“Who is king of America?”
“Why! Are you a native American? I thought Americans were black!”
Once a woman added insult to injury by inquiring in all sincerity:—
“In America you worship the sun, non è vero?”
On some rare occasions a wiser native appeared, to display his erudition to the assembly. One evening I mildly suggested that the United States as a whole is as large, if not larger, than Italy. My hearers were deafening me with shouts of derision, when one of the party came to my rescue.
“Certainly, that’s right!” he cried, “it is larger. I have a brother in Buenos Ayres and I know. America, or the Stati Uniti, as this signore prefers to call it, has provinces just like Italy. The provinces are Brazil, Uruguay, República Argentina, and Nuova York.”
Squelched by which crushing display of geographical erudition, the gathering maintained a profound silence for the rest of the evening; and the authority on America began a lecture on that topic, in the course of which I learned many a fact concerning my native land which I had never suspected.
One can be little surprised that the Italian fears to embark for a country so little known. I met often with people who had set out for America, gone as far as Genoa, and there abandoned the journey, perché aveva paura. Many, indeed, journey to the seaport, never suspecting that to reach this land of fabulous wealth they must travel on the ocean; more than one has only the vaguest notion of what an ocean is. When the endless expanse of water stretches out before them, all the combined miseries of their native land and the wheedling of the most silver-tongued steamship agent cannot induce them to trust themselves on its billows; and in dread and fear they hurry home again.
It may be said with little danger of error, too, that the average American knows very little of the Italian of this northern section. He is, quite contrary to popular notions, a very kind and obliging, even unselfish fellow, decidedly a different person from the usual immigrant to our shores. The riffraff and off-casts of their native land, that are spreading far and wide in our country, living in clans and bands wherein the moving spirit seems to be he whose record at home is most besmirched, the “dagoes” of common parlance, are no product of this northern portion of the peninsula. We have, possibly, been too quick to attribute to all Italians the characteristics of those undesirables with whom we have come in contact, more than seven-eighths of whom hail from the southern section. The Neapolitan, the Sicilian, the Sardinian, from lands where congested districts breed characters held in as much contempt by the Italian of the north as by our own citizens, have little in common with the Venetian, the Florentine, and the Sienese.