and nature reserves comprise nearly half of the region, protecting three-quarters of all known species in Europe.  Manoppello today is actually within the Maiella National Park.

 Manoppello’s nearest larger town towards the coast is Chieti, about 12 miles away.  It is one of the most ancient cities in Italy.  Local mythology says it was founded by the Greek hero Achilles more than a thousand years B.C.  There is archeological evidence that it was a settlement by 5000 BC, with some artifacts found in the area that are at least 400,000 years old.  Chieti was a substantial city of the Roman Empire, with some 60,000 inhabitants.  In 1921, Chieti’s population was about 31,000.   

 Another eight or so miles beyond Chieti is the now sprawling city of Pescara.  Together with its suburbs, it’s the largest city in Abruzzo.  But before 1927 it wasn’t even a single muncipality.  For much of its history, also going back before the Roman Empire, it was a fishing village and port.  Because it was a strategically useful seaport, Pescara was invaded and occupied at various times over the centuries, most recently by the French (including Joseph Bonaparte) in the 19^th century. 

 Manoppello also has archeological sites nearby indicating inhabitants three million years ago, literally the Stone Age. It was also settled before Roman times, and was called Pollitrio during the Empire.  It was known even then for the surrounding fertile land.  Eventually (perhaps in the 9^th century) it was renamed in honor of its fields of grain:  “Manoppio” is the amount of grain that can fit in a hand, which is the symbol on its flag and shield.  The name itself unites the Latin “manus” (hand) and “plere” (full), or a handful of grain.

,During medieval times, Manoppello was a fortress on a hill, the scene of battles, especially in the 15^th century. But it was mostly a monastic center, with prominent churches that date back to the 14^th and 15^th centuries. Some of the original architecture survives. 

 Members of the Carl Severini family visited
Manoppello with Gioconda Severini in 1976,
and took this picture of the procession.

Its historic and now contemporary claim to fame is the “Volto Santo” or “The Holy Face” or simply “the Manoppello Image,” an image of Christ’s face on a cloth that is similar to the Shroud of Turin—essentially a positive to Turin’s negative image.  It has been in the possession of the Capuchin friars since the 16^th century, and is housed in the Sautuario del Volto Santo church.  It is taken out for an annual procession.

 

The Capuchin friars themselves arrived shortly after their founding in the neighboring region of Marche, also in the 16^th century. They remain prominent in Manoppello. They are derived from the Franciscan order, and are devoted to returning to the simplicity and contemplative life of its founder, St. Francis of Assisi. The shade of brown robes the Capuchins wear inspired the name of the coffee drink Cappuccino. 

 

With its handfuls of grain, the area around Manoppello is known for producing pasta, including handmade spaghetti. Cheiti and Pescara remain homes to major international pasta manufacturers.  There are many varieties of olives trees grown throughout Italy, and several of them grow in the vicinity of Manoppello.  The area is known today for its excellent extra virgin olive oil.  Grapes and wine are also part of the local economy and culture.  Cheiti province in particular makes the distinctive Montepulciano d’Abruzzo red wines.

 

Along with the monastery and ancient churches built of Manoppello stone, there are a number of palaces that still stand, mostly dating from the 17^th to 19^th centuries.  The town was literally owned by one wealthy family or another for much of its history. 

 Most other families lived in tightly clustered stone dwellings of several floors. It was in this Manoppello, very late in the nineteenth century, that Ignazio Severini and Gioconda Iezzi were born.  They grew up in houses that faced each other across a narrow street.  Later, they married and came to America. I am one of their grandsons.

    

Gioconda Iezzi Severini (l) on her 1976 visit.

According to a genealogy prepared by Carol Vitace Flandro, there were Severinis in Manoppello since at least the 18^th century.  Vincenzo Severini was born there in 1735 and died there in 1800.  For the next 200 years, his descendants were born and lived in Manoppello, and the spouses they married whose birthplace could be documented, were also born in Manoppello.

 I have no genealogy for the Iezzi family, but the first Iezzi turns up in the Severini line in my great grandparent’s generation.  Carlo Severini (my great grandfather) was born in 1850.  In the spring of 1879 he married Maria Antonia Gloria.  Her mother Maria Loreta was a Iezzi. 

Carlo Severini

Carlo Severini was a shoemaker, like his father before him.  Like tailors and other craftsmen or tradesmen, a shoemaker was a cut above field workers and other laborers, probably akin to the difference between what these days are called lower middle class and working class.  Carlo Severini and his wife had three children: Annina (born in 1880), Giovanni (born in 1886) and Ignazio (1893.) All three would eventually wind up in the US. 

 Across the street was the family of Carlo Iezzi and Antonia Zazzara Iezzi.  They had six daughters: Onorina, Gioconda, Stella, Serafina, Clarina and Prosperia (or Prosperina.)  Gioconda was born on September 30, 1896, probably the closest in age to Ignazio Severini. 

 Gioconda was my grandmother and my chief informant on her life and her side of the family.  I will often refer to her from now on simply as G, which can be Gioconda or Grandma.

 According to G., her father, Carlo Iezzi, was, like Carlo Severini, a shoemaker.  He worked at home, usually in his backyard, in the mornings.  When he was still unmarried, in the afternoon he frequently went around to a nearby house that ran an informal kind of cafe, for a glass of wine.  He was served by a beautiful and fiery redhead named Antoinette, or Antonia.  He was fascinated, and would sometimes come back for a glass of wine several times a day.  She told him to get a bottle.  Eventually he married her.

Carlo Iezzi

 They apparently had a fiery marriage.  Antonia thought Carlo was lazy, and did not bring in enough money.  While in the backyard where he was supposed to be working, he enjoyed the company of a rooster named Cheechio.  He talked to him as he worked in the morning, and in the evenings he played clarinet for him, and Cheechio danced. One day he came home to find that Cheechio was dinner.  Antonia claimed there was no other food in the house. That was the story.

