“ It was spring 2007 when I started photographing inside Caffé Sicilia. I had been a semi-regular patron for about 8 years so I was already familiar to many of the regulars – mostly men, most of Sicilian heritage; fishermen, stone masons, tile masons, businessmen, plasterers, house painters and electricians. Still, we were all wary when I began showing up every morning with my camera. They were suspicious of my motivations and I was timid, worrying about being intrusive: for quite a while it felt like we were on an extended, awkward first date. But as is often the case, sharing time together produced a mutual curiosity which wore these barriers down. I and my camera became as much a part of the morning routine as the clattering and tinkling of espresso cups and spoons, the hissing of steamed milk, the clanging thuds of the braccio slamming against the metal drawer to empty out the spent grounds, the caffeine rush, the morning cornetti, European football on TV and above all else, soaring above all else, those voices speaking Sicilian, all at once, rolling up and down, one louder than the other, insistent, confrontational, passionate, playful, flowing and crashing and ebbing and flowing like Gloucester sea waves through the air across the room.
The reason I first brought my camera into the Caffé was to teach myself how to shoot digitally. I had been photographing with film for 30 plus years and I figured that the people, the activity and the smallness of the space would provide me with a good learning situation. (This, in fact, is how I taught myself photography in the first place – experimenting with a camera on the streets of Boston and in the shops of the Inman Square neighborhood of Cambridge, MA where I lived in the mid 1970’s.) I really didn't get it at first. I didn’t understand how complex and rich this little, unassuming Caffé was. I wasn’t tuned in to the depth of culture, personality, and life that existed here. I didn’t understand, to paraphrase the poet Charles Olson, that Caffé Sicilia was itself “Polis.” And I never anticipated that such a deep mutual respect and affection would develop.
Gloucester, Massachusetts was founded in 1623 by a group of men from Dorset, England called the “Dorchester Company.” It is the oldest fishing port in the United States. At one time it was the largest fishing port in the western hemisphere. By the late 19th century Gloucester had become the leading producer of salt-cured fish in America and the salt that gave the best, most reliable results in this process came on salt barks from the city of Trapani, on the western coast of Sicily.
At about this same time, after a long and contentious series of events in Europe, the Italian Unification was completed. The new Italian Kingdom quickly established a set of laws and taxes favoring the North. Southern Italians were so incensed by their new government that a massive emigration took place reducing the Italian population by a third. Many came to the United States. Among those were fishermen from Sicilian fishing ports who had heard the news, brought back by the salt barks, about Gloucester’s thriving fishing industry. By 1930 Italians made up the second largest group of immigrants in Gloucester.
After World War II and again in the 1960’s and 1970’s hard economic times in Italy produced additional waves of emigration. Many more Sicilian immigrants arrived in Gloucester, predominantly from the three port cities of Terrasini, Sciacca and Porticello. Parents, husbands, wives, sons, daughters and cousins came to stay with relatives who were already here. Others came alone then sent for family members still living in Sicily to join them in the U.S. Most of the men worked on fishing vessels and related services. The women took care of the home, raised families, found work in fish processing facilities and opened their own businesses. In recent years the fishing fleet in Gloucester has fallen on very hard times so the men have found work for themselves as cooks, masons, house-painters, plasterers, mechanics and contractors. They have become activists, forces to be reckoned with in matters of fishermen’s rights, fishing regulations and city governance. They still speak to one another in their native language and they keep their most cherished traditions alive by passing them down from generation to generation. Today, Sicilians make up about a third of the city’s population. They have both assimilated into the Gloucester community and shaped its personality.
Among those who immigrated to Gloucester in the 1960’s was Paolo Ciaramitaro, a young teenager brought here by his father who came looking for work. When Paolo graduated from Gloucester High School he became a fisherman. After living here nearly 10 years and becoming a U.S. citizen Paolo left for Sicily to marry his childhood sweetheart, Anna Bonnano. He brought Anna back to Gloucester and continued working on local fishing boats for another 8 years. Then, in 1989, Anna and Paolo opened Caffé Sicilia at 40 Main Street on the corner of Short Street in the area known as the “West End” of Gloucester, Massachusetts, USA.
