ESSAY FROM
DIANA GIOVINAZZO

When I was a teenager my aunt showed me a black-and-white photo of an Italian soldier taken during World War II. It was in a box mixed with photos of birthdays, Christmases, and scores of family Sunday suppers. The lone young man in the photo stood tall in his pristine foreign uniform, staring back at us from the small rectangular box. There was no doubt he was a relative: Not only did he have the tell-tale Giovinazzo eyebrows, he loosely resembled one of my cousins. The back of the photograph was blank. No hint of who this boy could be, or if he even survived the war. No clues as to who he was or what he meant to my grandparents. Nothing.

So many of my grandparents’ stories were lost to us along with the immigration stories of my great grandparents. My Calabrian grandfather died a few years before I was born, and I have precious few memories of my Sicilian grandmother before her untimely death when I was a child. Perhaps that’s why the picture of the soldier stayed with me well into my adulthood as I began to comb through the historical archives for the ghosts of my family. When I started to search the Italian archives those questions shifted from how? to why?

The question of why my family immigrated to the United States became my primary focus. Why did my great grandparents leave Italy in 1913? What drove them to gather their few belongings and start over in New York?

I was having the traditional Italian family dinner at my parents’ house when my father and I began to theorize what happened in Italy when our family made the journey. The subject of Italian Unification, also known as the Risorgimento, came up. That was when my father said “You should read about the Garibaldi’s and Anita Garibaldi in particular. I think you would like her.” Following his advice, I picked up a biography of Anita, and he was right. I was immediately taken by her fierceness. This was a woman who stood, unfazed, on the bow of a ship as canon fire whizzed by her head. She insisted her life was not valuable, that the freedom she fought for was all that mattered. Throughout her life, she believed in equality for everyone, regardless of gender or race.

It was this pre-feminist thought that lured me in. I say pre-feminism because the feminism that we recognize today can be traced back to only 1848 in Seneca Falls. But while the suffragettes were debating how to accomplish their goals, Anita was already sacrificing for the benefit of the citizens of three countries.

During Anita’s life, the women of Southern Brazil were severely repressed. Being forced into marriage at the age of fourteen, something Anita experienced herself, was not unheard of. Especially considering a daughter was one less mouth to feed for those in poverty, as was the case for Anita when her mother married her to Manoel. Just as the Italian anarchist women did during the early labor movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, Anita compared marriage to slavery. A woman’s worth was not just tied in with that of her husband, her ability to survive was entangled with whom she married. As result divorce was unheard of regardless of the circumstances.