 Carlo Iezzi was good enough at clarinet to be in an orchestra that played for operas.  He was away performing with the orchestra one night, possibly in Chieti.  When he returned he learned his wife had given birth to a daughter.  He decided to name her after the opera he had just played: La Gioconda by Amilcare Ponchielli.  In Italian, the name means “the joyful one.”  “La Gioconda” is also another name for Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

 As almost the oldest, G had family responsibilities and housework.  But she also attended a convent school, probably at the Capuchin convent, where she learned how to do fancy cut work, sewing and embroidery, for bridal linen and tablecloths, for instance, as well as for the altar.  She learned to read and write there as well, and what other sewing and knitting skills she hadn’t learned at home.

 According to G., she and Ignazio were childhood sweethearts. He used to come over to her house in the evenings when they said the rosary, and he would kneel next to her. They had an understanding they would marry, when Ignazio was called to the army in the Great War, or World War I.  Italians lost so many men over the course of that war, that it is likely he was in the army from the beginning of Italy’s involvement until the end, or nearly the end.

Ignazio Severini 1915. New soldiers
often had postcards made in the studio
with standard backgrounds.

 G’s stories about Ignazio in the war and the time they were separated were light-hearted.  He was posted “in the north,” and at one point billeted in a private home.  The family in that home included a daughter who took a fancy to him, and thought she might marry him. She wrote a relative in Manoppello about him. He dressed and talked differently, not like a peasant, she wrote.  But this friend, who couldn’t read, took the letter to G.so she could read it to her, as other girls did.  G. wrote to Ignazio and told him she knew what was going on. So he got in some trouble over that, and G. wouldn’t see him when he returned. He was appropriately contrite, and persistent, so they reconciled.

 Ignazio was already a skilled tailor, and according to G. he was saved from the worst fighting because during his training an officer saw how well his uniform fit him, and so held him back to tailor his uniforms and those of other officers.

 But the reality was probably not so simple or so gentle.  The war “in the north” was where Italy confronted the Austrian forces, supplemented by German forces, in a series of bloody battles between 1915 and the end of 1918.  In the end, 600,000 Italian soldiers were killed in the north, and the Italian nation was virtually bankrupted.

 Though there are photos of him in uniform, I don’t have any information on how or where Ignazio Severini participated.  Possibly the Italian government still has such records.  In general, there were a number of towns where troops were stationed, some near Milan for instance, but especially in the northeastern corner of Italy in the vicinity of Venice, Trieste and the Adriatic Coast.  These towns in the northeast were the targets of artillery fire, and in turn they had gun emplacements firing at the Austrians miles away.  But the main fighting was in the mountains just to the north of these towns.

 The fighting in the mountains was protracted and bloody, and like much of World War I, a back and forth war of attrition over a few miles of territory.  The carnage was so great that the Pope spoke out against it, and several Italian governments fell because of the losses and the military decisions that led to them. There was at times desertion on a large scale.

  Italian forces attacked Austrian forces during the whole of 1915, but were repulsed, losing a quarter of the army—some 60,000 men.  In the spring of 1916, Austrians swept down through the mountains towards the Venetian plains, attempting to encircle the Italian Army.  But on the snowy, rocky Castelletto, Italian troops stopped their advance.  By the end of 1916, losses added up to 130,000.  

Caporetto 1917

Italian forces were unable to advance against the Austrians in 1917, and in the fall, German forces backing the Austrians broke through Italian lines at Caporetto, aided by large-scale use of poison gas.  Some 13,000 Italian soldiers were killed, 30,000 were wounded and roughly a quarter of a million Italians were taken prisoner.  Italy’s Second Army collapsed into retreat in what was described as Italy’s worst defeat in its history. 

 German forces pressed the attack but the Italian forces regrouped at the Piave River.  A battle was joined in December 1917 at Mount Grappa, where Italian soldiers repelled the German attack. If Ignazio Severini was in this part of the north, he may have been part of the Abruzzi Brigade, which fought in this battle. Like other brigades, it suffered terrible losses: half the Brigade was killed.

Mt. Grappa

 By the beginning of 1918 the Italians were engaged in a defensive war. During these months, Ernest Hemingway was an 18 year old ambulance driver, and wrote about the war (Although he described events from the fall of 1917 in his novel A Farewell To Arms, he did not arrive in the area until June of 1918.)  The British writer Rudyard Kipling spent time here as a newspaper correspondent.

 In October and November of 1918, Italian forces counterattacked at Mount Grappa, near Vittorio Veneto, supported by contingents of other allied forces including British and American.  They broke through and advanced into Austria, ultimately forcing an armistice.  A week later, the First World War was over. Some Italian troops occupied towns and cities in Austria.

 Having heard G’s stories, I assumed my grandfather had not been under fire, until the 1990s when one of his daughters, my Aunt Toni (Antoinette Severini Wheatley) told me that he had been “gassed,” and suffered the effects for years.  She remembered his digestion was affected, so that for years he could eat spaghetti only without tomato sauce (fortunately he had recovered by the time I sat beside him at family meals in the 1950s.) 

Though the notorious use of poison gas in World War I is most associated with the Western Front (France, Belgium, etc.) I’ve seen mention of it in accounts of fighting in northern Italy.  In general, the British and other allied countries used irritants like tear gas, but poison gases were initially and mostly used by German forces, allied with the Austrian-Hungarian armies.  Beginning in 1915, these gases were chlorine and phosgene, with mustard gas introduced to battlefields in 1917. Eventually some American forces also used mustard gas.  These gases did not invariably kill, but required immediate measures and then a long convalescence to survive.  Poison gases were usually delivered by artillery shells.