The interior of Caffé Sicilia measured approximately 600 square feet. It was divided into 3 separate areas: kitchen, service and caffe seating. The front door, which was located kitty corner between Main Street and Short Street, opened directly into the tiny caffe area which held 6 tables and 18 chairs. It was only 10 feet wide and 23 feet long. When you went there you had to be willing to share your space with others.
By the time I began photographing inside their coffee shop Anna and Paolo had been doing all the baking, serving, purchasing, delivering and cleaning by themselves for 18 years. It was a two person operation. They had no employees. The Caffé was open 7 days a week 52 weeks a year from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. except on Sundays, Christmas day and Easter day when they closed at 1 p.m. They did take a week off here and there and occasionally, very occasionally, they took off an entire month. They had worn themselves out. Anna’s hands, wrists and elbows were damaged from all the years of kneading and rolling dough. Paolo became short-tempered. The Caffé itself was looking sad and neglected. Some of the regular patrons were no longer coming or they were coming less frequently. One day I taped one of my photographs over a stain on one of the walls - with Paolo’s permission. A few days later I taped another, then another, until, over the course of a year nearly every wall was covered by a mosaic of the photographs I had been taking at the Caffé. This unintended decorating scheme stimulated many animated discussions and brought a new spurt of life to the coffee shop. It also led to the idea of this book. But it didn’t obscure the reality that Paolo and Anna were selling the building and with it, Caffé Sicilia. Many of us began to talk in mournful terms about the impending loss of “our” Caffé.
In 1972, four years after Paolo Ciaramitaro came to the U.S., a 12 year old girl named Antonina (Nina) Purpura arrived in Gloucester with the rest of her family from Terrasini, Sicily. A few months after her arrival Dominic D’Amico, a 17 year old teenager from Porticello, Sicily was brought here by his mother. Nina and Dominic met one another by hanging out in the same crowd. Five years later, in 1977, they married. Dominic worked as a fisherman for 30 years. He sold his boat in a government buy-back in 1996 as the fishermen’s ability to earn a living was collapsing under the weight of federal regulations. Nina worked as a hairdresser, opened her own electrolysis business and raised their 3 children. In 1996 their oldest daughter, Maria, went to Sicily to study fashion design in Palermo. She stayed for five years, living in her grandmother’s house in Terrasini. During her stay in Terrasini she met an electrician by the name of Giuseppe Cracchiolo. In 2003 Giuseppe immigrated to Gloucester. He and Maria got married. Giuseppe became one of the regulars at Caffé Sicilia. Six years later, following a great deal of brainstorming, business planning and passionate family discussions, the D’Amicos and Cracchiolos put in a bid to buy the Caffe. On August 15, 2009, Maria Cracchiolo and her mother Nina D’Amico became the new owners of Caffé Sicilia.
Our little slice of “Polis” was saved! It had escaped the grasp of things relegated to the past by being handed over from one Sicilian Gloucester family to another, from one generation to the next.
Many of the photographs in this book were taken during the time between Caffé Sicilia’s near demise and its resurrection. A few of the images were taken on the sidewalk in front of the Caffé but everything else was photographed inside the small, narrow coffee shop. They are indeed intimate images; candid portraits of my Sicilian American neighbors and their culture. But they are also about our city of Gloucester and the American experience early in the twenty first century. And they are about the power of photography to illuminate the struggles and joys that are universal in human experience. “
Paul Cary Goldberg
December, 2013
Tutta la Famiglia : THE FACES OF CAFFE SICILIA
By Frank Viviano
Faces are more than our principal guise, the outward self that we share with the world. They are also narratives, endowed with an eloquence greater than words. The documents that pretend to define us, in the dry language and numbers of bureaucracy -- birth certificates, driver’s licenses, Social Security cards, passports -- record the public itineraries that brought Caffe Sicilia’s owners and clients from Old World Sicily to Atlantic New England. But the extraordinary faces in Paul Cary Goldberg’s Tutta la Famiglia chart private journeys, maps and archives of what lies below the surface.
