When I first told my mom about my idea to apply for a Fulbright scholarship to study cancer in Sicily, the site of her birth and childhood, she said somberly, “I have a feeling you’re going to go. It feels like it’s already done.”
This is how we spoke about these things. When I was in kindergarten, the little boy who sat across from me looked at my 6-year-old arms and said, “Why don’t you shave all that hair?” My mom made me promise that I never would, and I have kept that promise. Then she put a Pyrex container in my lunchbox with leftover pasta bathed in the homemade jar sauce that my grandparents made from the tomatoes they grew in their garden in Swissvale, and she sent me off to St. Bede catholic school in Point Breeze.
My dad is first generation and my mom immigrated when she was 7 years old. The walls of our home were covered with ceramic plates painted with grapes and lemons and photos of old women sitting in small chairs on the sides of dusty roads. We had stories about sweatshops and we had little horn necklaces for good luck and we had steamer trunks in the basement from The Great Journey. We had a lot of sacredness and a lot of conversations in small-town-dialect-plus-broken-English where we called a sandwich a sanguidgio.
After I grew out of the awkwardness of having too much hair on my arms (and later, on my face), I discovered that Pittsburgh was actually the great jewelry box for all these keepsakes I was inheriting. Think Bloomfield Little Italy Days. Think Penn Mac and Wholey’s the night before the Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve. I used to say that Pittsburgh chewed up Italian and Polish immigrants in the furnaces and spat back out their culture to keep the economy surviving on tourism once the furnaces were gone. This is perhaps ungenerous to the city and should instead be directed at the likes of Carnegie and Frick.
But the truth remains – Pittsburgh is a good place to be part of a second- or third-wave immigrant family. There is a rich culture here of keeping traditions alive and celebrating diversity.
From horn necklaces to a full recharge
In high school, when I skipped ahead to Spanish 2 because I was already semi-fluent in Italian, people thought it was really cool and they didn’t say anything about my arms. My identity became something I curated and displayed. I started wearing the horn necklaces.
Then, as I prepared to graduate from the university Carnegie founded to educate the children of the (immigrant) laborers of the industrial revolution, I faced a choice: I could either keep my Italian identity in its American box and start a research position in Boston, or I could take a huge risk and potentially recharge a heritage whose batteries were already starting to run out. I still have an abundance of cousins and aunts and uncles there, excited to welcome me.
My mom’s parents left because that was the only path up. Historians clock the number of times Sicily has been conquered at between 10 and 12, and, to put it gently, you can tell. In a charming way you can see it in the architecture, which varies from Spanish to Norman to Arabic within the same city block. You can also see it in the unemployment rate, which is roughly 10% higher than the Italian national average. There is a lack of resources in the south, which, combined with decades of mafia violence, has created a distinct culture of me-first resourcefulness, amongst other impacts.
My mother was convinced that, though our family had climbed higher in the years since their immigration, Sicily and Sicilians had not done the same. She did not fully understand my desire to go and, of all things, study there, when her parents had left so that she could have access to a better education in America. In the Shadyside Apple store, she unexpectedly announced to the poor Genius helping me figure out if my phone would work abroad that, “My parents gave up everything to bring us to America and now she’s just going straight back.”
I did not think she was wrong per se, I just wanted to see it for myself. If it was bad, I wanted to bask in the badness and ready myself to carry on my family’s next generation in America. And if it was good, well, then, I wanted the chance to take that in my own direction.
In Italy, learning about my American self
I found that Sicily has recovered significantly from how it was when my grandparents left. I found a modern society settled across the ancient mountains of their island, walking the stone streets of their crumbling cities. It coexists with an ever-evolving mafia, the crushing heat and the most stunning beaches anywhere in the world. Families previously thrived on their own agricultural pursuits, and some still do, even as they try to fit themselves in a consumer model that strongly resembles the U.S. Tourism has seized many of the cities and changed them irrevocably.
Though the island is roughly one-third the size of Pennsylvania, it’s rife with variety – every town of 1,000 has its own dialect and traditions and recipes. That said, Sicilians are united in being yellers, people with strong opinions, and somehow always incapable of intuiting what the most efficient solution to a problem might be. They will always feed you and they have a deep, unfailing loyalty to home.
The truth is that I went to Sicily thinking I would be drinking the concentrated version of my Italian upbringing, and that I might be welcomed home by people who would recognize in me elements of their own upbringing. Then my new Sicilian roommate brought me to reality when she asked me why I left the hair on my arms when I could just get it lasered off like she did.
I went to Italy to be Italian, but at first, I mostly learned what it meant to be an American. I found myself in conversations in which I endlessly compared and contrasted my Italian-American childhood in the United States and Italy itself. I said things that probably made people uncomfortable because I was critical of structures that objectively do not work. For example, I am the only international student enrolled in an Italian-taught masters program in medical biotechnologies. I wasn’t shy about challenging the theory- and memorization-focused system that often prevents students from getting the relevant hands-on experience I got so much of in the U.S. Students routinely struggle to get jobs out of this education system and I thought I knew why, and I wanted them to know that they could fix it.
After my first semester of school, I joined a marketing and business club. One day my club was invited to a financial literacy workshop run by a local startup. The opening speaker talked about the region and the economic and infrastructural issues it faces. A university student in the back of the room raised his hand and asked, “I just got back from a semester abroad in Germany, and everything there was organized and calm. Today it took me an hour just to get to school on a bus that only has to go 3 kilometers. Can anyone tell me why things are like this? I just want to understand why.”
There was a silence. The speaker could not offer him an answer and neither could anyone else. I realized that I had brought my own baggage to a place that already had enough of its own.
‘Why would you come here?’
Once, I asked a senior researcher at the local hospital if he knew of any research opportunities in my area of interest. He advised me to go back to America to look. The question I have been most asked since arriving in Palermo is: “Why would you come here when we are all trying to make it to America or at the very least get out of here?”
What the people I meet in Sicily are missing as they try to puzzle out my motivations is the multigenerational immigrant experience. They have never walked through the incinerated halls of Carrie Furnace, they have never eaten pierogis made with recipes passed down through generations, they have never had a Feast of the Seven Fishes.
They haven’t imagined how the dream of a few farmers and laborers manifested in the booming American industrial economy combined with decades of hard work conditions could eventually produce a girl with enough privilege to move to another country with fewer opportunities just to figure out if it’s just like her mom always said it was. Italy and, I imagine, other countries like it, haven’t invested themselves in what happened after people left. They don’t have to hold on to and laminate their grandmother’s precious tomato sauce recipe, because, with few exceptions, their culture isn’t going anywhere. Pittsburgh convinced me that these parts of my identity were important and worth cherishing.
The longer I stay here, and the more I assimilate, the less I worry about my family’s culture disappearing, because my family’s culture is more than Sicilian. I have learned that America, in all its melting-pot glory, made a spectrum out of all the cultures that migrated there. For example, I have always felt that I inhabited a higher echelon of Italian America than, say, Olive Garden. But even between these there is nuance, and then there is Italy itself.
From the moment I arrived in Sicily, I have been scared of being pulled down into a decadeslong tug-of-war between American and Italian cultures. Now I’m excited about it, and about what it teaches me every day. There is an undeniable magic in being Italian: tough, dramatic, expansive, nourishing. There is, also, a magic in belonging, even if all you belong to is the culture you built for yourself.
Anna Cappella is a research biologist, writer, EMT, and Fulbright Scholar from Pittsburgh. You can reach her at annac1363@gmail.com.
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