 It’s possible these symptoms Ant described were caused by concentrated exposure to one of the irritant gases, such as tear gas, which was delivered in grenades.  Italy manufactured and used tear gas, and one account mentions Italian soldiers using it in tunnels through the mountains against Austrians at Castelletto. 

 Exactly what horrors Ignazio Severini experienced or witnessed or even heard about are unknown.  Apparently, like most other veterans of that war, he did not talk about it afterwards, at least to members of his family.  The world had seldom seen mass carnage on that scale, and Europe especially would never be the same. 

I have no documentation of anything specific in these years, other than that Ignazio was back in Manoppello to marry Gioconda Iezzi on December 8, 1919, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, a holy day of obligation on the Catholic calendar. 

Gino Severini
Self Portrait 1916

It was probably on the occasion of their marriage that distant members of the Severini family gathered in Manoppello, and G overheard whispers about the family black sheep who ran off to Paris and became a bum.  She remembered this when I told her about the now famous painter, Gino Severini, who was born and raised in Cortona, in Tuscany.  The timing fits—Gino Severini was in Paris as a very young man beginning in 1906.  Though he would have many famous friends, including Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Eric Satie, Apollonaire and Jean Cocteau, and eventually became famous himself, he was very poor at the start and remained so for many years—certainly in 1919. And as he was a painter and not a shoemaker or other paid tradesman or craftsman, he would count as a bum.

 That the Manoppello Severinis were related to the Tuscany Severinis has not been established, though for what it is worth (and it may not be much), my Ancestry DNA profile shows strong genetic origins in the region of Italy that includes Tuscany—as much or more than the region that includes Manoppello. If this suggests anything, it might be that there is a strong Severini connection from Manoppello to Tuscany, and perhaps Cortona.

C. Severini 1976 photo of fields leading to the
Bascilica at Manoppello

 It seems that Ignazio and G planned to live in Manoppello, but would go together to America first, where Ignazio could earn and save enough money to open a tailor shop when they returned.  The war had left Italy impoverished, and Manoppello was poor to begin with. Many of its younger citizens were leaving for America, at least for awhile, to make money to send back and then return to Italy.  These emigrants included several members of the Iezzi and Severini families.  G’s own father had already gone to Canada, though he sent little money back.

 Then Ignazio’s parents both got sick, and wanted G to stay with them.  G was looking forward to escaping from her own mother’s meanness.  But eventually she agreed to stay to take care of Carlo and Maria Antonia Severini.  Also she was pregnant, and the long trip across the ocean might be too much.

 So only a little more than six months after his wedding, Ignazio Severini set off with others from Manoppello to take a chance on the United States.  He boarded the Nieuv Amsterdam steamship on July 24, 1920 at Boulogne-sur-Mer, a port in northern France where the first British troops had landed during World War I.  The New Amsterdam was a ship of the Holland America line built in 1906, when it was the 10^th largest steamship in the world.  In 1920 it was notable for being the last major liner to cross the Atlantic fitted with auxiliary sails.

 

Nieuv Amsterdam 1st Class Hall

The Nieuv Amsterdam was considered a luxury liner, if you were among the 440 in first class on that voyage, or even the 246 in second class.  But the ship made its money from the 2,200 emigrants in third class, otherwise known as steerage.  They spent the voyage in what was essentially the cargo hold.  For the voyage from Europe to America, collapsible wooden bulkheads were installed to create private cabins and dormitories. For the return trip, the bulkheads were removed and the hold would be filled with cargo—often including grain for a war-torn Europe.

 Ignazio arrived at Ellis Island, New York, on August 4.  He was listed as 27 years old, 5 ft. 2 inches tall, with blond hair and gray eyes. Except for his age, how much of that was accurate is questionable.  He carried with him a total of $26.  His destination in the United States was a small town in western Pennsylvania called Greensburg. 

N. Amsterdam 3rd class dining hall

He made his way from Manoppello to New York with several friends, including young Vincenzo Di Pasquale, just 18, who was sponsored by his father, Claudio, already in Greensburg.  They were not the only people from Manoppello on that particular voyage of the New Amsterdam.  They were not even the only ones from there who were on their way to Greensburg. They were going to this otherwise unknown place because members of their families were there. 

 It would be fascinating to know what drew the first Italian or the first citizen of Manoppello to western Pennsylvania, though it was likely the coal mines. But it surely had happened by the turn of the 20^th century.  A bakery established by Dan Morelli was turning out loaves of Italian bread in Greensburg by 1902.  The first of many Italian organizations and lodges was organized in 1906. 

 There were so many Italians in Greensburg by 1910, that when Father Nicola Albanese arrived in Pittsburgh from Italy and told the Bishop that his purpose was to take care of the spiritual needs of Italian immigrants, Pittsburgh Bishop Canevin sent him directly to Greensburg, where he established Our Lady of Grace church that same year.

Manoppello 

 But one church wasn’t enough. In 1916, Father Albanese built St. Anthony’s Church to serve Italians in the area of Greensburg then known as Ludwick.  This church (at Madison and Williams streets) would be just a few blocks away from the house that was Ignazio Severini’s destination.

 That destination on Hamilton Avenue in Greensburg was the home of his older sister Anna, and her husband, Raffaele Vitaci.  Raffaele had first come to the US in 1901. Born in Manoppello in 1877, he was the son of a judge who gave him his name, and a maid who gave him up to the Congregazione della Carita of Manoppello, an orphanage.  His father’s name was Adalgiso Vitaci, his mother’s name is unknown.  He was taken into the home of Luigi Cremonese as a baby. 

