Rosa Ponselle

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CHAPTER ONE

Italy, Fortunate Campania, and the Terra di Lavoro

The soprano known as Rosa Ponselle was born Rosa Ponzillo to first-generation Italian immigrant parents in the New England factory city of Meriden, Connecticut, on January 22, 1897. Their third child, she was also the third born in this country. Over the previous seventeen years a large contingent of Ponselle's close relatives had come to the United States, most from the area northeast of Naples. In 1881 some of her family emigrated; others followed later. Like members of the group who had preceded them, they declared to the Immigration Service that they were "cultivators," "farmers," or "peasants." In this country, through their own industry, they created a small empire in the grocery and coal business, and as tailors, dressmakers, and owners of saloons and boarding houses in New York City, Schenectady, and later Connecticut. This set them apart from the millions of immigrants who became day laborers and factory hands.

From her simple origins Ponselle rose to become one of the greatest sopranos in the history of music. Like her voice, her career has no real parallel in theater, for it began not on the opera or concert stage but in that familiar, homey American emporium the five-and-ten, the dime store, where she played the piano and sang, demonstrating sheet music for prospective buyers. As a teenager she sang in motion picture houses, popular restaurants, and in 1915 on the vaudeville stage, where her sister had already made a name for herself. Ponselle made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in November 1918, just after World War I ended, as Leonora in Verdi's La forza del destino, with Enrico Caruso as her tenor. The twenty-one-year-old soprano, with no previous experience in opera, became a celebrity with interviewers at the door, contracts with the Metropolitan and a recording company, and a full calendar of lucrative concert and recital engagements. Ponselle's operatic career reached across the years of "the Peace between the Wars," from 1918 until 1937, when she left the Metropolitan. But even after she had married and officially retired, she continued to work, teaching and later assuming the title of artistic director of the Baltimore Civic Opera.

The critic David Hamilton calls this an operatic "Cinderella story"; but it is also the saga of a clan, the Ponzillo family and their relatives, who swam in the stream of immigration but rose above it, powered by their pride, courage, and fierce spirit of independence. After they left Italy, these strengths brought them into the ranks of American entrepreneurs and transformed the three Ponzillo children into adventurers. These qualities gave us a peerless artist, Rosa Ponselle.

THE TERRA DI LAVORO

Of all the wonders of Italy, perhaps none is more recognizable than the image of the Bay of Naples, with its azure sky, the port, the teeming city itself, and Vesuvius looming in the background. Like Venice with its gondolas, like Rome with Saint Peter's and the Colosseum, the Bay of Naples suggests ancient mysteries beyond what the eye can see. Unlike those other, equally famous cities, Naples also has a heart that sings, for dozens of the most familiar "Italian folk songs" are actually the voice of emigration, evoking the much-loved places or people from that cherished sea and strand. From "'O Sole Mio" and "Torna a Surriento" to "Funiculi, Funicula," "Santa Lucia," and "Addio, mia bella Napoli," this repertory brings back memories of things loved and lost. Italians, particularly those from the south, possess a kind of spirit of place that they never surrender. Theirs is the world that was left behind by millions of Italian emigrants who came to the United States, for Naples was the "capital of the south" for nearly two thousand years and the point of departure for most who left Italy in the last century. Because Naples was the closing door on an old life for generations of emigrants, the city and Vesuvius were the last Italian sights the departing passengers saw. Small wonder, then, that they never lost their nostalgia for the world they left behind.

Naples itself began as two small settlements of Greek and Italic peoples on the hills above the bay. The first of these, Parthenope, founded between 800 and 700 B.C., was followed sometime after the year 524 B.C. by Neapolis, peopled mostly by Greeks from their original seat at Cuma, just beyond the northernmost reach of the bay. About a century later the prosperity of this "New City" aroused the envy of the warlike Samnites, who lived in the hilly region to the north and east. Over the centuries Naples was the seat of rude tribes and Roman masters, of powerful dukes and bishops, and later, of the rulers from the houses of the Normans, Hohenstaufen and Brunswick, Anjou, Aragon, and Bourbon, of the Bonapartes, and after 1815, of the last Bourbons of Naples, the sovereigns of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. With its royal residences, some in medieval fortresses and others in more recent structures, its magnificent churches and the Royal San Carlo Theater, Naples once surpassed Rome, Milan, and Venice in population.