A young mother gazes into her infant’s eyes, oblivious to the crowd that surges around her. A brooding smoker, lost in thought, pauses in the street outside the caffe’s doors. Inside, a weary painter trudges through imagined landscapes. A venerable gentleman, elegantly dressed, surrenders himself to reveries of the past. It is remarkable how many of the faces in Tutta la Famiglia seem immersed in solitude, even as boisterous arguments and laughter fill the air.
I know the mysterious depths of that solitude. I know those faces. They oversaw my own childhood as the firstborn American grandson of immigrants from Terrasini, one of three Sicilian fishing ports, along with Sciacca and Porticello, that are the ancestral homes of Gloucester Italians.
Viewed from the sea, the coastal towns of Sicily resemble post- Impressionist landscapes: pastel cubes and abstract splashes of palm and citrus huddled against a backdrop of opaque cliffs. A far cry from Massachusetts. Yet Caffe Sicilia’s weathered faces, infused with the natural dignity imparted by hard experience, speak of endless resonances with the Old World. They belong to pescatori, muratori, and the descendants of viddani. Fishermen, stone masons, and tillers of the land, masters of ancient Sicilian trades. Without words, they speak of time- honored skills passed on across generations, grueling labor, an unforgiving sun in summer, and brutal winter storms.
But to understand the Sicilian character fully, to navigate its hidden currents, is to accept a peculiar contradiction. As Paul Goldberg’s evocative portraits visibly demonstrate, there is no such thing as a classic Sicilian beauty, no typically Sicilian face. Blondes and redheads with blue eyes are as bonafide Terrasinese as my brunette, brown-eyed parents.
There are too many ingredients in the Sicilian melting pot for the simple generalizations implied in terms like “classic” and “typical.” The gene pool is almost infinite, the physical permutations inexhaustible. Therein lies the essential, inalterable heart of Sicilianità, “Sicilianness.”
Consider the pastries of Caffe Sicilia, arrayed in their display cases like precious gems in the window of a high-society jeweler. Sicilian dessert creations are almost hopelessly complex, with layers of suggestion and subtext as intricately constructed as Sicilian identity. A Sicilian pastry shop -- and for that matter, the entire Sicilian menu, from antipasto and primo to secondo, contorno, and dolce -- is a dazzling exercise in culinary globalism.
My Terrasini grandmothers’ pantry shelves were stocked with the candied rinds of orange, lemon, and watermelon; with dried chestnuts, sultanas and currants, pine nuts, almonds and pistachios; with blocks of chocolate in several contending degrees of amarezza (bitterness) and dolcezza (sweetness). Their spice racks were rainbows of startling color: the electric yellow of turmeric, the golden red of saffron, the rich magenta maroon of cinnamon sticks. It would astound me if the kitchen stores of Caffe Sicilia were any different. The present owners, like their predecessors, had Terrasini mothers and grandmothers.
None of the ingredients on those shelves is native to Europe. Many have origins in North Africa, only one hundred miles south of Sciacca. Some hail from as far away as India and China. They were introduced to the West in the harbors of Siracuse and Palermo by Greek and Levantine merchants, after journeys across half the planet on the backs of camels or in the holds of Persian dhows, Arab feluccas, Portuguese caravels, and Spanish galleons.
By some accounts the coffee bean, which has it botanical origins on the shores of the Red Sea, made its first European appearance in Sicily, although that honor is also claimed by Venice. What can’t be disputed, at least in my half century of experience as a foreign correspondent on five continents, is that nobody serves a more memorable espresso than a barista from the province of Palermo, where Porticello and Terrasini lie.
