Welcome to Pasta Trails

This website provides information about some of the people who came from Italy to the United States in the early 20th century — and about their families.

The posts below are in chronological order of their posting, with most recent first. In addition, this website has pages for certain families, organized by surname, and for topics related to Italian ancestry.  To help you navigate the site, there are menus and a search box. For example, to find a specific person, start by looking under surnames in the menu or use the search feature.

Once you’ve gotten to a specific page, you may find links on it to other people and related topics. In addition, if there are posts relevant to that page, you may see excerpts which you can click on to expand. This allows you to find articles of interest without having to go through the chronological posts.

Italian Diaspora

Most of the Italian ancestors described in this website came from Italy to the USA between 1880 and 1920. They were part of an emigration wave that you can learn more about from the Wikipedia article Italian diaspora. While this article discusses the general reasons for emigration from Italy, they do not necessarily explain the decisions of individual people. In some cases, we have family stories about such decisions, while in other cases we can only guess.

Four DeMatteis Brothers

In the early 20th century, there were four brothers of surname De Matteis who came from Giulianova, Italy to the USA: Domenico, Antonio, Cesare  and Alfredo. Their parents were Guiseppe De Matteis and Splendora Brancioroli.

Antonio lived for a number of years in the USA and Canada, but ultimately returned to Italy. Domenico, Cesare and Alfredo all remained in the USA and raised families in Columbus, Ohio. From the 1920s through the early 1940s, they lived in a neighborhood near St. Dominic’s church. That neighborhood has since been redeveloped, so their houses are gone and the streets have changed. Starting in the mid-1940s, the families began to move to other parts of town, generally staying north of the downtown area.

Carmine Bianco – From Parenti to Brooklyn

On May 24, 1899 the ship Aller arrived at the port of New York, having departed from Haples on May 12. It’s passengers included three men from Parenti1 who appear to have been travelling together. which is a comune (town) in the province of Cosenza in the Calabria region of southern Italy.

One of those men was Carmine Bianco. Although the handwriting on ths ship’s record is difficult to make out, the other two appear to have been Carmine Agnotti and Serafino Sorianini. All three men gave their final destination as Brooklyn, and all indicate that this is not their first visit to the USA. In this record, Carmine Bianco reports that he previously live in Brooklyn from 1893-1896 and other records indicate that he first came to the USA in 1890. Thus Carmine is probably the first person from the Dominico Bianco family tree to immigrate to the USA.

  1. Parenti is a comune (town) in the province of Cosenza in the Calabria region of southern Italy. ↩︎