The Neapolitans could never have amassed their riches without the natural wealth that came from the agricultural Eden north of the bay. In this crescent-shaped hinterland above Naples is the plain of "Fortunate Campania," or Campania Felix, as the Romans called it. Through it the Volturno River flows to the sea, describing a great arc northeast of Naples and through the farm country around Caserta and Capua. This area is the Terra di Lavoro, the Land of Work, and it is the home soil of the Ponzillos and their collateral families. As the Italian essayist Roberto Mainardi observes, "The economic and cultural life of the region, even that of the coastal strip, is only moderately influenced by the sea and sea activities.... Even Naples itself is not really a maritime center; most Neapolitans belong to the countryside or to the hills and are more inclined toward agriculture and the typical service industries of a center with a rural hinterland than toward maritime activity. The pervading rural character of the region can be seen in the very names Campania [countryside] and Terra di Lavoro [land of work]." This entire region benefited from the radial pattern of roads leading to Naples. "Of the various nuclei that went to make up Campania, the Terra di Lavoro has always had the strongest agricultural tradition," Mainardi goes on. "The presence of trees (poplars, elms, vines) is a characteristic of this countryside.... Mediterranean polyculture flourishes, with the mixed farming of olive trees and vines, fruit trees and fodder crops."

All this might have changed when Italy became a nation after 1860 and the Second War of Italian Independence, which brought new blood and ideas to the south; but it did not. Unification was achieved in the battles of 1859 and 1860; the sovereign, Vittorio Emanuele II, reigned in Turin, the capital. Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna, and Tuscany had been freed before March 1860; by October of that year Garibaldi's victories in the south added Naples and the entire Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to the new country. In this struggle Garibaldi's campaign along the Volturno River was decisive in defeating the Neapolitan army. George Martin, in Verdi: His Music, Life and Times, states that the Battle of the Volturno was "possibly the most important of the war."

This battle was fought where the Ponzillo and Conte families lived; and the ruin it brought--then and in the decades that followed--was one factor in inducing them and others in their area to leave Italy. Had Garibaldi not won the Battle of the Volturno, the Neapolitan army would have restored the king, Francesco II, to his throne. With that, Naples, Sicily, and the whole of southern Italy would have been lost. As King Vittorio Emanuele II and his recently seated parliament discovered, progress in the south would not be swift, for the traditional ways of feudalism remained in place in the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, no matter how many well-meaning, modern, educated bureaucrats and teachers were sent down from the north to drag this ancient culture into the circle of European nations. Massimo D'Azeglio, the son-in-law of the novelist Alessandro Manzoni and one of the most powerful and respected figures in Italy, had been a minister in the government of Vittorio Emanuele II before unification. Deploring the condition of the new nation-state in the autumn of 1861, he even questioned whether "the Neapolitans" really wanted to be part of Italy, given their massive resistance to the influence of the north.

When the early revolts in Campania and a major uprising in Sicily erupted, Vittorio Emanuele II sent his troops to prevent further violence because the aroused populace threatened the very existence of Italy. In Turin, Milan, Venice, and Florence these "new Italians" of the south were perceived as a threat to public order. Considered poor, backward, superstitious, sick, illiterate, and too religious in the eyes of the secular government of Italy, they appeared to have no interest in the idea of progress. Keeping their children out of public schools so they could work in the family shop or in the fields, refusing vaccination, suspecting the reclamation and draining of marshlands, and despising developments in agriculture, they also often supported the very landlords and overseers who oppressed them rather than show allegiance to Vittorio Emanuele II. The ancient culture of the south--the culture that produced a Rosa Ponselle--was dismissed as "pagan," and southerners were thought of as dangerous, fractious children.

This was a struggle no one could win, and soon there emerged a new generation of southerners so disaffected that they were disposed to leave everything they knew and seek a new life on the other side of the Atlantic. This was the situation of the Ponzillos and their relatives in their towns and villages of the Terra di Lavoro.

THE PONZILLOS AND THEIR CLAN IN THE VOLTURNO VALLEY

Far from being a backwater, the Terra di Lavoro was the very heart of Campania, a world that could boast thousands of years of history and culture. It was also a hotbed of disturbance after 1859. When Rosa Ponselle's ancestors lived there, the capital of the Volturno Valley was the twin community of Santa Maria Capua Vetere, which attracts tourists today, and the newer Capua. Now the nearest large, modern city is Caserta, the present capital of the province that bears its name. Its recent reputation as a tourist attraction is owed to the royal palace built there in 1752 for Charles III of Bourbon.