Its apotheosis, intensely concentrated and ferociously potent, is described by some Sicilians as ristretto (restrained) and by others as discreto (discreet). In the tasting, it is neither. The bean is so darkly roasted and the steaming so volcanic that each serving triggers a head- spinning explosion. Sicilians don’t linger over an espresso any more than a Scot would linger over a wee measure of prime whisky. They belt it straight down in a single gulp.
This is food and drink as botanical and genealogical history. A Sicilian family tree. Its myriad branches trace the lineage of that peculiar contradiction: there is a classic Sicilian sensibility evident at every table in Caffe Sicilia, a paradoxical universe where sudden bursts of uninhibited joy just as suddenly lapse into pensive solitude. But there is no such thing as a singularly Sicilian face.
Roughly thirty-five hundred years ago, Sicily was inhabited by three tribes, the Elymi, the Sicani and the Siculi, who may have been the first indigenous Sicilians and the last with an unambiguous DNA. Sometime in the eleventh century BC, Phoenician colonists from Anatolia landed not far from the villages that later became Terrasini and Portcello. Sicilian history for the following twenty-one centuries is a blur of endless invasions.
Every major power to rise in Europe, western Asia and Africa over that two-millennial span found Sicily irresistible. Its ten-thousand-square- mile landmass, almost precisely the size of Massachusetts, made it the largest and most strategic island in the Mediterranean. Its hardwood forests, blanketing the mountainous interior, were a treasure trove for the shipyards of a dozen empires. Its valleys, blessed with fertile soil and Europe’s sunniest skies, produced two bumper harvests of grain per year. Its sun-drenched coastal plain was a paradise of vineyards and olive groves, lemons and oranges. The fathomless narrows that separate it from Africa and mainland Europe teemed with fish.
Around twenty-eight hundred years ago, in the Age of Homer, the Greeks arrived and spent the next five centuries constructing monumental temples and cities. By the end of the third century BC, many of them lay in ruins, sacked by the armies of Rome and its chief rival, Hannibal’s Carthage, in relentless wars. Rome emerged victorious in 146 BC, and Sicily served as its granary for another half-millennium. Now the blur accelerates, with wave after wave of invaders: Barbaric hordes of Franks, Ostrogoths and Vandals. The Byzantine Greeks ruled from Constantinople until Arab emirs conquered the island in the ninth century. The Norman French seized power in the mid-eleventh century, and Sicily experienced a golden age of harmonious coexistence among the Roman Catholic Norman knights, Muslim Arab farmers and cavalrymen, Greek Orthodox ceramicists and mariners, Jewish scientists and scholars.
The golden age collapsed with the death of the last Norman king in 1194, to be replaced in brutal sequence by rulers from Hohenstaufen Germany, French Anjou, the Kingdom of Aragon, the Spanish crown in Madrid, a decade-long struggle for control between various Austrian factions, and finally (or almost so), a Spanish Bourbon dynasty which reigned from Naples until 1860 -- apart from an interlude during the Napoleonic Wars, when the Royal Navy took command and Sicily was governed by Admiral Horatio Nelson.
One result was the exotic Sicilian menu. Nearly every invader stormed ashore with foreign cargoes of fruits, nuts, vegetables, herbs, spices, and beverages. The Vikings introduced salt cod from the North Atlantic. Latin American foodstuffs, imported by Spanish aristocrats, would ultimately transform the entire world’s palate: the chili pepper, the potato, and the tomato -- and above all, from the perspective of the Caffe Sicilia pastry display, chocolate.
As early as the sixteenth century, returning Spanish conquistadores were bringing sacks of the aromatic substance known to the Maya and Aztecs as “xocóatl” to their estates in Sicily. Today, there are still Sicilian chefs who produce chocolate using methods employed by Meso-Americans two thousand years ago. In the city of Modica, 120 miles east of Sciacca, meats and poultry are traditionally braised in a thick sauce of chili peppers and chocolate, an unmistakable echo of the famous mole negro (black chocolate sauce) of Oaxaca in southern Mexico.
