“They no longer greet us respectfully as they used to, and the way they spend money looks to these deluded contadini as if they had found it in the streets of New York.
“Everybody in my town who has anything to sell, sells it or borrows from his friends in America and goes there. Last year over 1,600 went out of my town, which has less than 6,000 inhabitants. The saints alone know what will become of us! And the worst of it is, Signor, that they lose respect for us!”
Travelling from Naples towards Calabria, I noticed in the second-class compartment a group of Italians returning from America for a visit to their native hill town. Among all the people of this class that I had seen, these were the most remarkable. They were better dressed than others, spoke English fluently, were cleanly in their habits and travelled second-class.
“Oh, yes! Italy is beautiful!” said one of them, who I afterwards learned was a stationary engineer at New Brunswick, N. J. His finely chiselled face showed his delight as he watched the landscape.
“But America is more beautiful on the insides. You ask why? I will tell you.
“I was born in a small hill town of 3,000 inhabitants. My parents were poor labourers and I was born in a hole in the wall. I will show you the wall when we come to the town. No windows, no chimney, no nothing. Our goats and pigs had another hole, smaller than ours; but the goats and pigs were not ours, they belonged to the landlord and when the pigs were killed we got half. We had just one meal of the meat and the rest had to be sold to those who could afford to eat it; we couldn’t. It was a great day though when we had that taste of meat, and I don’t think I have ever tasted such good meat since. Of course we had meat only three or four times a year.
“My father and mother both had to work in the fields. They left the hole in the wall at four o’clock in the morning and came back to it at seven in the evening. When I was a baby, my mother carried me along on her back; later my sister carried me and I can’t remember the time when one of my sisters didn’t carry a baby out into the field.
“I worked from the time I was seven; we all worked when there was work to do. I never was hungry when the melons and the figs were ripe; but I never remember having eaten as much bread as I wanted. I remember I wanted to be older than I was, for the children got about an inch more bread for every year, as they grew older.
“I went to school to the padre, and he taught me the Pater Noster and the Ave Maria and just enough writing to sign my name. When I was fourteen years old, an uncle who lived in New York sent money to my father and mother to come over. Never can I forget when that letter came. I nearly went crazy. I ran around to every hole in the wall and called out: ‘We are going to America! We are going to America!’
“My father was crazy, too; for he gave the letter-man half a lira for bringing him such a letter and reading to him the good news. Everybody in the town knew of our good fortune; for the letter-man told all those to whom we could not speak, because they were above us. When we went to Naples I thought I was going to heaven, and on the ship, in spite of seasickness, I was happy; because for the first time in my life I had enough bread to eat.