The road that meanders north and east from Capua leads to several villages and small market towns that lie on the way to the next important commercial and administrative center. On hillsides along the winding Volturno stand these towns, some scattered precariously on rough terrain, others nestled near the foot of valleys leading down to the river. The first is Caiazzo, the home of the Ponzillos; next come Alvignano and Dragoni, the original towns of the Faraone family, who were relatives and godparents of Rosa Ponselle's mother. Each of these towns is about five miles from the next. About five miles beyond Dragoni, in plain sight, perched on a steep slope on the north side of the river, stands Piedimonte d'Alife, now called Piedimonte Matese, the home of Enrico Caruso's parents, Marcellino Caruso and Anna Baldini.

After the unification of Italy, Caiazzo and these other villages fell under the jurisdiction of Piedimonte d'Alife. This meant that when the Ponzillos and their closest relatives, the Contes, Giannellis, and Faraones, had to transact official business, it had to be done in the Carusos' town. In Piedimonte they paid taxes, registered tenant contracts and deeds, got permission to travel, and took care of all legal disputes and matters relating to the new universal military service.

Caiazzo, the Ponzillos' home, now has just over five thousand people in the town itself and another eight hundred in the hamlets around it. The largest of these is Piana di Caiazzo, on the banks of the Volturno. Here is the bridge built by Hannibal of Carthage to facilitate his march on Capua. The ancient monuments of Piana are Roman ruins, the parish church of Santa Maria a Marciano, built in the 1300s on the foundations of a far older sanctuary, and on one wall of the transept of the church, a Roman milestone from Caiatia. Looming above the valley of Piana di Caiazzo is Monte Santa Croce, where a medieval monastery stood. At Castel Morrone the ruins of a huge fortress from the 1200s are surrounded by farmhouses. The site of battles in the thirty-year war between Emperor Frederick II and the papacy, this hamlet also saw an engagement in the Second War of Italian Independence in September and October 1860, when Garibaldi's men were fighting the troops of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in one of the crucial battles along the Volturno. Rosa Ponselle's father, Bernardino Ponzillo, was less than one year old when this furious engagement tore through the area.

Caiazzo, where he was born, stands above Piana, on a hillside dominated by a massive medieval fortress. The town is surrounded by fields, groves of fruit and olive trees, and woodlands with stands of holm oaks, with their twisted trunks, black bark, and thick canopy overhead, all inviolable and sacred to pagan worshipers. In such forests stone altars were built for religious rites; inscriptions carved on their bases warned that anyone who cut down a tree would be killed. Because this area was inhabited by Italic peoples in prehistoric times, we have every reason to believe that these woods were holy sites, like the sacred forest in the opera Norma. The town of Caiazzo was probably founded by the Oscans, but like so much of the Terra di Lavoro, it was overrun by the warrior Samnites from the east. With the coming of the Romans down the Via Appia, Caiazzo became Caiatia. Its other masters over the centuries were the abbot of the monastery of Montecassino, the dukes of Benevento, the counts of Capua, Ferdinand of Aragon, and a noble family from Florence, its feudal lords. Nobles here possessed huge estates, or latifondi, the source of the peasants' misery.

Caiazzo was not without great historical figures, among them a Roman consul, Aulo Attilio Caiatino, and Pier delle Vigne, who began his career as a minister of state for Frederick II. Born about 1190 in Caiazzo, Pier reached the apex of his power when he was named chancellor to the emperor, soon after the balance between the popes and the Western Empire was tipped in favor of the papacy. In his capacity as Frederick's chancellor, Pier rewrote the laws of this realm and became his most trusted counsellor. He remained in a position of almost absolute power until 1247; then he was suspected of treason and committed suicide after being imprisoned and tortured. More than 250 years after Pier's death, his genius was revealed when his collected letters, poetry, and account of his life were published. One of the streets of Caiazzo is named for this brilliant courtier, whose house is marked with a coat of arms.

