Lindsay Marie Morris

Frank Bruno grew up in Pittsburg, California, hearing his grandmother's memories of Isola delle Femmine, a fishing village outside Palermo, Sicily. But he knew very little about the place and didn't think much about it. That was until 1992, when his friend, Vince DiMaggio, shared that he'd returned from his godparents' wedding vow renewal in the same town. Vince had spoken with Isola delle Femmine's then-Mayor Vincenzo DiMaggio about possibly having a Sister City relationship with Pittsburg.

 

Frank and Vince weren't alone in their ties to Isola delle Femmine; most of Pittsburg's Italian American population shared that connection. As President of the Pittsburg Chamber of Commerce, Frank was in a good position to take action. He asked Pittsburg's mayor, who agreed to the proposal, and then he reached out to officials in Sicily.

When Isola delle Femmine's mayor came to Pittsburg, he saw its iconic fisherman statue, sculpted by local artist Frank Vitale, whose grandparents came from Isola delle Femmine. He wanted one for his town, so Pittsburg community members raised funds to make it happen.

The sculptor still had the mold he used to build a replica that the Americans sent to Sicily. Today, you can find that statue at Isola delle Femmine's Piazza di Pittsburg, named for the town's original sister city.

That would have been the end of the story: a lasting connection made in honor of shared heritage. Frank moved to Novato, California, in 1997 and lost track of many of the people who were involved until 2017, the 25th anniversary of the Isola delle Femmine-Pittsburg delegation's first visit.

Frank and Vince returned to the fold, and a group from Isola delle Femmine joined the community for a reception. Two years later, Frank, Vince, and Vice President Mary Coniglio co-founded Friends of Isola delle Femmine with a mission statement to preserve, protect, and promote Sicilian-American heritage within Isola delle Femmine's California sister cities, which today number three after the 2017 and 2019 respective additions of Monterey and Martinez.

Frank, who serves as Friends of Isola delle Femmine's President, shared more about how and why Isolani emigrated to the U.S. and first landed in Pittsburg. We also discussed the organization's events, outreach, and evolution, as well as its challenges for the future.

Friends of Isola delle Femmine 1994 trip - Sal Caccaroni, John Buffo, Vince DiMaggio, Sculptor Frank Vitale, Frank Bruno, Mary Coniglio, Rocco Battaglia, and Vince Coniglio

 

 

How and why did Isola delle Femmine residents find their way to Pittsburg?

Back in the 1860s, when Garibaldi unified Italy, it did little to help the people in Sicily. They were still starving, and there was no work. One story was that they were so hungry they resorted to eating wheat plaster from the walls.

In 1862, two brothers from Isola delle Femmine with the last name Aiello came to New Orleans, where a big influx of Sicilians lived in the French Quarter.

They were trying to make a living fishing and cooking. After a Yellow Fever outbreak, they left Louisiana for Oregon, where they fished for salmon before seeing an advertisement from California. The state was looking for fishermen to come and help fish the delta to feed the people who came in for the Gold Rush. So the Aiellos got on a train and ended up in what is now called Pittsburg, California, on the Sacramento River. They started fishing and called for their family, saying, "Here in Pittsburg, the weather is like home. The fishing is abundant, and we're making money."

A lot of people started to come, and many of them worked and stayed here. Then, a lot of them went back home. Pittsburg was the fishing area, but there was seasonal fishing. So when the seasonal fishing went to the wayside, they went to Martinez and Monterey, and many of them stayed there while others went back to Pittsburg. So that was the influx, which is why we have three Sister Cities with Isola in our organization.

 

Describe your cultural exchange and promotion efforts.

Back in 1994, we started a student exchange program. We only did it twice. We sent high schoolers back there, and they went to school. Isola delle Feminine sent college students here, which became a vacation for them. And I said that's not what we really wanted to do as a student exchange program.

My idea, and we're trying to start this now, is to have something similar to what I'm involved in with the Rotary Club: a group study exchange. There would be dentists or any occupation that is here that wants to go. We would supplement, coordinate their stay over there, and have a little bit of money to help them there. But they would pay for their trip. They would go over to Isola and the Palermo area and vice versa.

We can do it with contractors, dentists, doctors, and many professional business people who would come back and forth. As for the cultural heritage stuff, we're working on doing what I call an ancestral fair, having an area where folk music and heritage stuff are going on, and then having booths. 

 

How have you connected with younger generations?

We're giving scholarships to our members' children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren who are going to college. We give out six; two years ago, we gave out 10. They would have to qualify normally by having a grade point average acceptable for college and writing a statement about what it was like growing up Italian. Then we have a picnic and give out our scholarships.

One of our roadblocks is passing on our cultural heritage to the younger generations. It's very difficult. They're proud to be Italian American, but that's where it ends. Now, all of us old-timers look at this as memories. Growing up in Pittsburg was one of the greatest childhoods anybody could have. I mean, it was just full of family everywhere.

