ITALIAN NEW ORLEANS' Submitted by Larie Tedesco Source Times-Picayune Newspaper ************************************************* Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/la/lafiles.htm ************************************************ ITALIAN NEW ORLEANS' Those of us who love muffulettas and the Roman candy man are barely brushing the surface of Italian contributions to New Orleans culture. Tune in to "Italian New Orleans," airing Sunday (just in time for St. Joseph's Day), and you may learn that much of what you see, taste and hear locally has roots in Italy. Did you know that: -- LaSalle's right-hand man was Italian explorer Henrico Tonti. -- New Orleans has the second oldest Italian colony in the United States, established just a few years after the one in New York. -- So many Italians settled in the French Quarter that, by the first half of the 20th century, it was known as "Little Palermo." -- Jazz great Louis Armstrong borrowed at least a few musical strategies from local Italian opera. -- Kenner's annual 2 -mile procession in honor of St. Rosalie dates back a hundred years, to a successful deliverance from a local anthrax epidemic. -- Much of America's concept of the Mafia stems from turn-of-the-century events right here in town. The latter events launch the show, as narrator and radio personality Bob Del Giorno revisits history's single worst day for Italians in America: The March 1891 lynching of 11 Italian-Americans by a crowd of New Orleanians incensed at the acquittal of six other Italian defendants for the murder of the city's police chief and inflamed by local newspapers' hints that the "Italian Mafia" was responsible for that and other crimes. The crowd's action not only went unpunished, but was lauded by the press, and spawned a wave of anti-Italian sentiment across the country, actually bringing the U.S. and Italy to the brink of war. "Italian New Orleans" goes on to chronicle the rise and fall of reputed local Mafia chief Carlos Marcello, but the show uses the lynching mostly as a history lesson on xenophobia. This hour is an ode to all local things Italian -- or, more specifically, Sicilian, since the better part of our Italian immigrants arrived from that sun-washed island. New Orleans, after all, had the climate, Catholic religion and a passion for food and drink that paralleled the homeland. At times, the documentary gets a little effusive in its praise. Certainly, Italian musicians contributed to the rise of jazz, but can it be that fully a third of all early jazz musicians had Italian names? Or that Louis Armstrong really learned more from Italian music than its practitioners from him? Or that an Italian was responsible for getting the Superdome built? These, however, are minor questions about a program that, overall, offers a well-researched, in-depth look at all things Italian. The mostly chronological approach covers both the well-known (the origins of St. Joseph's Day, the muffuletta and the Monteleone Hotel) and the little-known (the local Contessa/Palermo animosity). It recalls local Italian athletes, restaurateurs, entrepreneurs, clergy and politicians, coupling Del Giorno's explanatory narrative with a well-researched lineup of archival photographs, film footage, recordings and interviews with a host of prominent Italian-Americans. The hour ends with a salute to local Italian pride. The stature of Italian- Americans today is a far cry from that of early immigrants, lured to Louisiana shores with the promise of streets paved in gold. They arrived to find that not only were the streets not paved in gold, but that they were not paved at all -- and that the Italian arrivals were the ones expected to pave them. Less than a century later, New Orleans gave America its first Italian-American millionaires, and now some of the most prominent surnames in the area end with a vowel. "Italian New Orleans" should be required viewing for anyone with an Italian branch to the family tree. It provides an instructive hour to others, irrespective of their roots.