7. However shocking to our modern sensibilities, daughters appear to have accepted this state of affairs, even when betrothed to men with whom they were barely, if at all acquainted. Chapman notes that in most cases, “objection is not expected, and is only occasionally made” (94).

8. Even poorer families made every effort to provide some form of dowry for their daughters. Such is the case for the protagonist’s mother in Elvira Mancuso’s Una vecchia storia inverosimile.

She was a poor widow who had toiled for years to provide bread for herself and her daughter and had managed, through so many sacrifices, to keep her in elementary school, always with the hope that one day she would become a teacher. She would have loved—oh, how she would have loved!—to see her married, too. But having learned the hard way what it meant to be a widow and to live without bread, with a baby in her arms, she was reluctant to give her daughter in marriage to a poor day laborer. On the other hand, there was little hope that her daughter would marry a shopkeeper—or anyone well to do—because, as she always used to say, those who have material things only look for more. And her daughter had claim to nothing other than the hovel they lived in. Nor had the poor woman managed, for all of her efforts, to put together any sort of corredo. (Mancuso 1990, 12)

9. Mancuso inveighed against the system, noting that she, a Sicilian woman, had earned “a respectable, honorable position … certainly worth far more, economically and morally, than an ostentatious dowry handed over by her father—a dowry that conferred on her no rights, a dowry that she could neither touch nor administrate” (1990, 166).

10. My information on traditional mourning customs in Sicily comes primarily from interviews conducted in Mistretta in 2005 and 2006 with town historians Professor Antonino Testagrossa, Nella Faillaci, and Giuseppe Ciccia. All are involved with the Progetto Mistretta, a civic organization dedicated to the preservation of Mistretta’s historic, artistic, and cultural patrimony.

Works Cited

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Bell, Rudolph. 1979. Fate and Honor, Family and Village: Demographic and Cultural Change in Rural Italy Since 1800. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Briggs, John. 1978. An Italian Passage: Immigrants to Three American Cities, 1890–1930. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Cecchetti, Giovanni. 1973. The She-Wolf and Other Stories. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.

“Centonove.” “Inseguendo il sogno americano.” 27 ottobre, 2006. Messina, Sicily.

Chapman, Charlotte. 1971. Milocca: A Sicilian Village. Chicago: Schenkman.

Cinel, Dino. 1984. “Land Tenure Systems, Return Migration and Militancy in Italy.” The Journal of Ethnic Studies, 12:3 (Fall, 1984): 55–74.

Foerester, Robert. 1924. The Italian Immigration of Our Times. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Gabaccia, Donna. 1988. Militants and Migrants: Rural Sicilians Become American Workers. New Bruswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

Lopreato, Joseph. 1970. Italian Americans. New York: Random House.

Mack Smith, Denis. 1968. Modern Sicily after 1713, vol. 2 of A History of Sicily. New York: The Viking Press.