Like most Italian towns, Caiazzo has changed over the centuries, and particularly since World War II, as new buildings have been added around the historic center; but within it many of its old monuments remain. Except for the street names, much of Caiazzo's center is unchanged from the days when Rosa Ponselle's parents were living there. Along the Via Attilio Caiatino is the Church of San Francesco, built in the 1300s. Near to it is the city hall, the municipio established after 1860, occupying the building that was once a monastery belonging to the Franciscans. Further on, a votive chapel boasts a fine Renaissance doorway. The town square, Piazza Giuseppe Verdi, stands over the ruins of the old Roman forum; it, in turn, was built where the center of the primitive community was originally located. A Roman cistern, with six huge basins for water, is hidden beneath the square; it was fed by a reservoir constructed by the Romans in the nearby hamlet of San Giovanni e Paolo. On market day this picturesque piazza is crowded with vendors from surrounding towns, selling all kinds of hard and soft goods, and with local farmers who bring in their produce. In the nineteenth century, when the Ponzillos lived here, this meant that Caiazzo was a center for the exchange of information by word of mouth, the medium that was crucial to the people, more than 80 percent of whom could not read or write. The market was their place of learning, and the culture of this place was the baggage the Ponzillos, Contes, and Faraones brought with them to America.

The most important religious structure in the town is the Church of Maria Santissima Assunta, for Caiazzo was the seat of a bishop from about A.D. 800 until the see was suppressed in 1818. A new bishopric was founded there in 1849, after the uprisings, and the present diocese is Alife-Caiazzo. Beyond Maria Santissima is the small Church of the Annunciation, with a fine Renaissance doorway. At the top of the hill stands the castle originally built by the Lombards.

This, then, is Caiazzo, the home of Rosa Ponselle's antecedents, the Ponzillos, Contes, Giannellis, and Espositos. Several respected artists were born here during the last four centuries, and in the 1700s and early 1800s the town was the birthplace of two scientists, one of whom was the physician Niccolo Giannelli. who may have come from the family of Carmela Giannelli, Rosa Ponselle's grandmother. As its history shows, Caiazzo was fortunate in having a certain level of education and culture that reached everyone who lived there. In this it is superior to other rural towns where all knowledge is kept within the four walls of the landlord's villa, where the parish church has one or two insignificant paintings and perhaps a decaying fresco. In the churches of Caiazzo are many fine works of art, which were called "the Bible of the poor." The very civic order and architecture of the place distinguish it from many of its drastically impoverished neighbors. Because there was a cathedral, there was also a rich tradition of music. Rosa Ponselle was told by someone in her family that one of the Ponzillos, a prelate of the church, had a fine baritone voice. If this is true, it is beyond doubt that he sang in the Church of Maria Santissima Assunta, for this was the Ponzillos' home parish; it is here that their records are found in the parish registers. As we know from Rosa Ponselle's later interviews and from evidence gathered from a cousin of Rosa's, Cynthia Di Tallo Starks, the Contes also had a family musical tradition.

In Caiazzo in the mid-nineteenth century two branches of the Ponzillos lived in the center of the town. Two first cousins, Francesco and Antonio, were having children at the same time; the baptism and civil records show a small difference in status between them, for one tilled the soil and the other had a trade.

Bernardino Ponzillo, Rosa Ponselle's father, was born on December 1, 1859. The son of Antonio Ponzillo and Carmela Giannelli, he was baptized in the cathedral on December 2. The godparents were Antonio Mondrone and Stefana Di Giglio, both from that parish. On that same day, just after having his son baptized, Antonio Ponzillo presented himself at the city hall and declared his son's birth before the constituted official of the civil registry of the province of the Terra di Lavoro. This was, of course, still in the old Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Antonio Ponzillo, "by profession a coachman," swore that the infant had been born the day before in his house on Strada San Felice. Although we do not know who employed him, it is safe to say that it was either a prelate, the bishop or one of the monsignors, or a noble or aristocratic family, for only they could afford horses and a carriage. Antonio said that he was the son of Giuseppe Ponzillo, who was still living, and that he and his wife were both thirty-six years of age. His witnesses, who accompanied him to the civil registry office, were both tailors, one being Nicola Bernardo, living on the Ponzillos' street, and the other, Stefano Petrucci, living on Strada Tasso.

