Imported Americans: The Story of the Experiences of a Disguised American and His Wife Studying the Immigration QuestionBrandenburg, Broughton
History
Imported Americans: The Story of the Experiences of a Disguised American and His Wife Studying the Immigration Question
Brandenburg, Broughton
Italy -- Emigration and immigration; United States -- Emigration and immigration
Here occurred an evidence of that class feeling which exists from the
beggar up in Italy. There is no democracy. By a very natural process,
with no words or discussion, Nunzio Giunta, Antonio Squadrito, Nicola
Curro and one or two others, who considered themselves members of a
better class than our farmer-boys from Socosa, for instance, took the
best room, leaving the third, which was dark and close, to the others,
who accepted it without a murmur. In this connection I would note an
amusing thing: Antonio never carried his own baggage till he reached
America, nor did he ever fail to protest when I shouldered mine. He was
afraid we should lose caste in the eyes of the people we met.
It was not ten minutes after we were indoors, before every member of the
party was stretched out and sound asleep, being simply exhausted by the
strain under which we had been for two days.
It was nearly six o’clock when the host roused everybody to tell them
that if they wished to take advantage of the one meal a day the
steamship broker was paying for, they should be going to the
_trattoria_.
It was a subdued party that arrayed itself, filed down the stairs, and
went to its first substantial meal since noon of the day before. There
was less talking done than there had been over anything since we started
from Gualtieri.
At the restaurant we found some hundreds of emigrants coming and going,
and others seated at the tables. For a half hour we waited until those
eating made room enough for us, and then we gathered around one of the
large tables arranged about the long room, and soon were served by
unkempt waiters with soup made with tomatoes and paste, a stew of meat
and vegetables, the meat being from portions of the goat not the most
savory, melons and wine. Poor little Ina was very hungry but very brave.
She confessed, after we had all been cheered and stimulated by the meal,
that she had been afraid she would “faint, and they would not let a
fainty girl go to America.”
Nothing was of more interest to me than the rapid broadening of the
mental scope of the children and young folks in our party. Pretty
Concetta, in all her sixteen years, had never been away from home
before. Some of the youths had never been outside the village community
of Gualtieri. Little Ina showed how bright she is and how well she had
understood all the wonders that had been told her, by refusing to be
appalled by the tremendous size and unheard-of splendor of Naples, for
such the town, shabby and tumbledown as it is in the parts they had
visited, seemed to them. She took her new experiences as a matter of
course.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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