A City of Villages

The Italian immigrants who passed the Ellis Island test went about transforming the city they found before them. Many previous immigrant groups, such as those from Germany and Scandinavia, had passed through New York City in decades past, but most had regarded the city merely as a way station and had continued on to settle elsewhere in the country. This generation of Italian immigrants, however, stopped there and made their homes; one-third never got past New York City.

They scattered all over the New York region, settling in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and nearby towns in New Jersey. Perhaps the greatest concentration of all, though, was in Manhattan. The streets of Lower Manhattan, particularly parts of Mulberry Street, quickly became heavily Italian in character, with street vendors, store owners, residents and vagrants alike all speaking the same language--or at least a dialect of it.

In part because of the social and political divisions of the Italian peninsula, southern Italian villages tended to be isolated and insular, and new immigrants often preserved this isolation in their new country, clustering in close enclaves. In some cases, the population of a single Italian village ended up living on the same block in New York, or even the same tenement building, and preserved many of the social institutions, habits of worship, grudges, and hierarchies from the old country. In Italy, this spirit of village cohesion was known as campanilismo—loyalty to those who live within the sound of the village church bells.

Many distinctive events and practices maintained the village's unity: weddings, feasts, christenings, and funerals. One that often caught outsiders' attention was the festa—a parade celebrating the feast day of a particular village's patron saint. Hundreds or thousands of residents would follow the saint's image in a procession through the neighborhood's streets.

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