Lindsay Marie Morris

When Sarah Campise Hallier's father unexpectedly passed away in 2012, she realized she didn't have much information about his side of the family or her Sicilian roots. It awakened a passion for genealogy, and in 2019, her research led her to a distant Texas cousin, Ross Todaro, Jr., who had recently co-founded a group called Poggioreale in America (PIA).

Ross invited Sarah to a reunion in College Station, Texas, organized for people like her, descendants of Poggioreale, Sicily. There, she encountered 300 people who shared her connection to the Trapani Province town.

Later that year, she traveled to Sicily on a Poggioreale in America-sponsored trip. Fifteen people stayed for nine nights in the 500-person town. Each day, the group was bused to a different Sicilian locale, allowing Sarah to see the island's western side. She also saw the remains of her great-great-grandfather's house at Poggioreale's original site, now a ghost town.

More than 200 people died in a 1968 Belice Valley earthquake. It decimated Poggioreale and forced the evacuation of about 4,000 residents. Some moved to a newly erected village just over two miles south. Others relocated elsewhere in Sicily. But many left Italy completely, heading to the United States and Australia.

Thus began a second major wave of Poggiorealesi emigration, seven decades after the first. About 4 million Italians—most from the south and Sicily—arrived in the U.S. between 1890 and 1920. Many fled rural poverty after Italy's Risorgimento; others followed family and job opportunities. The Poggioreale diaspora settled in New Orleans, Texas's Brazos Valley, and, in the case of Sarah's family, Fresno, California. 

After that first reunion and Sicily visit, Ross and co-founder Tina Anderson asked Sarah to join the PIA team. She's served on the board for five years and is currently the managing editor. It's a natural fit for the writer and Appetito magazine associate editor. But Sarah wears many hats.

In addition to managing the quarterly newsletter and helping oversee website and social media communications, she's helped with reunions and the college scholarship fund. The group raised $15,000 in 2022 and 2023 for college students who are also descendants of Poggioreale.

"The sense of community is important to me, especially with my dad not here anymore," Sarah says.

She continues to help grow the organization, hoping to strengthen the Poggiorealesi community across generations.

Sarah Campise Hallier with PIA co-founders Ross Todaro and the late Tina Anderson.

Tell us more about Poggioreale's history.

The town itself was established in 1642, and we can trace my family back that far. In 1968, a devastating earthquake in Sicily affected Gibellina, Salaparuta, and Poggioreale.

There's a lot of controversy surrounding that earthquake. It was pretty devastating in Poggioreale. When we interviewed the people in the town who never left, they said the government came in and decided that the town was uninhabitable. So, the government established barracks at the foot of the hill.

For the better part of 15 years, the families would sleep in the barracks at night, but during the day, they would travel back up to the town, go into their houses, cook, and just hang out in the piazza. There are still people in the town who lived through this and are still alive.

One Poggioreale resident told me, "The concrete unions came in and built a new town at the base of the hill." Many survivors of the earthquake still live in the new town, but the ghost town up on the hill is a reminder of the sadness from over 50 years ago.

Some say the town probably could have been salvaged had it gotten into the right hands, but the government is now helping the town turn it into a tourist destination. They've started a little museum and renovations in some of the buildings so that tourists can visit safely.

Sarah Campise Hallier and her brother, Dr. John Campise, in Poggioreale Antica in front of the ruins of their great-great-grandfather Mariano Campisi's birthplace. 

What are PIA's future plans?

Poggioreale in America, Junior is a subdivision of PIA. They worked with the board to create the college scholarship program, and they're trying to grow that right now. It's been stagnant over the past year, but recent donations have sparked an interest in revamping the program for this coming year.

A PIA 2023 calendar was sold to raise funds for the college scholarship program.

What keeps you involved?

I had my Italian citizenship recognized in 2021 through the San Francisco Consulate via the Italian Jure Sanguinis law. I've been an amateur genealogist for decades, learning it all from my mom. While I was growing up, I watched her traipsing through cemeteries—all of the stuff you did before the internet came around to find out your family history. So, the genealogical perspective is probably what I enjoy the most—being able to find your roots. I do a lot of work with expanding our family tree and helping others within the organization do that, too—just as a fun side project. But I just feel a connection to the part of it that brings us all together.

Reunion organizers Marilyn and Jack Henley, Jack Anderson (husband of late President Tina Anderson), Anna and AJ Tusa (owners of Briquette Restaurant), Cav. Pietro Maniscalco from Australia, Father Rigoli (Pastor Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church), and Sarah Campise Hallier at the 2025 PIA Reunion in New Orleans

It's absolutely amazing that thousands of people all over the United States came from this small town in Sicily. My daughter attends UT Austin. She was born and raised in California, and did a blind roommate pairing during her first year in college. In the first couple of weeks of being in her dorm, she found out that her roommate's great-grandparents also came from Poggioreale. We've been trying to figure out if we are related or not.

Little things like that make you think, "Wow, it's pretty incredible," and to just be able to get together... I've been able to meet first cousins I never knew I had.