 

We have functions, but not many younger people have come. Instead of trying to decide how to capture the younger generation and have them tell us what they're looking for, we're going to have a discussion and invite a number of our younger members who are 40 or 50 years old to ask them.

If we're going to succeed as a cultural heritage organization, we need to replace these people. I can't do this forever.

Scenes from Friends of Isola delle Femmine picnics

 

Tell us about your events.

We've had some fundraisers to fund administration, scholarships, and anything else we want to do. We've done pretty well. 

We started with a program back in 2019 called That's Italian. We had some opera singers, and we sang show tunes at a place called the Colombo Club in Oakland. About 565 people could sit down for dinner, and then upstairs, there is a banquet hall, bar, and stage. We had 200 people, and they went downstairs and had a nice Italian dinner. And then they came up, and we had this big show and a live auction.

 

After the pandemic, when the British Queen passed away, one of our members said, "Why don't we have a High Tea but Italian style?" We had one in Monterey and one in Pittsburg. We're finishing up our third one, which will be the last, and we're going in another direction.

 

Our summer picnic was designed to be something we used to do as kids and families. Here in Northern California, we have Mount Diablo, where we had Camp Curry and Marsh Creek, and we could swim and play baseball as a family. We wanted to do something similar and said, "Why don't we just give our scholarships out then?"

 

We are getting about 250 people, and we can showcase what we do and get new members out of that. We have an Italian who lives in Martinez and owns a catering company. He comes and does the pasta and salads, and then we cook sausage. The mayor of Martinez and the city council people come out, and they do the serving. 

 

What do you ultimately want to share with your community?

There are Italians and Sicilians from Isola here in Pittsburg, California, but not many. They've branched out to the other areas. What I want to accomplish for the community is to bring back our pride and heritage and continue to have that. We all want to remember what our nonnas and nonnos did for us when we were growing up. We're trying to put together a cookbook per se with all these recipes in our newsletter. But we want to do more cultural stuff to remember our grandparents and great-grandparents; hopefully, the next generation will be appreciative.

 

Frank Bruno with family at the celebration and unveiling of the Fisherman Statue and sister city in 1994

 

 

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Current archeological evidence suggests that humans first occupied Sicily around 17,000 years ago, which is far more recent than settlement to more remote places like Siberia or Australia. The question of why and how these early occupiers impacted Italy's largest island is at the heart of the Early Occupation of Sicily Project.

 

Led by Sicilian-born Washington University in St. Louis Assistant Archaeology Professor Ilaria Patania, alongside University of Connecticut Department of Anthropology Chair Professor Christian Tryon and a dedicated team of graduate students and alumni, the project seeks to answer questions about when humans first arrived in Sicily and their ecological impact.

 

Focusing on the region encompassing Syracuse and Ragusa, the Early Occupation of Sicily Project investigates why human settlement in Sicily lagged while examining whether early settlers influenced habitat changes and the extinction of species like tiny elephants and giant swans once found on the island.

The project combines geological mapping and underwater surveys to reconstruct ancient sea levels and migration routes. It has also gotten the local communities involved through citizen science initiatives focused on site preservation and research.

 

By exploring Sicily's archaeological past, researchers aim to connect historical migration patterns with today's climate-driven displacement issues. Perhaps it will also shed some light on solutions for our own future.

I recently spoke with Dr. Patania, who shared more about the project and her hopes for its outcome.

 

 

What inspired this project?

I've always done paleolithic archeology. I'm a geo-archeologist and an environmental archeologist by training. So, I'm really interested in how we can, as archeologists, contextualize. I'm less interested in what we produce and more in the environment we live in as humans, how we interact with it, and how we adapt to it. I have a very personal experience of traveling a lot and having to adapt to different places. I'm from a very warm place. I went to school in Boston, where it was very cold. And climate today is such a critical issue for everybody. My experience is that it impacts us no matter what. And it has impacted us.

 

One thing that I've also always been interested in is the very first wave of migrations of humans to a new place. It's not easy to arrive in a new landscape. How do they deal with it? What do they do? You need to know where water is, where food is, and what helped us because the reality is that we really moved a lot in a matter of a couple of hundreds of thousands of years. We colonized the entire planet, and we reached places that were almost unthinkable.

 

I think empathy is one of the things that allowed us to do this. The fact that other groups of Sapiens, Neanderthals, or Denisovans that were already on that landscape recognized their similarities with the newcomers. And they were able to help and guide us. And if we didn't have that, we wouldn't have been as successful at the very beginning.

 

Why are you studying southeastern Sicily in particular?

The reason why we're studying this area is more geological. This is an area on the African plate, not on the European plate, which means that tectonically speaking, it is quite stable, so there's no uprising of the coast. So, if you go to the north, all the coasts you see today are 80 to 160 meters higher than during the last glaciation, which means that where the first people arriving here walked is quite different from where it is today.