 At age 18 he worked as a stonemason in Romania, and six years later came to the US with an Antonio Iezzi. He was bound for Philadelphia to rejoin his stepfather Cremonese. By 1903 he was in Greensburg, where he became a naturalized US citizen. Raffaele returned to Italy where he married Annina (Anna) Severini and in 1914 brought her back to Greensburg.

 Raffaele was described as tall and robust, with blond hair and blue eyes.  (His wife Anna also had blue eyes.) He was outgoing, with many friends, including Greensburg’s Republican mayor.  He invited them to eat at his house, where Anna would cook for them.

He and his wife did not go out at night, however, and were asleep at 7 p.m.  Raffaele had several different jobs over the years, including working for a building contractor.  His name in America eventually became Ralph Vitace.

 By the time Ignazio arrived, Anna and Raffaele had two small children: Mary (born in 1916) and Louis (born in 1917.) The family had just moved into their new house on Hamilton Avenue the year before, in 1919. 

Gioconda age 17

Almost immediately upon arriving, Ignazio wrote to G and asked for a photograph of her and his parents.  Neither of them was getting better.  She wrote back that she was too big with the baby.  He answered that he didn’t care, he wanted the picture.  So they went to a photographer in Chieti.  Years later, that photo would hang on a wall of their living room, next to a picture of G. at age 17, made from a small photograph that Ignazio had carried with him during the war.

 It was little more than a month after Ignazio arrived in Greensburg that he became a father.  Back in Manoppello, his wife gave birth to a baby girl.  G had been reading romance novels during her pregnancy, and the heroine of the one she was reading the night before she gave birth was named Flora. Ignazio’s mother, who was near death, was named Maria.  So the birth certificate would read: Maria Flora Severini, born September 13, 1920.

To America in the 1920s-30s

Italian passenger ship S.S. America

 Ignazio soon got a job in a large tailor shop in Greensburg near the train station, on Harrison Avenue. This was probably the shop opened by Anthony Robert in 1914.  But over the next two years the news from Manoppello was not good.  His parents’ health grew worse.  First his mother died, then a year later, his father.

 Even the news about Italy was bad.  With continued poverty there was political unrest and violence.  The new Fascist party and its armed thugs, the Blackshirts, began a campaign of strike-breaking and attacking socialist politicians.  In late 1921 Benito Mussolini renamed them the National Fascist Party, and in the fall of 1922, Mussolini organized a march on Rome to demand power.  To avoid bloodshed, the King made him prime minister. It was the beginning of terror, warfare and the Fascist dictatorship.

 By then Ignazio and G had already decided she would join him in Greensburg, and they would remain there. 

On her 1976 visit to Manoppello, Gioconda with her sisters:
Serafina, Suor Carla, G., Onorina, Stella; with Rose Severini. 

 For Ignazio, there was now no close family in Manoppello to return to.  His sister was with him in Greensburg and his older brother Giovanni emigrated to Ohio.  His parents and their generation may have been the last Severinis to live out their lives in Manoppello. A survey of names in a mid-1990s telephone directory—just about the last time such a directory was a source of fairly complete information—showed no Severini listed.  But there were 39 Iezzis listed in Manoppello.  G’s family in fact still lived in the same house as she had.  All but one of G’s sisters had remained in Italy.  Her younger sister Clarina became a cloistered nun at the Capuchin monastery.  She was Suor Carla.

 Another factor in Ignazio and G’s decision could have been the new United States laws to limit immigration, specifically from Italy and Eastern Europe. (Immigration from Asia had been almost totally banned for years.)  The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 would become the sweeping Immigration Act of 1924.  The 1921 Act continued to allow close relatives of U.S. residents to join them, provided they were either spouses or would vouch for their support.  But there was no guarantee that this provision would remain.

 Gioconda might have gone as early as 1921, when her youngest sister, the 19 year old Prosperina, sailed for America and headed to Greensburg, where she was to marry the 32 year old Joseph Romasco, originally from Manoppello.  Instead G. waited until Flora was a little older.  Just a month after Flora’s second birthday, they took the train to Napoli to begin their journey to America.

 Gioconda was traveling with her cousin Giuseppina, also a Iezzi, who was also married to a Severini, Ignazio’s cousin Raffaele.  Raffaele Severini lived in Newark, New Jersey.  Guiseppina also had a daughter with her, Antoinetta, who was eight years old.

 Before they could get on the ship, they were herded into a building with more people than she had ever seen in one place, G. remembered.  Doctors examined them and they were dusted with powder for lice.  The officials were not mean but most of them showed no feeling but impatience.  The people were scared and so tried not to offend the officials who would decide if they were allowed to board the ship. Some travelers would get no farther than this: if they were found to be too sick, or for reasons that remained mysterious, they were turned away.  They were careful, because if the officials in New York sent them back, the steamship company would have to pay the fare.

 But G and Guiseppina and their children were allowed to board.  It was a big steamship with two smokestacks.  It was called America.

 There were many steamships called America over the years, from several different countries. This S.S. America was an Italian ship built in 1908 that made its maiden voyage from Genoa to New York in May 1909. It’s the same ship that brought Ignazio’s sister Anna Severini to America in 1914, also from Napoli.  It continued taking passengers from Europe to New York, including returning American soldiers after World War I.  Just two years after this 1922 crossing, the ship changed destinations to South America, and four years after that it was scrapped.

 More generally, G’s voyage in 1922 was very near to the end of an era that had begun at least thirty years before.  With the restrictions of the 1924 law, the ships full of immigrants soon stopped crossing the Atlantic.

 But now safely aboard and with one worry behind her, G. faced the voyage itself.  They were deep in the belly of the huge ship, and there were so many people.  The only light came through the tiny windows, but she did not like to look out, because the water was right there, and it seemed it would cover them over at any moment. G. did not trust the food, nor some of the people around them.  But Guiseppina helped with the baby, and Antoinetta played with her.