Bernardino Ponzillo was just eleven when Rosa Ponselle's mother, Maddalena Conte, was born on the same Strada Tasso, in another parish of Caiazzo, San Nicola de Figulis. Born on December 20, 1870, she was the daughter of Antonio Conte and Fortunata Esposito. Her godparents, Giovanni Battista Faraone and his sister Filomena, figured so heavily in the child's life that the family later believed that Maddalena's mother was a Faraone rather than an Esposito. Maddalena's father, Antonio Conte, took her for baptism, then registered her birth at the city hall, where he stated that he and his wife were both peasants. One of his witnesses, Giacinto Di Carlo, was a servant; the other, Luigi Squegli, was a tailor. One lived on Strada San Francesco, the other on Strada Tasso. Like Antonio Ponzillo, Antonio Conte could neither read nor write.

We know nothing of the childhood of Rosa Ponselle's parents, save that conditions in towns like Caiazzo were considerably better than those in country villages, where farmers often slept on the ground floor with their animals or, if they were better off, slept on the top floor and kept the animals below. Townspeople were healthier and better fed than those in the hamlets. Of Ponselle's parents, we know that Bernardino Ponzillo could read and write; Maddalena could not.

When Bernardino Ponzillo turned twenty, he was conscripted into the army of Vittorio Emanuele II, where he became a bersagliere, or sharpshooter, wearing the splendid plumed hat that was the crown of his uniform. Of all the troops, these were the most beloved, and a repertory of patriotic songs grew up around them. The hat was the hallmark of Luciano Manara, the boy-general of the First War of Italian Independence, who was killed in 1849 outside Rome, and his myth, enshrined, sanctified his uniform. The bersaglieri were a veritable synonym for patriotism; the black-green feathers from the gallo cedrone, a huge rooster, became an icon of manhood and liberty. As Bernardino Ponzillo began his military service, the dangerous five-year war against the brigands was largely over, at least in the Terra di Lavoro, although it continued for decades in Calabria and Sicily, and a far more risky venture had been accomplished: the conquest of Rome. Venetia and Venice had become united with Italy in October 1866. The Italy we know was virtually complete.

Because so many of the bersaglieri had been called in the campaign to take Rome, Bernardino Ponzillo became an heir to their exploits. It is a family tradition that Maddalena Conte, his future wife, was impressed by his dashing appearance in this uniform, with its cargo of romance and history. Because he was eleven years older than she, Bernardino was performing his military service just in the years when her childhood ended. The year he came of age and became a bersagliere, 1880, was also marked by the effects of the first decade of emigration, particularly in the south, for in 1876 the Italian government lifted some of its early restrictions. Between 1876 and 1886 about 134,000 people emigrated each year.

As many historians have shown, poverty was not the sole motive driving people to leave. Many who had emigrated had earned enough to be able to return to their hometowns and villages and talk about the new status they had acquired abroad, by which they usually meant North or South America. Although critics of the southern way of life believed that the lack of entrepreneurial spirit was the dominant character trait and the greatest shortcoming in those who lived south of Rome, many families there had great independence of spirit and a desire to rise above the traditional laborers' role and establish small businesses in their own names. From what we know about the Ponzillos' life in New York State and Connecticut, it is clear that they had this spirit.

THE CARUSOS OF PIEDIMONTE D'ALIFE

Although Enrico Caruso was born in Naples in 1873, his entire family, paternal and maternal, came from Piedimonte d'Alife, just three towns to the north of Caiazzo. The tenor's grandfathers, Vincenzo Baldini and Giovanni Caruso, grew up and found wives in Piedimonte. His father, Marcellino Caruso, had one brother, Salvatore, whose descendant still lives there and teaches music. True to tradition, this present representative of the family is also named Enrico Caruso. He and Cav. Aldo Mancusi, founder of the Enrico Caruso Museum of America in New York City, located many of the documents relating to the Ponzillos' life in the diocese of Caiazzo and contributed invaluable help in this research; they were helped by the clergy of the cathedral of Caiazzo.

The Carusos were firmly grounded in Piedimonte; the tenor's grandparents never moved from there. Enrico Caruso's father, Marcellino, was born in Piedimonte, as were the several generations before him. He married Anna Baldini (whose mother was a d'Onofrio) in August 1866 in the Church of the Annunciation there and remained in the town for several years after marriage, living in a house at Via Sorgente 10. Apparently they had no children born there.

