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The Bucchianichese of 'Jim' Street

There are places you feel you totally have to leave, and then months later, hundreds of miles away, you find they're still stuck to you like wet ciabatta dough. The Sault is like that for a lot of people. So is Bucchianico, Italy.
There are places you feel you totally have to leave, and then months later, hundreds of miles away, you find they're still stuck to you like wet ciabatta dough.

The Sault is like that for a lot of people.

So is Bucchianico, Italy.

Scenically perched on a hilltop between the Adriatic Sea and the slopes of the Maiella on the calf of Italy's boot, Bucchianico is best known for the sons and daughters it has sent to America.

Hundreds of hopeful, strong, kindly Bucchianichese found their way over the past century to Sudbury and Sault Ste. Marie.

"The town has virtually no resources," one historian, a Father Mario Vanti, wrote in 1940.

"The few it does have are not adequately valued or compensated. Consequently, it has always been a town of emigration," Father Vanti wrote.

The continuous erosion of Bucchianico's population through out-migration has not weakened it.

Somehow, emigration has actually strengthened the Italian community of 5,000.

"These were the same people who demonstrated their devotion and lived in rural poverty marked by sacrifice and a desire to emigrate in the hope of a normal and traditional life which the Fascist regime suppressed," wrote author and architect Giuliano Davide Di Menna in a 2008 book, Bucchianico: Images, Emotions, Memories.

"They were secretly encouraged and supported on a daily basis in letters they received from their relatives who had emigrated the previous decade," wrote Di Menna, who is the nephew of Sault Ste. Marie's Maria Di Labio.

This 2008 history of Bucchianico, by Di Menna, Enzo Di Meo and Rita Camilla Leva, has recently been translated into English and published by John Di Luzio of Sault Ste. Marie (shown).
 
Di Luzio, who was born in Bucchianico, became aware of the book when his older brother went to visit relatives in Italy and brought him back a copy as a gift.
 
“This was an excellent source of information about my native home that my mother had told me about all my life,” he tells SooToday.com. “She had died a year or two before that. I found it a ready-made treasure of all the history.... I felt a compulsion to translate it so that I could preserve what my mother had told me all my life, and make it available to our children.”

Di Luzio grew up speaking Italian at home, but it was in dialect and he wasn’t formally educated in the language.
 
So his first job was to learn proper Italian.
 
Even though the words he learned as a child were not true Italian, he found they gave him a solid understanding of the thinking process that the language uses.
 
Translating the book turned out to be a three-year project for the former director of finance and administration and acting president at Algoma University College and property development coordinator at the City of Sault Ste. Marie.

”It was a ready-made treasure for me to translate for our kids so they would know the history and culture of their ancestral home. That's why I did it. Because our kids don't speak the language and we have many generations of new Canadians in Sault Ste. Marie, and abroad. Many of the Bucchianichese left Buchhianicio.”
 
Di Luzio’s great uncle arrived in the Sault in 1903, part of the first wave of Bucchianichese who came after the turn of the century to help Francis H. Clergue build Agoma Steel and other parts of his industrial empire.
 
There were subsequent waves of Bucchianichese emigration after World War 1 and World War II.
 
Before the first war, it was the severity of feudalism that drove them to North America.
 
“Peasants were subjugated under that system,” Di Luzio says. “They were illiterate. They were abused and dispossessed of their properties and always looking for a better life, because life was so difficult.”
 
After World War I, there was mass destruction in Buchhianicio.
 
World War II, mercifully, was not as hard on the community.
 
“Our little town was somehow not subject to the demolition and destruction that occurred elsewhere. The bombs, I guess, missed that town, but within 10 or 15 minutes away, towns were decimated,” Di Luzio tells SooToday.com.

Still, there was considerable poverty and much upheaval and many Bucchianichese emigrated to America in search of better prospects.
 
“Many came to Canada, in particular, Sault Ste. Marie,” Di Luzio says. “I have relatives in Windsor, in Toronto, in Niagara Falls. A lot of them went to South America and Argentina and Venezuela.”
 
Over the years, at least a couple of hundred Bucchianichese found their way to the Sault and as many as 400 of their descendants trace their family histories to Buchhianicio.
 
Giuliano Davide Di Menna’s 33-page essay in Bucchianico: Images, Emotions, Memories, describes a visit he made to Sault Ste. Marie to visit his aunt Maria Di Labio.
 
Although his scholarship is meticulous, Di Menna quaintly refers to James Street as “Jim” Street, as working-class Italians commonly pronounced it as recently as the 1950s and 60s.
 
“The Italians lived in the Jim Street neighbourhood near the French parish of St. Ignatius and shared public space with the French and Spanish with whom they often clashed, engaging in acts of bullying and sometimes bloody conflicts.”
 
“They lived in small wooden houses with four rooms and steep roofs placed side-by-side near Dutch, French and German families, much different from their clay houses scattered throughout the sunny countryside they left behind in Buchhianicio,” Di Menna writes.
 
The book talks about Sault Bucchianichese who excelled at sports, including boxer Umberto Li Labio and hockey player Carmine Tucci.
 
It talks about Sault Ste.Marie’s Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, built by Italian immigrants in the early 1900s and attended by many Bucchianichese who brought with them the popular religious celebrations for which Buchhianicio is known, particularly the feasts of Saint Camillo, Saint Urbano and Saint Antonio.
 
“After Sunday, it was customary for them to exchange visits like one extended family, driven by their social dependency and their need to preserve their identity,” Di Luzio writes in his introduction to the book’s English translation.
 
“They lived within a short distance of the Sault Ste. Marie canal and locks, where they gathered often, perhaps as a distraction from the hardships of daily life or simply for recreation where the men could try their hand at fishing for whitefish teeming in the St. Marys River.”
 
Back in Bucchianico, people are grateful for Di Luzio’s work in translating and publishing an English-language version of their local history.
 
“It never occurred to me that such an undertaking could be so easily performed by someone in Canada, albeit of Italian origin. For this, I remain most grateful to John, who this summer honoured us with his visit here in Bucchianico,” Giuliano Davide Di Menna wrote in a recent letter to Mayor Debbie Amaroso and city councillors.
 
“I am proud of the fact that one of our own hardworking Bucchianichese in the person of John Di Luzio has voluntarily translated the book of Bucchianico dedicated to our native town,” added Pino Muriana, president of the A.C. De Meis Cultural Association of Bucchianico.
 
“Through his work, he has provided a great service of encouragement to the new generations of Italians who live abroad, and are called upon to preserve the memory of their origins, within the framework of modern society.”

Di Luzio recently presented the city with a copy of Bucchianico: Images, Emotions, Memories.

If you're interested in a copy of the English translation for yourself or for holiday gifting, it sells for $30 (tax included) and can be obtained directly from John Di Luzio at [email protected] or 705-759-1996.
 

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David Helwig

About the Author: David Helwig

David Helwig's journalism career spans seven decades beginning in the 1960s. His work has been recognized with national and international awards.
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