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ITALIAN LIFE IN NEW YORK.

HE fact that Italian immigration is

and why, indeed, should not the architectural principle of beauty supplementing necessity be applied even to the daily

Teen factly on the increase in New round of hod be applied even to the daily

York makes it expedient to consider both Ligurian mountains is certainly a more the condition and status of these future picturesque object than Bridget from citizens of the republic. The higher walks Cork, and quite as worthy of incorporaof American life, in art, science, commerce, tion in our new civilization. She is a literature, and society, have, as is well better wife and mother, and under equal known, long included many talented and circumstances far outstrips the latter in charming Italians; but an article under that improvement of her condition evoked the above title must necessarily deal with by the activity of the New World. Her the subject in its lower and more recent children attend the public schools, and aspect. During the year 1879 seven thou- develop very early an amount of energy sand two hundred Italian immigrants were and initiative which, added to the quick landed at this port, one-third of which num- intuition of Italian blood, makes them valber remained in the city, and there are now uable factors in the population. That the over twenty thousand Italians scattered Italians are an idle and thriftless people among the population of New York. The is a superstition which time will remove more recently arrived herd together in from the American mind. A little kindcolonies, such as those in Baxter and Mott ly guidance and teaching can mould them streets, in Eleventh Street, in Yorkville, into almost any form. But capital is the and in Hoboken. Many of the most im- first necessity of the individual. Is it to portant industries of the city are in the be wondered at, therefore, that the poor hands of Italians as employers and em- untried souls that wander from their vilployed, such as the manufacture of mac- lage or mountain homes, with no advice aroni, of objects of art, confectionery, arti- but that of the parish priest, no knowlficial flowers; and Italian workmen may edge of the country to which they are gobe found everywhere mingled with those ing but the vague though dazzling rememof other nationalities. It is no uncom- brance that somebody's uncle or brother mon thing to see at noon some swarthy once went to Buenos Ayres and returned Italian, engaged on a building in process with a fortune, no pecuniary resource but of erection, resting and dining from his that which results from the sale of their tin kettle, while his brown-skinned wife little farms or the wife's heritage of gold sits by his side, brave in her gold ear- beads, and no intellectual capital but the rings and beads, with a red flower in her primitive methods of farming handed hair, all of which at home were kept for down by their ancestors, should drift into feast days. But here in America in- listless and hopeless poverty? Their emcreased wages make every day a feast igration is frequently in the hands of day in the matter of food and raiment; | shrewd compatriots, who manage to land

them on our shores in a robbed and plun- | hand struggle for bread of an overcrowddered condition.

On the other hand, the thrifty bourgeois who brings with him the knowledge of a trade, and some little capital to aid him in getting a footing, very soon begins to prosper, and lay by money with which to return and dazzle the eyes of his poorer neighbors, demoralizing his native town by filling its inhabitants with yearnings toward the El Dorado of "Nuova York." Such a man, confectioner, hairdresser, or grocer, purchases a villa, sets

ed city. Hence the papers of the peninsula teem with protests and warnings from the pens of intelligent Italians in America against the thoughtless abandonment of home and country on the uncertain prospect of success across the ocean.

The fruit trade is in the hands of Italians in all its branches, from the Broadway shop with its inclined plane of glowing color, to the stand at a street corner. Among the last the well-to-do fruit-merchant has a substantial wooden booth,

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up his carriage, and to all appearance pur- | which he locks up in dull times, removing poses spending his life in elegant leisure; but the greed of money-getting which he has brought back from the New World surges restlessly within him, and he breaks up his establishment, and returns to New York to live behind his shop in some damp, un wholesome den, that he may add a few more dollars to his store, and too often his avarice is rewarded by the contraction of a disease which presently gives his hard-earned American dollars into the hands of his relatives in Italy. There is an element of chance in the success of Italians which makes emigration with them a matter of more risk than with other nationalities of more prudence and foresight. The idyllic life of an Italian hill-side or of a dreaming medieval town is but poor preparation for the hand-to

his stock. In winter he also roasts chest-
nuts and pea-nuts, and in summer dis-
penses slices of water-melon and aqua
cedrata to the gamins of the New York
thoroughfares, just as he once did to the
small lazzaroni of Naples or the fisher-
boys of Venice. With the poorer mem-
bers of the guild the little table which
holds the stock in trade is the family
hearth-stone, about which the children
play all day, the women gossip over their
lace pillows, and the men lounge in the
lazy, happy ways of the peninsula.
night the flaring lamps make the dusky
faces and the masses of fruit glow in a
way that adds much to the picturesque-
ness of our streets. These fruit-merchants
are from all parts of Italy, and always
converse cheerfully with any one who