 Once on the nearly two week voyage G. wrapped Flora in a blanket and took her on deck to see the sky.  But the next day Flora was sick, and so there was another worry.  What if they didn’t let her into the country because her daughter was too sick?

 Then they arrived in New York Harbor, on November 1, 1922: The Feast of All Saints.  Some had gone on deck to see the Statue of Liberty. Then they approached their destination: Ellis Island.

 They all were herded off the ship and into even bigger buildings than in Napoli, as big as cathedrals.  There were many more people there, all talking different languages.  

 

The building was cold, and they stood in line to be examined again by doctors.  Everyone was frightened because if they did not pass they would have to go back.  G. was worried about Flora.  If they were sent back, she might get worse on the return trip.  Their money would be gone, and they would be separated again from her husband by an ocean of a size she now knew too well.

 As they stood, they watched the people in front of them being examined.  They saw that some people had an x marked in chalk on their clothes.  Some worried when they did not get the x, but G. guessed that the x was bad, and she was right.  Those were the people who had to go back. 

They got to the front of the line, were quickly examined and the doctors passed them.  Now there was another line, and at the end of that would be Ignazio, there to vouch for her so she and Flora could stay.

 But again she was worried because some said the boat had arrived early.  And when she got to the official who looked at her papers, no one was waiting.  She had seen Guiseppina and Antoinetta ahead of them in another line, and her husband Raffaele Severini standing with them. He lived in a city nearby, and could come to Ellis Island every day to see if her ship was arriving.

 She watched the official carefully.  As he looked at her papers he frowned.  He was not going to let her in.  She did not know why. 

Then another official came.  He spoke Italian.  He told the first official that her husband was here.  Without him, she would be turned away.  She thought it was a miracle.

 But Ignazio was still in Greensburg.  The man ready to sign for her was Raffaele Severini, Guiseppina’s husband.  The first official looked at his identification, with the same last name as hers.  He passed them through.  They had landed in America.

 G. and Flora went to Newark with her cousin’s family, to send Ignazio a telegram saying she had arrived.  G. learned that it had been Guiseppina’s idea that Raffaele pose as her husband.  There were so many people in so many lines that he was able to sign as the husband of two women.  Besides, to them, all Italians looked alike.

 Ignazio arrived in Newark the next day, looking very handsome in his new raincoat, tailored suit and his beret.  But Flora would not let him touch her mother.  She screamed at him in the Italian of Manoppello: “Get away from my mother!  Don’t stand so close to my mother! I don’t want to see you here, you frog face!”  And so this became a story G. told. 

Harrison Ave. Greensburg

They took the train, past the wide farm fields of central Pennsylvania, through the mountains and around the Horseshoe Curve outside Altoona, to the giddy hills of Greensburg, with trees everywhere, all along the tracks. It was most of a day’s travel. They got off at the bustling Greensburg train station, very near the tailor shop where Ignazio worked.

 By American standards, Greensburg was an old town. There is evidence of Native Americans living in the area for thousands of years.  The Lenni Lenape (Delaware), the most prominent in this part of western Pennsylvania when Europeans first arrived, were relative newcomers.  The town itself was settled by these European transplants before the American Revolution, a place of inns and taverns a day’s ride on horseback from Ligonier to the east and Pittsburgh to the west.  The young George Washington made that ride, and helped establish that road.

 Incorporated just after the Revolution and named after one of its generals, Nathaniel Greene, Greensburg became the county seat for Westmoreland County, the last county established by the British government in the United States.  There had been a regular stagecoach stop just across the street from where the train station was now.  A hotel was built there before the Civil War, and a hotel was still there in 1922, the Lincoln Hotel. 

The town, and especially this part of the downtown, was still growing.  Much of that was due to the railroad.  The Pennsylvania Railroad carved out its roadbed and started service in 1852.  Soon it was linked to the rest of the state, and then the rest of the country. Hauling freight, carrying away the region’s coal and coke, and bringing passengers, the railroad still dominated in 1922. It was in that year that hundreds of people lined the Greensburg tracks to watch the latest demonstration of the railroad’s power: the largest train of locomotives to travel across the United States, a total of fifty steam engines.

 As Ignazio and his family got off the train at the large and ornate Greensburg station, opened just ten years before, they likely could see just outside of it on Harrison Avenue, across the way from the Lincoln Hotel, a much larger hotel under construction, the Penn Albert. It would be eleven floors tall, and after it opened in 1923 it would be a center for community events and entertainment, with its meeting rooms, the Crystal Room ballroom and Chrome Room restaurant, and the Roof Garden for music, dancing and big events. 

And these were not the only hotels nearby.  There was the Hotel Rappe about a block away—it was almost as large as the Penn Albert—the old Cope Hotel, and soon there would be the Keystone Hotel.  

Hotel Rappe, later Greens-
burger & General Greene

At the other end of Harrison Avenue, past the Merchant’s Hotel, the heart of Greensburg’s commercial downtown began.  There were big banks and the county Court House. A new department store called Troutman’s was opening next year, where the old Hotel Zimmerman was. There was McCrory’s five-and-ten and other shops. All of that promised a steady stream of customers for the tailor shop, though it was by no means the only tailor shop in the downtown.  But it was the closest to the railroad station and the hotels.

 The house on Hamilton Avenue where they were first to live was on the western side of Greensburg, near the crest of a hill and a corner of Pittsburgh Street, a major road to downtown. G. must have been pleased to learn that St. Anthony’s, a Catholic Church that served mostly the Italian community, was a short walk away.  

 Ignazio, Gioconda and Flora lived there with Ignazio’s sister and her family for about a year. Their second child was born in Greensburg, on July 28, 1923.  She was baptized Antoinette Marie Severini.  Shortly after her birth, the family moved to a house on nearby Vannear Avenue, which was close to the Westmoreland Hospital on Pittsburgh Street.