Another result of the millennial blur is speech. Like its food and its genealogy, Sicily’s “indigenous” tongue is a cascade of unexpected riffs on all of its conquerors’ languages. French adjectives are marshaled in support of Greek nouns. Salutations in mountain villages are often in Latin. Fish carry names coined in Scandinavia, vegetables in North African Berber and Arabic. In Palermo, a friend of mine likes to say, “a different dialect Yis spoken in every room of every house.”
But it is the third, and profoundly unsettling, result of endless invasion that brings us to the core of Sicilian identity.
“For over twenty-five centuries we’ve borne the weight of grand and heterogeneous civilizations, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own,” observes the protagonist of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, the bible of Sicilianità. They are “incomprehensible to us, because we didn’t build them. Yet they have formed our character.”
Every Sicilian is shadowed by “a unique psychological and moral ambiguity,” declares Gesualdo Bufalino, another of the island’s long list of brilliant poets and writers. And “every Sicilian is marked by an emphatic solitude.”
The tensions implicit in that enigmatic character, born in the long succession of foreign despots, were amplified by a parallel series of insurrections, chronicled as long ago as the Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth century before Christ.
Most of them changed nothing.
On May 11, 1860, two hijacked steamships drop anchor offshore from Marsala, a city of wine merchants at the very western tip of Sicily, roughly equidistant from Terrasini and Sciacca. They carry one thousand armed militants under the leadership of the lifelong revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi, who aims at unifying an Italian nation-state that will stretch from Palermo to Turin.
This invasion will change everything, perhaps forever, although no one knows it at the time.
The Thousand march eastward, joined en route by three thousand young Sicilians -- i picciotti, “the kids” -- among them three of my great-great- grandfathers. Their ragtag battalions climb a hill above the town of Calatafimi on May 15, then charge into the ranks of a professionally trained Bourbon army. To the astonishment of both sides, the Bourbons are routed and less than two weeks later Garibaldi is in command of Palermo.
For continental Italians, Calatafimi is the keystone of nationhood, Italy’s equivalent to America’s July Fourth and France’s Bastille Day. For Sicilians, its consequences will be a disaster. Northerners quickly unseat the moribund Bourbon aristocracy, taking control of vast but anachronistic estates that up to now have relied on manual labor.
Agricultural production is modernized, along with the fishing and building industries. In the same years, a sinister criminal institution, with local roots but reorganized to deliver the efficiencies of a modern corporation, grows in the countryside and cities. Although it will assume other names -- the Black Hand, the Mafia, Cosa Nostra -- Sicilians simply refer to it as il Sistema, “the System.”
Their livelihoods decimated by modernization and violent crime, both in the name of profit, the viddani, pescatori, and muratori are caught in the jaws of an unyielding vice. They are pressed by taxes they cannot pay levied by yet another ruling class of outsiders, the young Italian state in Rome. A state that ignores the cancerous growth of il Sistema.
By 1891, grinding poverty is rampant and the island is awash in landless families, when a violent insurgency breaks out in the mountains above Terrasini and Porticello. In 1894, Prime Minister Francesco Crispi ships forty thousand troops to Sicily, the largest Italian military force deployed before World War I. It crushes the uprising with savage brutality.
At a stroke, the incoming waves that have defined Sicilian history for three millennia are now reversed. History is turned on its head.
In a human tsunami that exceeds two million people by 1920, entire families embark for the Americas. Emigration will continue, almost unremittingly, to the present day. It will ebb and flow on the deep currents that define Sicilian identity -- the weight of the past, natural dignity, and enigmatic solitude.
It will bring the men and women who populate Tutta la Famiglia to Gloucester.
Frank Viviano is the author of seven books, including "BLOOD WASHES BLOOD," a personal history of Sicilian America. His articles have appeared in National Geographic Magazine, the NY Times, the NY Review of Books, the San Francisco Chronicle, and La Repubblica.