And so [Vanzetti wrote] in the year 1901 he conducted me to Signor Conino, who ran a pastry shop in the city of Cuneo, and left me there to taste for the first time, the flavor of hard, relentless labor. I worked for about twenty months there—from seven o’clock each morning until ten at night, every day, except for a three-hour vacation twice a month. From Cuneo I went to Cavour and found myself installed in the bakery of Signor Goitre, a place that I kept for three years. Conditions were no better than in Cuneo, except that the fortnightly free period was of five hours’ duration.
Later he became a caramel-maker in Turin. Scarcely out of his childhood, drifting from city to city, reading whatever came to hand, he found nothing to replace the memory of Villafalletto. His companions, the casual workers of the urban proletariat, were blasphemously Marxist, and he, still loyal to his heritage, would occasionally defend his religion with his fists. Yet, as the hard years of his adolescence passed, he too was drawn to the socialist image of a better world. His Catholicism eroded to a vague deism.
Early in 1907, working again in Turin, he fell ill of pleurisy, and his father came from Villafalletto to take him home. In spite of his suffering, when he saw from the train the deep green of his native countryside Vanzetti felt renewed.
And so I returned after six years spent in the fetid atmosphere of bakeries and restaurant kitchens, with rarely a breath of God’s air or a glimpse of His glorious world. Six years that might have been beautiful to a boy avid of learning and thirsty for a refreshing draught of the simple country life of his native village. Years of the great miracle which transforms the child into the man. Ah, that I might have had the leisure to watch the wonderful unfoldment!
After two months in bed, nursed by his mother, he began to recover. He was now twenty years old. Later he was to describe the period of his convalescence as one of the happiest of his life, a time of gardening, of talking, and wandering through the woods bordering the Magra. The happiness was brief, for his mother developed cancer and after three agonizing months died. Vanzetti cared for her as she had cared for him. He remained at her bedside day and night. For the last two months of her life he did not even undress. She died in his arms.
In after years he recalled that death in all its immediacy:
It was I who laid her in her coffin, I who accompanied her to the final resting place, I who threw the first handful of earth over her bier. And it was right that I should do so, for I was burying part of myself ... the void left has never been filled.
It was in the days following her death that he decided to go to America, to that land across the ocean where the past might be erased. On June 9, 1908, he left Villafalleto, accompanied far down the road by his tearful relatives and neighbors. After traveling across France he embarked at Le Havre in the packed steerage of a giant liner.
New York, the impersonal sky-swept metropolis, seemed to him from the huddled deck both inviting and threatening. In his autobiography one can sense the bewilderment of the immigrant coming down the gangplank.
How well I remember standing at the Battery, in lower New York, upon my arrival, alone, with a few poor belongings in the way of clothes, and very little money. Until yesterday I was among folks who understood me. This morning I seemed to have awakened in a land where my language meant little more to the native than the pitiful noises of a dumb animal. Where was I to go? What was I to do? Here was the promised land. The elevated rattled by and did not answer. The automobiles and the trolleys sped by, heedless of me.