 Though they were in a new country with a new language to learn, and they faced the possibility of some hostility and prejudice against immigrants and Italians, they were also surrounded by relatives and friends, and generally people from Manoppello who spoke the same language, the same dialect, with each other.  There was also Italian clubs and lodges organized for social events, education and mutual support, and their numbers were growing. 

Picnic 1957 of lifelong friends: Carmen DePaul,
G., Mrs Armelia De Paul, Vince Di Pasquale,
Mary Di Pasquale.  Ignazio taking the photo.

The relatives and friends from Manoppello saw each other frequently.  They were working and starting families but they were still young.  When G. arrived in Greensburg she was 26.  Ignazio was 29. Years later Vince DiPasquale recalled the fun they all had, on picnics and outings and in each other’s homes.  Often their get-togethers would include playing musical instruments, singing and dancing.  Ignazio—Natz to his friends—played guitar and mandolino.

 Besides Vince Di Pasquale and his wife Mary, they remained close for years to several other families including Carmen and Armelia DePaul, and Rocco and Chiarina (Clara) Mazzaferro.  

Armelia De Paul was born in Manoppello, and her maiden name was Gloria—the same last name as Ignazio Severini’s mother—so there was likely a blood relationship.  She was born in 1896, and arrived in the U.S. in February 1924.  Carmen--originally Carmine DiPaolo-- came from Polla in southwest Italy in 1913. 

 Rocco Mazzaferro was born in Manoppello in 1893, and arrived in Greensburg in 1910.  Chiarina (Clara) Mariani came from Manoppello in 1919, aboard the Dante Alighieri.  They married and had a daughter in 1934, Angelina, who would often be in the Severini home.  Gioconda Severini may have been her godmother.  Rocco was a tailor who eventually had a shop on Otterman Street in Greensburg.

  The Severini family was probably still living on Vannear Avenue when G.’s father Carlo Iezzi suddenly appeared.  He stayed with them while he opened a shoemaker shop in a little village nearby called Red Dog (probably the village of Edna in Hempfield Township), where there was a coal mine. Many Italians lived there.  It was called Red Dog because its streets were paved with the crushed stones that came out of the fires the miners made to purify the coal.  The stones were pink and black and red.  They were used to pave other roads, and even to make bocce ball courts.

 One day in 1927 Carlo returned and said that he had sold his shop and had lots of money, and he wanted to take Antoinette to the movies. She was four. But G. didn’t trust his drinking.  So he went out alone and didn’t come home that night, or the next. 

Then Ignazio read in the paper that a man named Charlie Nezzi had been found badly injured on the railroad tracks under one of the bridges in Greensburg—the Main Street or Maple Avenue bridges.  He thought it might be Carlo and called the hospital. 

 The hospital said that the man had died. Another man had been with him, but they didn’t know if Carlo fell from the railroad bridge, jumped or was pushed. They knew he had been drinking. He had lived for a while after he’d been brought in, but no one could understand him, to find out where he lived.  Sometimes he spoke English, sometimes Italian, sometimes French.  Carlo had been back and forth to Quebec, and some of his friends called him Frenchy. 

 Natz told G., and she called her sister Prosperina, who lived in Greensburg.  She was married to Giuseppe—now Joseph—Romasco.  They had three girls: Mary (1922), Jenny (1924) and Stella (1926). They would have a boy, Louis, in 1929, and another daughter, Joann, in 1931.  Prosperina called herself Pearl now, but G. continued to use her Italian name.

 G. wanted Prosperina to go with her to the hospital, to identify their father’s body.  Prosperina refused until G. got angry, and finally she agreed.  They went together but when it came time to go down to the morgue, G. had to go alone. 

They went down flights of stairs to the hospital’s basement.  G. was taken to a body that was under a white sheet, with one arm dangling down.  She knew immediately it was Carlo.  She knew it was her father’s hand.

 But the doctor and another man there insisted she could not identify him officially unless she looked at his face.  Finally she allowed them to pull back the sheet.  The next thing she knew she was sitting on the floor, with the doctor looking at her as the other man held her up.  She had passed out and swallowed her tongue.

 Despite the uncertainty about how he died, Carlo Iezzi was buried in the Catholic Cemetery in Greensburg.

 In 1928 Ignazio Severini was able to buy a small house at 637 Stone Street, not far away on the western side of Greensburg, with a $100 down payment.  It was valued at $3,000.

 Stone Street was a short, quiet street of houses.  Across a large field was Grove Street, which shortly intersected with Hamilton Avenue, but this was some distance south from where they had first lived with Ignazio’s sister.  At Grove and Hamilton, looking west just beyond the new Sacred Heart School (it opened in 1922), there was a creek and a steep hill with nothing on it but dandelions and trees.  It was where the city of Greensburg ended.  G. would take Flora and Antoinette up that hill to pick dandelions for salads. 

Flora Severini, First Communion

Flora was around eight years old when they moved to Stone Street and just beginning school. It’s likely that she attended the Fifth Ward public school on Spring Street, just a few blocks away, at the corner of Grove St.  Antoinette would be of grade school age before they moved again, so she may have gone there briefly.

 But within a few years from their move to Stone Street, there would be new challenges arising from events and forces far beyond Greensburg.  After the New York stock market crash in the fall of 1929, the American economy began to weaken until by 1931 President Herbert Hoover was talking about “a great depression” taking hold.  When corporations lost stock value they invested less, stopped expanding and eventually cut production.  Families cut their spending, to ride out the temporary downturn.  But it only kept getting worse.  Banks failed (over 5,000 of them by 1932) so people lost their savings, and businesses could not get loans.  People lost their jobs. Businesses closed.  Some people lost their homes, and some went hungry. 