Sometime before 1869 Marcellino and Anna Baldini Caruso moved to Naples, as hundreds of families from the country were doing from all over the south, in their mass flight from the fields. Enrico Caruso was baptized in the Church of San Giovanni e Paolo on February 26, 1873, having been born one day earlier. In Naples Caruso grew up, studied singing, and began his career, first in a choir, then as a soloist for weddings and other ceremonies and for evening concerts in restaurants and small theaters. He made his opera debut in 1895, in a work called L'amico Francesco at the Teatro Nuovo in Naples, and went on to perform in several Italian cities and in Cairo before reaching Milan in the winter of 1897-98. Caruso's first engagement in America was in Buenos Aires in 1899, the same year that he first went to Russia. He made his first appearance at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan in 1900-1901, under its director, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, who had taken over the theater two years earlier.

Caruso's later career is described in another chapter, but here it is enough to say that he was engaged by the Metropolitan Opera in New York for the 1903-04 season and made his debut as the Duke in Rigoletto on November 23. Gatti-Casazza and Arturo Toscanini did not join the Metropolitan until several years later, arriving there together at the beginning of the 1908-09 season, at the invitation of Otto Kahn and members of the board. Once in office, Gatti presided over and helped to shape Caruso's sensational career in America. These two men, Caruso and Gatti-Casazza, had the sole responsibility for launching Rosa Ponzillo's operatic career, for it was Caruso who heard her sing in her teacher's studio and asked Gatti-Casazza to give her an audition, and it was Gatti, as general manager of the company, who wrote her first contract with it, engaging her to make her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1918.

DEPARTURES: THE PONZILLOS AND THEIR RELATIVES LEAVE ITALY

The first member of the Ponzillo family to emigrate in the 1880s from the Terra di Lavoro to the United States was Vittorio, who left in 1881, at the age of thirty-eight, on the steamship Chateau Leoville. Like his traveling companion, twenty-six-year-old Pietro Faraone, Vittorio Ponzillo was described on the passenger list as a laborer. The two men were in the first wave of the huge emigration movement of 1876-86, as were several other members of the Faraone family who left through the port of Naples in 1883 and 1884; all males, they ranged in age from fourteen to forty, and like those who had gone before them, they embarked for New York. Two of the Giannellis also left; one stated that he was a carpenter, the other that he was a cultivator. Later in the decade three more Ponzillos and a group of nine relatives from Alvignano and Dragoni (including some of the Faraones) joined other members of their families on their journey to the New World.

Early in June 1886, when he was twenty-eight, Bernardino Ponzillo set off from Caiazzo for America. With him went his fiancee's sister, Filomena Conte, who was eighteen, and Alfonso Faraone, at thirty-eight the oldest of the three. These travelers made their way to Naples and, with about five hundred other passengers and crew, boarded the steamship Burgundia. The passenger list, like many similar lists from this period, shows utter indifference to the individual histories of the emigrants, for with the exception of those designated "infant" or "child," everyone in the lower classes was identified as "peasant." Beyond that, everyone is identified as coming from "Italy"; no more-specific places of origin are mentioned. Bernardino, Alfonso, and Filomena had packed their possessions in two suitcases, both of which were tagged in Bernardino's name. Those two suitcases are a clue to their relative prosperity, compared to that of the other passengers, most of whom tied their belongings in great scarves or blankets. And unlike hundreds of thousands of desperate emigrants from southern Italian villages and farms, this little party of adventurers possessed the confidence that comes from growing up in a town such as Caiazzo, where a certain level of culture, civility, experience, education, and even sophistication penetrates the whole social body.

Maddalena Conte, Bernardino's fiancee, found herself in a rather awkward situation, for she had recently broken an earlier pledge to another suitor, a cooper in Caiazzo to whom her family had promised her. According to the Ponzillo-Conte family tradition, Maddalena had fallen in love with Bernardino instead, had become engaged to him, and had decided to marry in America to avoid a scandal at home. When she saw him off on the Burgundia, she could be sure that he would prepare the way for her own departure and for their eventual marriage in New York State. This plan and the fact that they had a fixed destination raised their expectations far above those of emigrants who knew no one in the United States and were without a base there. On that June day, then, the little group that would become Rosa Ponzillo's core family had reasonable hope for the future as they sailed out of the Bay of Naples, bound for America.

Copyright © 1997 Mary Jane Phillips-Matz. All rights reserved.