By Martina Lancia
Motivated by “Making Meaning Through Relationality in an Oral History Project”, Martina Lancia tries to trace back the history of a part of her family that moved to the US for some time and describes the importance of recording memories and asking questions while there is time.
The event hosted at OHMA on October 28th, “Making Meaning Through Relationality in an Oral History Project,” aimed to diffuse the voices of Latino Immigrants during the Pandemic, sharing their work, family and immigration stories. The workshop made me reflect on my own family’s history of immigration, beginning from a small town situated in a provincial part of Lazio, Italy, moving to Rome, and from the Eternal City across the ocean to the United States.
The thread of immigration from Italy to the US is also one of the topics I’m planning to discuss in my thesis project. While asking different narrators about their lives and experiences, what kept coming back to me is the importance of asking questions and recording an interview while there is an opportunity, reconstructing a story and getting a real chance to tell it, before that possibility gets taken away from us by time and life passing by.
I noticed that oftentimes, when asked questions about their family, people would stop and think about it, then realize they don’t know the answer. They never got the chance to ask it to the specific person or didn’t expand on it while there was time, and would be left with only a hypothesis of what the answer could have been.
The same thing happened to me trying to trace back the journey that Gaetano Notargiacomo, born in a rural town in Italy, named Colfelice in the province of Frosinone (FR) in 1898, did for the first time coming to the US in 1920.
Gaetano Notargiacomo with his wife Gaetana Notargiacomo (they had the same exact name, coming from the same small town, it used to be very common). Circa 1930.
His daughter, Ada Notargiacomo, was the wife of one of my mother’s maternal brothers. I’ve had the chance to meet her a few time and ask her some questions about her life and her father, without thinking about recording it. When she passed away, her husband, named also Gaetano (the perks of coming from the same small town of a rural part of Italy) remained, and remains still today, as the only repository of the information that he remembers from talking to his wife and her father about this journey.
I was able to discover that Gaetano Notargiacomo was drafted in World War I, and a few years after he was over, he decided to travel to the US and go be with his brother Filippo, who was living in Providence, RI.
What his son-in-law heard about was not the weeks long trip on a boat, but rather Gaetano’s surprise of having a job the very next day that he arrived here, a job that his brother had found for him. He lived in the US for about 10 years, going back to Italy in 1926, when he decided to begin with the money he was able to save in the US to construct a building in a neighborhood in Rome called Torpignattara, situated on Via Pietro Rovetti.
The building on Via Pietro Rovetti being built. Torpignattara, Rome. Circa 1929.
After World War I, this neighborhood was mostly inhabited by people coming from the same part of the province, due to the fact that the train connecting Rome to that area would go through this part of the city.
After he went back to the US in 1931, he eventually returned to Rome, where he got married and had two daughters. They kept the building in the family still to this day, where they had a small grocery store until the end of 1990s.
Still today, I have many questions I would like to be able to ask—like why didn’t Gaetano bring back his family to the US, since by 1931 he was an American citizen? Someone in my family says it’s because his wife was scared of the long trip and the stories she heard about it. My mother’s uncle elaborated that Gaetano was not comfortable with a country he perceived as very different and far more progressive than Italy.
The building on Via Pietro Rovetti and the grocery store (on the left), Torpignattara, Rome. Circa 1960.
Having all these questions reminds me of something that a narrator told Alessandro Portelli during an interview about what he knew from his family regarding what happened during the Massacre of Fosse Ardeatine:
“Until my father was alive, I have never asked too much, meaning that he was my historical memory that I could have access to. But then when he died I understood I didn’t understand everything, and that my story was incomplete. I will never be able to complete it, but also I will not be able to pass it down.” [1]
Even if it seems obvious, the idea that there will always be time produces in future generations the feeling of a memory that can’t be grasped and understood completely. Therefore, the loss of the opportunity to keep it alive and be able to own it, not only as family history, but as History that belongs to each and every one of us, gets partially if not completely lost.
Telling a story means to say: “this is my story, belonging to my family, but it is your story as well, because I am telling you the story of your father, your family, of the place you live in.” [2]
Martina Lancia (she/her) is a student from the 2021 cohort joining from Rome, Italy. Her work is focused on 20th century Italian history, with a focus on Rome. She is currently working on a project on Italian immigrants in New York City and also conducting more interviews in Rome.
Footnotes:
[1] Flavio Govoni (1964) son of the brother of Aladino Govoni, killed at Fosse Ardeatine; 04.21.1998, interviewed by A. Portelli.
[2] Ascanio Celestini in Guide to a rebellious Rome written by R. Modenti, V. Mordenti, L. Sansonetti, G. Santoro. Edizioni Voland, Roma 2012, pp. 36-37