Johnstown 1934

In the early 1930s, all this was in plain view for everyone to see.  But the numbers remain staggering. In just three years, the US went from a 3.2% unemployment rate in 1929 to nearly 25% in 1932. Pennsylvania was hit especially hard, with an unemployment rate at 37% in 1933.  In places like Johnstown it was closer to 50%.

 Every kind of job was hit. One of the first was construction, which dropped nearly a third in 1930, and nearly another third in 1931.  Manufacturing was not far behind: US Steel cut wages in September 1931, and cut them again in the spring of 1932.  Between 1927 and 1933, Pennsylvania lost 270,000 manufacturing jobs.

 Westmoreland County had a diversified economy, but parts of it were troubled even before the Depression took hold.  Coal and coke production had been declining in the 1920s, so a combination of played-out mines, resistance to unions and then a drop in demand in the 1930s saw 40% of the remaining mines close.

 Much of Westmoreland County was farm country, and that included Hempfield Township, which completely surrounded Greensburg.  But farm income generally had been falling for years. The Depression made it worse.  There was plenty of food, and no money to buy it.  Farmers couldn’t sell overseas—there was Depression in Europe, too, and by 1931 the European banking system had collapsed.  

Unemployment line Pittsburgh
1933

The result was human suffering and uncertainty. In Sept 1932 Fortune magazine estimated that there were 34 million American men, women and children without any income at all, 28% of the population, and this study did not include 11 million farm families. By 1932 some 270,000 families had been evicted from their homes. In 1932, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was trying to respond to some 324,000 families seeking relief—the highest number in the US. 

Those with the least income—and the last workers hired, like the black steelworkers of Pittsburgh—suffered first, and worst.  But the middle class was not exempt: across the US, teachers, nurses, ministers, engineers and middle managers were among those sleeping in parks, or living in tents with their families. 

A million men were jumping onto to trains, piling into boxcars, and riding the rails back and forth across the country in permanent transit.

 People were desperate, and some did desperate things, adding to the sense of a world spinning out of control. There were many instances of people organizing to fight back, regardless of legality.  Farmers in every part of the country stopped bank auctions of their neighbors’ farm equipment. In the Allegheny County borough of Rankin, members of the Unemployed Council halted a sheriff’s sale of the furniture of an unemployed man and his daughter by disarming a police officer, keeping out bidders while they themselves bought all the furniture for a total of 24 cents, and then returned it to the owner.  In Wilkinsburg, adjacent to Pittsburgh, another Unemployed Council seized a Duquesne Light truck to prevent it from shutting off power to an apartment building.

 1932 is considered one of the worst years of the Great Depression, if not the very worst.  So it was not an ideal time to be starting a business.  Yet it is likely that 1932 was the year in which Ignazio Severini started his.

 It is true however that the Depression also provided opportunities.  Such an opportunity arose for Ignazio when, in nearby Youngwood, the town’s only tailor went out of business.  

Gioconda Severini

According to Gioconda Severini, the person who talked to him about it was Domenick Gelfo.  It’s not clear how the two men met, though it was likely through one Italian-American organization or another.  Gelfo had arrived in America in 1907 from his birthplace of Vilarosa in Sicily. 

 By 1930 (and probably earlier), he and his wife Carmilla were living in Youngwood. Carmilla would become one of Gioconda’s close friends. They had three sons: Samuel, Joseph and Eugene. Their first child had been Angelina, born in 1916, who died six months later.  On October 3, 1920 they had another daughter they named Angeline.  She would become Flora’s best friend.  They’d been born 20 days apart. 

 In the early 1930s, Domenick was moving his barber shop from his home at 207 Depot Street in Youngwood, to a building he bought in the middle of the next block at 313 Depot Street.  There was room in the building on the ground floor for a tailor shop as well.   Domenick would even give Ignazio free rent for awhile. 

 The Sons of Columbus had established their A & B Club in Youngwood as both a social club and a mutual support (the initials stood for either Americanization and Beneficial or Association and Beneficial, depending on who you asked.)  Domenick suggested that they would probably provide Ignazio with a loan to buy the equipment the previous tailor left behind.  The price would likely be low.

 Youngwood was a much smaller place than Greensburg, just six miles away.  Only about 3,000 people lived there, while 16,000 or so lived in Greensburg.  But still, Youngwood needed a tailor, and Italians in nearby places might be attracted to a tailor who speaks their home language. 

 At that time Ignazio may have lost his job in Greensburg when the tailor shop closed, partly because the owner died.  Though the 1930 Census confirms that in that year he owned their home on Stone Street, he subsequently may have lost that as well.

  G. recalled that he was riding streetcars to McKeesport to work in a tailor shop there. But at least he was working, so starting his own shop would be taking a risk. Ignazio talked it over with G. They’d always planned that he would have his own tailor shop, and here it was.  

There is a photograph of Ignazio in his shop published in Youngwood many years later that dates the photo at 1929.   This so far is the only evidence that he’d opened the shop by then, and there is more evidence to the contrary.  According to the U.S. Census, Ignazio was a tailor working as a “wage or salary worker” in 1930 rather than self-employed or a business owner.  That suggests he hadn’t opened his shop yet, especially since his 1940 Census form said that by then he was “working on his own account,” which was Census code for self-employed. 

  The more plausible date for the opening of the Severini tailor shop in Youngwood is 1932 (give or take a year), since according to Domenick’s daughter, her father opened his new barber shop in that building in 1932.

 It’s not a quibble, because the difference is that most of 1929 was before the Depression, but 1932 was in the thick of it, and Ignazio was taking a bigger chance.  In any case, he was certainly in business during the worst years of the Depression.

     One important event in the Severini family definitely took place that year of 1932: the birth of Ignazio and G.’s son Carl on January 27.  He was their third and last child.

