Pasta Trails – Our Italian Ancestors

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.

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.

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.

Foods of Abruzzo

These are some of the traditional foods of the Abruzzo region that may be familiar to those with roots in that region:

Spaghetti alla Chitarra

Chitarra Pasta Cutter available for purchase from Destination Abruzzo

In the Abruzzo region, spaghetti was made traditionally by cutting fresh pasta dough using a tool known as a chitarra (pronouced kee-TAHR-rah). The word “chitarra” translates into English as “guitar,” a word that can mean either a musical instrument or a wired frame used in the kitchen for cutting soft things like dough or jelly candy. In the Abruzzo region the wires of the chitarra are close together, producing a noodle that is thinner than similarly produced pasta of other regions.

You can watch the video, provided by Experience BellaVita, to see how a rolling pin is used to push the pasta dough through the wires of the chitarra.

The square-cut edges of pasta made this way contrast with the cylindrical shape of extruded spaghetti. The resulting geometry allows chitarra spaghetti to hold more sauce. This same geometry can be achieved using a more modern pasta machine with a narrow-spaced spaghetti cutter built-in or as an attachment. However the cut is achieved, this traditional fresh pasta is often served with a tomato sauce and tiny meatballs called pallottine. Alternatively, another traditional sauce for spaghetti alla chitarra is a mixed-meat ragù that often contained lamb, since the Abruzzo region had a long tradition of sheep herding.

Scripelle

These very thin pancakes are made from flour, eggs and water. When rolled up, sprinkled with grated cheese and served in a bath of chicken broth, they are known as scrippelle ’mbusse. They also can be layered with cheese and sauce and then baked (similar to lasagne), rolled with a vegetable filling, or filled with sweetened ricotta and topped with fruit.

Gnocchi di Patate

The traditional gnocchi of Abruzzo are made with potatoes, flour and egg. After the ingredients are mixed, the dough is shaped into long thin ropes and cut into small pieces (about 3/4 inch). These are then rolled on a gnocchi board, as shown in the photo, to create ridges that will hold the sauce. In the dialect of the Teramo area these are called “li surgitt.”

Gnocchi Roller-Ridger Paddle available for purchase from Destination Abruzzo

Caggionetti

These are a traditional fried pastry with a sweet filling.

Torna a Sorrento

When I was a child, my Italian grandparents did not try to teach me Italian — with one exception. When I was about four or five years old, my grandmother taught me a song “Torna a Sorrento,” with lyrics translated from the original Neapolitan into standard Italian.

Guarda il mare com'è bello
Spira tanto sentimento
Come il tuo soave accento
Che me desto fa sognar

Senti come lieve sale
Dai giardini odor d'aranci
Un profumo non v'ha eguale
Per chi palpita d'amore

E tu di' "parto, addio!"
T'allontani dal mio core
Questa terra dell'amore
Hai la forza di lasciar

Ma non mi fuggir
Non darmi più tormento
Torna a Sorrento
Non farmi morir!

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.

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