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The 1950’s in Sicily were a time of change, of upheaval, of economic progress! Economic conditions were very difficult, given that we were only a few years removed from the end of World War II and bartering was still quite prevalent.

I was born in 1950 , the only child of Sebastiano Pirrotta (1916-1990) and Giovanna Ficara (1924-2010) in Canicattini Bagni, province of Siracusa, in southeastern Sicily. I never met my paternal grandparents, as my grandmother died when my father was a young man and I was two years old when my grandfather died. I did grow up with my maternal grandparents; they lived in the house next door and the two homes were connected inside by an open door. Technically we were “poor,” but not in the sense we mean it today. We had more than enough to eat and drink, as most food came from self-production, and the fact that we did not have much cash was no big deal, since there wasn’t much we could buy with it!

Women’s work was still strictly at home (my mother became a seamstress) while the men spent entire weeks away from home, working on farms.The feudal land system was not yet dead, and in addition we had a class system: rarely if ever would you see farmer families associate themselves with say teachers, doctors or landowners! A town was not really a cohesive unit but an aggregation of boroughs, and it would only take something like a local soccer championship to rekindle long-simmering rivalries: A Matrice (the main church) vs. U Santuzzu, the second-most important church in town and only about half a mile away; or u vaddune (the low land) vs. San Giuvannieddu(St John), etc. I recall from very young how at times kids from the upper section of town would ”invade” our lower part of town and start a stone-throwing war, with a few injuries always resulting. In one of these skirmishes, a rock hit me on the left side of my head. I was bleeding and had to get medical attention; it scared the shit out of me and I never did it again.

Real town unity did not exist, and these mini-wars within a town paled in comparison to the rivalries between towns, in our case between Canicattini and Floridia, a larger town about 15 km from us. I don’t have any direct recollection of this, but soccer matches between these two towns invariably resulted in brawls, both on and off the field. This animosity went far behind soccer: weddings between people from rival towns were unheard of.

These conditions were at their strongest in the early 1950s to around 1960, for certainly as our generation came of age and became more educated, most of these rivalries and customs disappeared. Interestingly, when I emigrated to the U.S. I would find stronger feelings about these issues in the Italian community here, which is understandable: people in the U.S. were of the older generation, less educated and clinging strongly to their old customs. The Sicilian dialect is disappearing back home, but here it is still widely practiced! My wife learned Sicilian from my mother so that when she went back to Sicily to visit with me and she spoke the local dialect, people would marvel. Of course, from time to time she used words that had fallen out of favor; for example, she might say pisciare, which is vulgar for “urinate,” and people would laugh, but they knew she meant no harm!

Slowly the class system disappeared. The biggest impetus for this change was a development in the late 50s and early 60s that initially was considered a godsend, but over the long run turned into a serious albatross: SINCAT. The establishment of a petroleum refinery in Priolo, about 25 km from our town, created thousands of jobs and accelerated the shift from farming to industrial development. Thousands upon thousands of people from the entire province found work there, and most of these people abandoned farming to follow the future. My father was one the few who never did abandon the land. In any case, the economic structure of the entire province had changed and feudal barons were no longer as important.

The 60s were a time of great growth in prosperity as a result of SINCAT, but at what a price! Air quality became so impure from refinery emissions that at times even in our town, 25 km away and on a hill some 600 meters up, the winds blew fumes from SINCAT with a smell like rotten eggs that I haven’t forgotten to this day. Health costs over the past fifty years have been enormous, not only for the workers but especially for the townspeople of Priolo, where the number of children born with significant deformities has skyrocketed and death by pulmonary disease is too frequent. Not to mention the damage done to the beautiful coastline! The price of progress, I guess.

Two other traits are important in understanding our town and Sicily. One was the existence, well before its time, of a wireless communication system. In a small town like ours, everyone knew everything. News would travel through this informal wireless network of mainly women at the speed of light. There really was no privacy (one the things I like most about the U.S.), and since there wasn’t much else to do, women and men talked about what their neighbors had done or not done and who was seen with whom, and perhaps would criticize someone for wearing the latest clothes to show off, or the rich person who bought a TV or (later on) a car! Nothing was too small to pass on, and the juicier the better.

The second aspect of life that we learned from a very early age was that without help—a pidata (literally, the kick) or a raccumannata (recommendation from important or connected people)—you would get nowhere. If you needed a little help at school, you found a professor through a friend who could put in a good word for you; if you needed a document from Town Hall or the police, it would help once again to know someone who could expedite the process; for a passport or to avoid the military, you sure needed someone in the army to help you.

When you finished school and wanted a job, certainly you could not expect that one would be there for the waiting! Often many years would pass between graduation and starting work, and once again, hopefully you knew a politician who could get you to the head of the line in return for a small sign of respect, nowadays known as a bribe. These signs of respect began as eggs or a chicken or grain right after WWII and grew more and more into cash payments as the economy evolved. And of course an eternal pledge, seldom fulfilled, to vote for that politician and his or her party.

Another curious aspect of life was that people did not know each other by last name but by the ingiuria or nickname that somehow had been assigned to that family or branch of that family. Most of these nicknames were based on their trade: we had u ferraru (the blacksmith), u carrettieri (the Sicilian cart maker or driver), U sanzali (the business broker). My mother was a paluma, the dove, I never knew why, while my father was u sciunnatu, bottomless, which I believe refers to appetite! My maternal grandfather was Cauci (kicks), don’t ask me how that came about. My mother, until she died in February 2010, more than forty years after leaving Sicily, still identified people by their nicknames while I, part of the newer generation, knew people by their last names. She and I had many conversations where we had a tough time trying to identify people we knew from back home: it was like speaking two different languages!

At that time we had a high degree of family support, which no longer exists or at least has diminished greatly. People in these towns did not pack and leave unless they died. People married within the same town; marrying relatives, usually arranged by the parents, was fairly common as well. This resulted in a village that was highly homogeneous, in which many people are related or at least knew one another well. In this environment, it was easier to provide and receive support.

The 1950’s also saw a new emphasis on education from parents who did not want their children to “grow up like us.” Roads were not paved; transportation was by foot, horse or mule-pulled carts, with a few bikes and motorbikes and an occasional car. Sanitary conditions were changing from primitive holes in the ground to modern piping and sewage systems. We had radios and no TV, and one movie house. (Watch Cinema Paradiso for the best rendition of this era.) Running water inside most homes, but we had lots of public water fountains with women carrying their vases full of water on top of their heads. Electricity was not a problem but phone services would not arrive for a long while. We had no violent crime except your basic theft of cows, grain, chickens. The Church played a critical and controlling role; major Catholic holidays were the hinge around which social life revolved. And, of course, the Piazza or the Villa (the town-maintained public garden) played central roles as gathering places to see and be seen.

This is the story of my life, of my growing up in Sicily; of our migration to the USA and the personal development and transformation I have undergone!.