 A few important national events in 1932 might also be mentioned.  That spring, thousands of American World War I veterans gathered in Washington, D.C. to petition Congress to pay them now the war bonus they’d been promised for 1945, because they were in desperate straits.  They remained there in makeshift encampments, many with their families, through the summer.  The press covered the story extensively, dubbing them the Bonus Army.  This may have attracted Ignazio’s attention.  As a World War I veteran himself,  he may have been interested in the fate of his American counterparts.

 Things were at an impasse in late July, with Congress failing to provide the bonus and with President Hoover opposed to it. It was then that a police officer trying to clear away a crowd from the entrance to the Treasury Department panicked and shot a veteran dead.  Hoover called out the Army to settle things down.  Instead, General Douglas MacArthur decided to make war on the Bonus Army. 

MacArthur, with his officers including Major Dwight D. Eisenhower and Major George Patton, deployed tanks and tear gas, routing the veterans and burning down their camps with gasoline.  Patton led a cavalry charge with drawn sabers against unarmed men, women and children.  In a deadly irony pointed out by historian William Manchester, among those that Patton’s attack routed was a World War I veteran decorated for saving the life of Patton himself.  Though newspaper stories of the day tended to support the government line that the Army had thwarted dangerous criminals and radicals, Hoover never recovered his political reputation.

 After the rout, the Army rounded up Bonus Army participants and their families, put them into trucks and drove them west on the Lincoln Highway, Route 30, with an undetermined destination.  But the Mayor of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, offered the marchers a park where they could set up a new encampment.  So just beyond Jennerstown, where Route 30 climbs steeply up Laurel Hill and trucks slowed in low gear, hundreds jumped off the back of the trucks.  Many made their way to Johnstown, while others presumably straggled into Ligonier and Latrobe and other western Pennsylvania towns.  Those who remained on the trucks would pass through Greensburg (where there was more opportunity to jump off) on the way to Ohio and points west.

 Also in 1932, the baby boy of aviators Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh was kidnapped from his crib in an upper floor of their estate.  A ransom note was found, a ransom was paid, but two months after the kidnapping, the boy’s body was discovered.  The story was covered extensively in newspapers and magazines and on radio. With her own infant son asleep in his crib, this may have attracted G’s attention.  But for certain, among those who followed it avidly was 12 year old Flora Severini, who never forgot it.  

Then in November came the historic 1932 presidential election, with President Hoover the Republican candidate for re-election, and New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt the Democratic candidate.   In local elections, newly naturalized Italians often voted with the ruling majority of their time and place, or for the candidates supported by their employers (usually Republican), because (as was often the case in the coal patches) their jobs might depend on it.

 In presidential elections, Italians had generally supported the Republican candidate until things began to change in 1928, when the Democrats ran Al Smith, the first Catholic to be nominated by a major party. His campaign was met in Oklahoma by the anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan.  But among primarily Catholic Italians that 1928 candidacy began their move to the Democrats that became a majority in 1932 for FDR. Nevertheless, when FDR won the presidency in a landslide in 1932, Pennsylvania was one of only six states he didn’t win.

 President Roosevelt took office in March 1933. By the end of the year the new administration made many changes. Price supports began improving farmers’ incomes.  Rules for businesses and industries, a minimum wage and protections for workers (including a ban on child labor) were increasing profitability and incomes.  The federal government started projects to get electrical power to rural areas.

 The government supported relief efforts in all the states and began public works on what today is called infrastructure.  An early example was probably the Greensburg Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue, erected in 1911, which was essentially doubled in size and modernized in 1934-5.  It later become the Greensburg-Hempfield Public Library.

 Also by the end of the year the federal government increased confidence in the banking system by guaranteeing deposits for the first time.  Even by the spring the banking system was stabilized and working again while the country began moving away from the gold standard (I recall G. telling me that when the government called in the last gold dollars, Ignazio kept a few as souvenirs.  To my knowledge, they never turned up.  But I do remember that for gifts he often gave silver dollars.)

 So by the end of 1933, even though the Depression still gripped the nation, things were looking up.  But there were other changes as well.  The growth from immigration that had characterized Italian communities in the U.S. since the late 19^th century came to a dead stop in the 1930s.  The ships carrying thousands of Italians no longer sailed.  In fact, more people were leaving the U.S. than entering it.  That included Italians who returned home, where the money they earned in the U.S. would go farther, and family and social structures were better adapted to making do.

 But those who stayed were establishing themselves and their children in their communities.  Still, the support within the Italian community remained important, as did organizations like the A&B Society in Youngwood.

 According to G., for awhile after he’d opened his shop, Ignazio Severini supplemented his earnings by taking several streetcars into Pittsburgh a few days a week to do tailoring work there.  Otherwise, he was commuting by streetcar from Greensburg to his shop in Youngwood.  G. remembered meeting him at the streetcar stop at 5:30 each day, with her baby Carl in her arms, or later, holding his hand beside her.  They were followed both ways by their cat.

 But Ignazio worried about the snowy mornings when the streetcar tracks might be blocked and he couldn’t get to the shop.  Soon he began to look around for a place for them to live in Youngwood.  G. didn’t want to leave Greensburg but finally agreed when a house became available a short block from the tailor shop, across the street from the Gelfo residence. It was available because the store on the first floor facing the street had gone out of business. (This may or may not have been Jake Rueben's fruit market, which according to what Angeline Gelfo Miller remembered, was on this block but closed during the Depression.) The owner agreed to rent the house to them for $10 a month.

 Perhaps after a brief return to living with Ignazio’s sister’s family in their house on Hamilton Avenue (which had since been expanded), the Severini family moved in 1933 or 1934 for the last time, to 200 Depot Street in Youngwood.