 

If you go to the southeastern portion, we have an uplift that goes between four and 12 meters, which is quite negligible. So we see something that was also seen by the first inhabitants, and it was pretty much in the same position. Of course, there was erosion and human impact, but more or less, we can reconstruct it.

 

Tell us about the time period you are researching and how Sicily looked.

This was a time period when the globe underwent glaciation. There's only a finite amount of water on Earth, and a lot of it is trapped in the ice caps, which means that the sea retreats during glaciations and comes back up. So, what is happening today with the rising sea levels? They're rising because the ice is melting, right? The opposite was true for the last glaciation, which was the time when the first humans arrived in Sicily. This means we are working on a landscape 100 meters to 120 meters farther offshore. These people had way more land to deal with to accommodate them.

 

Another piece of the puzzle is that because of that sea retreat, the island of Sicily was connected to the mainland of Italy, creating an actual land bridge, but also to the island of Malta, where there was another quite large bridge. Sicily was in the middle of this highway, which possibly brought people to Malta through Sicily. So that is one of the big questions: Did people come through Sicily and go to Malta? We are pretty sure that people came from Italy to Sicily.

 

At this point, the earliest homo sapiens in Northern Africa were from 300,000 years ago. Homo sapiens started coming out of Africa, traveling up the Levant. Eventually, they spread to places like Siberia 45,000 years ago.

 

Yet, there was nothing in the Mediterranean. At least they were getting their feet wet in that same sea and walking around that basin, yet they were not able to colonize the islands even if they could see them. And it might not be a matter of seafaring because between 65,000 and 45,000 years ago, we know that they could seafare the ocean because they arrived in Australia.

 

But they didn't seem able to colonize this basin. Most scholars agree that the reason why is the low trophic level and the strong and unpredictable currents of the Mediterranean.

So, the current hypothesis is that we cannot settle these landscapes unless we have the knowledge of goats and sheep, for example, if we bring them or grain with us and we start growing things. This seems to be true for most of the islands except Sicily—possibly because Sicily is so large—that if you have a small enough population, you might be able to survive.

 

Questions still open are: Did Sicily have such a small population that it took so long to really populate this island and colonize it? How long did it take us to move from one side to the other and eventually into Malta if we ever did that?

 

What impact did early humans have on Sicily's environment and vice-versa?

People think of humans in the past as being in tune with nature. In reality, that's not true. Humans are destructive at different degrees. Of course, our civilization today is one of the most destructive for the planet because of sheer numbers and the kind of technology we have that requires certain things. But we've always been like that. For example, when we arrived in pristine environments, we often hunted, killed off many animals, and eventually created a cascade effect and mass extinctions. So our questions are, did we do that in Sicily, and how did we do it?

 

Part of the work involves diving to find hidden evidence.

What methods have you used to trace human dispersal?

Our protocol has several steps. We start with archival work. This landscape hasn't really been studied a lot, scientifically speaking. This is a landscape where Greek and Roman archeology is way more popular and makes more money, touristically speaking. But that doesn't mean that local people are not interested in it.

 

There have been a few local vocational archeologists who have spent their entire lives after work and on their weekends walking this landscape. And a few of them actually did a great job of recording everything that they found. So we're going through all of the local publications, small historical bulletins in towns, et cetera, and trying to catalog as many of these finds from vocational archeologists as possible. Then we try to find them again, and we assess them in a very archeological way if we know that people have already excavated some sites. And we try to find the collections in the museums, and we analyze those.

 

We have found and analyzed two collections fully. During our foot surveys, we try to look at all of the caves that we find. So, while we relocate the other caves, we are also exploring new caves and trying to see if there's anything promising.

 

Underwater, we take a very similar approach. We start from the archival. We also do surveys. We walk the coast, swim or snorkel in certain areas, and dive in others.

 

We use a lot of citizen scientists. We have trained people to recognize stone tools and fossils. And so we ask every year we go back if they found anything. We have a reporting system in place for the underwater. This has worked particularly well.

 

What do you hope people take away from your research?

Archaeology is all about pretty objects like the Vase Museum. I don't think that's what archeology is. I think it's really about who we are as humans. 

 

I think empathy is a big part of our survival, especially when it comes to successful migrations, occupying new territories, and exploring new things. We, as a community, have accomplished a lot. We've always found a way to survive and go on. But at the same time, we've also very often destroyed the landscape around us, so we could learn from that.

A colleague the other day said something that really struck me: "We can't science ourselves out of this climate crisis, but we can definitely anthropology our way out."

 

Scientifically speaking, this climate crisis is indeed happening and is caused by humans. The issue, to me, is around how people react to this fact, and that is something we can look at through anthropology and archaeology.

 

We often forget the value of knowing our past and learning about it. I think the Paleolithic is a good place to start because it's stripped of the pretty flashy objects that often take attention away from the core issues. 

 

 

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