At

can speak their language, with the excep- | stamping patterns for artificial flowers, tion of an occasional sulky youth who de- an old Carbonaro who had left his counclines to tell where he came from, there- try twenty-two years before-one of the by inviting the suspicion that he has fled old conspirators against the Austrians to escape the conscription. That they who followed in the footsteps of Silvio suffer much during our long cold winters Pellico and the Ruffinis. He was grayis not to be doubted, but the patience of haired and gray-bearded, but his eyes their characters and the deprivations to flashed with the fire of youth when we which they have always been accustomed talked of Italy, and grew humid and make them philosophic and stolid. As bright when he told me of his constant soon as they begin to prosper, the fatalism longing for his country, and his feeling of poverty gives place to the elastic inde- that he should never see it again. It was pendence of success, and their faces soon a suggestive picture, this fine old Italian lose their characteristic mournfulness. I head, framed by the scarlet and yellow have seen young Italian peasants walking of the flowers about him, while the sunabout the city, evidently just landed, and light and the brilliant American air clad in their Sunday best-Giovanni in streamed over it from the open window, his broad hat, dark blue jacket, and leg- and two young Italians, dark-eyed and gings, and Lisa with her massive braids stalwart, paused in their work and came and gay shawl, open-eyed and wide- near to listen. It was the Italy of Eumouthed in the face of the wonderful civ- rope twenty years back brought face to ilization they are to belong to in the fu- face with the Italy of America to-day. ture. The elevated railroad especially In another room, pretty, low-browed Italseems to offer them much food for spec-ian girls were at work making leavesulation-a kind of type of the headlong girls from Genoa, Pavia, and other cities recklessness of Nuova York, so unlike the of the north, who replied shyly when adsleepy old ways of the market-town which dressed in their native tongue. Italians has hitherto bounded their vision. are especially fitted for this department of industry; indeed, their quick instinct for beauty shows itself in every form of delicate handiwork.

in their trades and callings. It is much to be regretted that the sins of a few turbulent and quarrelsome Neapolitans and Calabrians should be visited upon the heads of their quiet, gentle, and hardworking compatriots. All Italians are proud and high-spirited, but yield easily to kindness, and are only defiant and revengeful when ill-treated..

There are two Italian newspapers in New York-L'Eco d' Italia and Il Republicano. There are also three societies for mutual assistance-the "Fratellanza Ita- In the second generation many Italians liana," the "Ticinese," and the "Bersag- easily pass for Americans, and prefer to do lieri." When a member of the Fratel- | so, since a most unjust and unwarranted lanza dies, his wife receives a hundred prejudice against Italians exists in many dollars; when a wife dies, the husband | quarters, and interferes with their success receives fifty dollars; and a physicians provided for sick members of the society. It gives a ball every winter and a picnic in summer, which are made the occasion of patriotic demonstrations that serve to keep alive the love of Italy in the hearts of her expatriated children. Many of the heroes of '48 are to be found leading quiet, humble lives in New York. Many a one who was with Garibaldi and the Thousand in Sicily, or entered freed Venice with Victor Emanuel, now earns bread for wife and child in modest by-ways of life here in the great city. Now and then one of the king's soldiers, after serving all through the wars, drops down in his shop or work-room, and is buried by his former comrades, awaiting their turn to rejoin King Galantuomo.

There is something pathetically noble in this quiet heroism of work-day life after the glory and action of the past. I met the other day in a flower factory,

There are two Italian Protestant churches in the city, various Sundayschools, mission and industrial schools, into which the Italian element enters largely, established and carried on by Protestant Americans, chiefly under the auspices of the Children's Aid Society. The most noteworthy of these, as being attended exclusively by Italians, adults and children, is the one in Leonard Street.

Some four hundred boys and girls are under instruction in the afternoon and night schools, most of them being engaged in home or industrial occupations during

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four girls who are taught plain sewing and ornamental needle-work, including lace-making. I visited this class, and found a number of little girls employed with lace cushions, and the manufacture of simple artificial flowers. With these last they were allowed to trim the new straw hats that had just been given them. They were plump, cleanly little creatures, much better off in the matter of food and raiment than their contemporaries of the peninsula. The lace class has been in existence but a short time, and the specimens are still somewhat coarse and irregular, but there is no reason why it should not become as important a branch of industry among the Italian women of America as among those of Europe. The only wonder is that instruction in a calling which exists by inheritance in Italy should be needed here, as these girls are mostly from the villages of Liguria, of which Genoa is the sea-port, and might fairly be supposed to know something of the craft which has made Rapallo and Santa Margherita famous. Shirts for outside orders are also made in the school, and the girls receive the same wages for their labor as are offered by the shops. The attendants upon the school are mostly Ligurians, and repudiate indig

nantly all kinship with the Neapolitans or Calabrians, whom they refuse to recognize as Italians, thereby showing how little the sectional sentiment of Italy has been affected by the union of its parts under one ruler.

Under the guidance of a lady connected with the school, I explored Baxter and contiguous streets, nominally in search of dilatory pupils. Here and there a small girl would be discovered sitting on the curb-stone or in a doorway, playing jackstones, with her hair in tight crimps, preparatory to participation in some church ceremony. An Italian feminine creature of whatever age, or in whatever clime, stakes her hopes of heaven on the dressing of her hair. Her excuse for remaining away from school was that she had to "mind the stand," or tend the baby, while her mother was occupied elsewhere, and her countenance fell when she was reminded that she could have brought the baby to school. It was noticeable that all these children, who had left Italy early or were born here, had clear red and white complexions, the result of the American climate. We passed through courts and alleys where swarthy Neapolitans were carting bales of rags, and up dark stairs where women and children were sorting

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