Dear Readers,
May jottings with an Italian Connection:
Mother’s Day, Sunday, May 14th, calls for a toast. Here is one shared with me by the late Frank Befera of Duluth, Minnesota: “Here’s to the happiest hours of my life, spent in the arms of another man’s wife: my mother!”
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Mother’s Day is a modern American invention, created by a West Virginia schoolteacher whose devotion to her own mother was augmented by what she saw as the ill-treatment of many elders by their children. When Anna Jarvis’ mother died in 1905, she petitioned ministers, businessmen, and Congressmen to support a national day honoring mothers. Three years later, West Virginia became the first state to proclaim a national day of observance, and within a year, the rest of the nation followed suit.
In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson officially established the second Sunday of May as Mother’s Day.
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Antonio Meucci was finally recognized as the first inventor of the telephone (1849) by the United States Congress in its resolution numero 269, presented by Congressman Vito Fosella in 2002. Unfortunately, many of the fathers and grandfathers who told us disbelieving Italian-American bambini this factual bit of history, are no longer around to revel in this belated recognition and proudly say: “I told you so.”
Meucci was born in 1808 in San Frediano, near Florence, Italy. He was a highly inquisitive individual and, with two lifelong friends (Lorenzo Salvi, a distinguished tenor, and Ester Mochi, a skilled dressmaker who became his wife) he decided to sail to Cuba to further their careers in opera, as this form of art was rapidly advancing on the island. On October 5, 1835, they boarded the Coccodrillo, a former pirate ship, joined by eighty-one passengers, and arrived in Havana, Cuba, on December 16.
Meucci’s first job was to work on the new opera house, including improvements to the proposed acoustics. His life in Cuba was a happy one and he stayed there for over 13 years.
In 1848, a historic event occurred: the human voice instigated by Meucci was transmitted through wires. For his invention, Meucci was inspired by necessity. His wife suffered severely from arthritis and spent most of her time in her bedroom. His initial telephone, crude as it may have been, allowed Meucci to communicate with his wife, from her bedroom to his office. By 1850, Meucci had decided to move to New York City to devote more time to advancing his telephone designs rather than following his technical opera expertise.
Circa 1876, Antonio learned that Alexander Graham Bell had been awarded a telephone patent and realized that Bell had stolen his telephone design. After years of debate, the US Circuit Court in New York City decided, in 1887, in favor of Bell. Meucci had filed a patent caveat for a telephone in 1871, but patent caveats were supposed to be renewed annually. He did not do so, allowing Bell to obtain a patent in March 1887.
We little Italian-American bambini never heard or read a word about Meucci in school. Thanks to the Italian press, though, the old-timers knew that Meucci was robbed.
Antonio Meucci’s home on Staten Island has been preserved and is called Garibaldi-Meucci Museum. Garibaldi, the unifier of Italy, was a guest at Meucci’s home for a time.
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King Vittorio Emanuele III ascended to the Royal Italian throne in 1900, abdicated on May 9, 1946, and was exiled in 1948. A quiet, unimaginative family man, Vittorio Emanuele was notoriously indecisive on matters of state and proved only too willing to let Benito Mussolini, his aggressive, strong-willed Prime Minister, run things.
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Florence Nightingale was born on May 12, 1820, in Florence, Italy. She was called “the lady with the lamp,” because at night this English nurse carried a lamp through a hospital filled with wounded soldiers during the Crimean War (1854). She was the subject of Santa Filomena, a poem by Longfellow. The founder of scientific nursing, she died in 1910.
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Ignazio Silone, the author of Fontamara, wrote most of his books after his break with communism. They are bitter, tragicomic stories of the life of Italian peasants attempting to resist the inroads on their lives by the corrupt officialdom of the Fascist era. He is venerated first of all as a political fighter who defied the Fascists first and then the Communists. He weathered conspiracy and exile and never failed to cry out against oppression.
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