May 13, 2019 Still looking at itinerary

The plan for Tuesday, May 21 is to visit our grandmother’s ancestral village in Mendicino, Italy.  We will have a private driver whose name is Domenico.  He will meet us in the hotel lobby at 9:00 a.m. He is a heritage specialist.  We have sent him some advance research of what we know of Rosaria and Carolina Reda.  He will have taken that and seen what else he could discover in the town records.  We’ll have lunch near our ancestral village.

It looks to be a little over an hour drive north and slightly east of where we will be in Pizzo.  It’s not on the coast.

The region of Italy we will be in is Calabria, the boot of Italy.  It has five provinces: Catanzaro (regional capital), Reggio Calabria, Cosenza, Crotone and Vibo Valentia.  Pizzo is in Vibo Valentia and Mendicino is in Cosenza.

To give a very brief condensed view of Italian immigration, the best I understand it now, southern Italy (Calabria) was settled by the Greeks in 800 BC and it was known as Magna Graecia.   As the Romans extended their grasp farther south, the Greeks were eventually conquered and Magna Graecia became part of the Roman Empire. Eventually the Normans ruled Calabria until Italy was unified in 1861. This is also known as Risorgimento.  After this, a great migration began. 

According to a Web site by Joe Giordano, "The south of Italy, the Mezzogiorno, spoke different languages, had been dominated for centuries by foreign powers, and had distinct cultures. Many in the north of Italy held southern Italians in disdain. The policies imposed by the north turned economic conditions in the already poor south dreadful. The lack of jobs and the threat of starvation compelled many to seek work in North and South America, and people became Italy’s most successful export."

My great grandmother, Rosaria Reda, came over from Italy through Ellis Island arriving on the ship Calabria on May 11, 1903.  That was 116 years ago.  She was 26 years old, coming to the U.S.A. to Portland, Oregon, to marry a friend of her sister Carolina's husband, Dominic, Francisco Lombardi.  She actually married him 8 days later on May 19, 1903.  

She would go on to have several children, one of whom was my grandfather, Frank Lombardi, my dad's dad.

We will see what we will learn in Rosaria and Carolina's home town.