Sarah Campise Hallier's Campise cousins at the 2023 PIA Reunion in Bryan, Texas

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Known for its now-defunct sardine canneries that inspired John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, Monterey, California, has a rich history as a fishing community. Communities have fished the area for thousands of years, with contributions spanning from indigenous communities to Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, and Italian (primarily Sicilian) fishermen. The latter of whom are celebrated by the Italian Heritage Society of the Monterey Peninsula.

Founded in 1975 and currently led by President AnnaMarie Della Sala Stanton, the organization aims to honor and preserve the stories, traditions, and culture of Italian families who immigrated to the Monterey Peninsula and Central Coast of California more than a century ago.

The Italian Heritage Society has published three books celebrating local Italian American history, culture, and community contributions: Italian Fishing Families of Monterey, Italian Fishing Families of Monterey (second edition), and Italian Americans—We Don't Just Fish! 

Since 2002, the organization has recognized notable individuals connected to Monterey's Italian Community at its annual Honoree Dinner fundraiser. In the past four years, the group has awarded $25,000 in scholarships.
 

Recognizing the city's deep connection with the Sicilian community of Isola delle Femmine, from which many early Italian Monterey residents emigrated, Italian Heritage Society members Gasper Cardinale, Peter Coniglio, Peter Davi, and Sal Ferrante were instrumental in establishing a sister-city relationship between the two locales in 2017.

In December 2023, the organization launched a joint effort with the Monterey History and Art Association to present a display titled "Bounty of the Sea" at the city's Stanton Center. The exhibit presents stories, photographs, and fishing paraphernalia gathered from various groups that have fished in Monterey Bay throughout its history. 

I had a chance to speak with Mike Ventimiglia, the organization's vice president and webmaster, who shared more about Monterey's past and Italian contributions.

How and why did the organization start?

The idea behind it was, and still is today, to preserve the local history of the fishing industry in Monterey. We have written three books about the history, capturing the fishing industry and the people who fished in the fishing industry; we went beyond that with the last book we published, We Just Don't Fish! It's taking the people whose parents had ties to the fishing industry that, as the fishing industry became depleted, had ventured off into different professional organizations that still help the Italian community, the largest community in Monterey then.

The Italians realized they had to get involved in the community if they were to make changes. They felt it was very important to get involved with politics and change the course, which they did and changed for the better.

The Italian community's predominance in Monterey went from the early 1900s to probably the 1960s and early 1970s. And then it started changing. Different people got elected to office. The Italians weren't on the city council, so it just started diminishing. We don't want to lose the history behind what the Italian community did for the city of Monterey.

The Italian Heritage Society at the three-day Monterey Fisherman's Festival.

Tell us about Monterey's connection to Isola delle Femmine.

My great-grandfather came from there, and then they left because of the hardships there at that point in time. While doing my genealogy, I realized I had six uncles who came here, and I found out more about them. But I also had two aunts back there who never came. Their father migrated to Martinez, where other Sicilians came at that time. They used to fish the Martinez Straits in the Sacramento River, and many of them came into what they called Black Diamond (Pittsburg, California, today) at New York Landing.

Before the Sicilians, the only people who really fished in Monterey were the Chinese and the Japanese. They mostly did shellfish, and salmon was a big thing then. But salmon gave way to learning about fishing for sardines. 

In about 1905, they started fishing sardines in Monterey. Frank E. Booth was the main cannery owner at the time, and he called on a man named Pietro Ferrante for his expertise in fishing. Pietro realized they were using the wrong fishing nets. They weren't using a lampara net, which is a close-fitted net. And so he recommended and brought forth what was a really small net compared to the gill net they were using. And they started getting more of an abundance of fish. Booth transitioned from doing salmon to canning sardines, which started the escalation of "How do we get more people here?"

So, Pietro Ferrante called his friends in Martinez and Pittsburg and told them they needed fishing in Monterey. People in that area were used to fishing off the coast of Africa.

Word got out that there was an abundance in Monterey, and people started migrating here. They'd send notes back to their family members and friends in Sicily. And they started migrating because they had an opportunity here.
 

They felt quite at home when they came to Monterey because it reminded them of their old country. It just continued to prosper and went through generations of different types of boats they used and canneries.

Reading the history of women working at the canneries in Carol Lynn McKibben's Beyond Cannery Row, Sicilian Women Immigration, and Community in Monterey 1915-1999 was quite an eye-opener for me. Many of my aunts worked on that, and she interviewed many of them, allowing me to see some things that I never knew about.

Women were the backbone of the Italian fishing industry because they were the ones running the households while the men were out fishing. They were the ones that basically, in the future years, were making investments in property as canneries closed and the fish industry started depleting. So they were not only doing the canning but also taking care of the household because the husbands were gone all the time.
 

How can the community get involved?

We're always looking for members and community support. We get a lot of that during our fundraisers and when the community comes out to honor the four individuals we nominate to attend the annual dinner.

The support of the Italian community has fallen to a certain degree. We used to have a lot of community involvement when we were involved with the city and its politics, including the mayors and city council members, as well as many individuals serving on various city boards. That has given way to the modernization and the different needs of people in various sectors living here on the peninsula.

There are people who can't afford to live here, but they want to. So the direction has gone towards other things, like the tourist industry. Monterey's tourism is one of the biggest fundraisers they have. And then the events that have come into play here. A lot of city direction is geared towards that, but we always look for their support. 

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