The Italian towns and regions behind America's most celebrated names — from Sicilian ports to the hills of Abruzzo
Seventeen million Italians emigrated between 1880 and 1930 — the largest migration in modern European history. Most came from the south: Sicily, Calabria, Campania, Basilicata, Abruzzo. They came to the port cities, worked the mines and railways, built the neighbourhoods that still carry Italian names in Brooklyn and South Boston and the North End. And from those streets came a generation of Americans who defined the country's culture, sport, and politics.
Baseball and sport
Joseph Paul DiMaggio — "Joltin' Joe," "The Yankee Clipper" — was born in Martinez, California, the eighth of nine children of Giuseppe DiMaggio, a fisherman from Isola delle Femmine, a small island village just west of Palermo on the northern coast of Sicily. His father had come to San Francisco in 1902 and settled in the Italian fishing community of North Beach, where Sicilian fishermen had established their own world along the waterfront.
DiMaggio played all thirteen seasons of his major-league career for the New York Yankees. His 56-game hitting streak in 1941 remains the most unbreakable record in professional sports — unbroken and likely unbreakable. He was married to Marilyn Monroe for nine months in 1954; for years after her death he sent roses to her grave three times a week, every week, until he died. He is still considered the most complete baseball player in the history of the game.
Vincent Thomas Lombardi was born in Brooklyn, New York, son of Harry Lombardi and Matilda Izzo — both families from Vietri di Potenza in Basilicata, the poorest and most remote of the southern Italian regions, landlocked in the arch of the Italian boot. His grandparents had come through Ellis Island in the early 1900s and settled in the Italian community of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.
Lombardi coached the Green Bay Packers to five NFL championships in seven years, including the first two Super Bowls. He never had a losing season as a head coach. The Super Bowl trophy is named the Vince Lombardi Trophy. His post-practice speeches — "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing," and others — became the most quoted lines in American sporting culture. His Catholic faith, southern Italian work ethic, and Brooklyn toughness combined into something that looked, to post-war America, like the ideal of the leader.
Music
Francis Albert Sinatra was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, the only child of Antonino Martino Sinatra and Natalia Garaventa — both Sicilian immigrants. His father, known as Marty, came from Lercara Friddi, a sulphur-mining town in the interior of Sicily, near Palermo. His mother, Dolly, was from Genoa but of Sicilian family. Hoboken was heavily Italian — Sinatra grew up in a neighbourhood where Italian was spoken as freely as English.
He recorded more than 1,400 songs across sixty years. His catalogue — from the Columbia years through the Capitol period through Reprise — represents the most comprehensive documentation of the American popular song in the twentieth century. He won the Academy Award for From Here to Eternity (1953). He headlined at Carnegie Hall more times than any other artist. He is, by any measure, the defining voice of mid-century American culture.
Anthony Dominick Benedetto — Tony Bennett — was born in Astoria, Queens, the son of John Benedetto and Anna Suraci, both immigrants from Podargoni, a small village in the hills above Reggio Calabria, the toe of the Italian boot, looking across the Strait of Messina to Sicily. His father died when Tony was ten; his mother worked in a garment factory; the family was very poor.
Bennett's voice — warm, measured, with a technical control that only deepened with age — defined American pop vocal style for seventy years. He continued performing until his diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease was made public in 2021, and his final recording sessions with Lady Gaga, documented in the film Love for Sale, showed a voice still capable of beauty even as his memory failed. He died in 2023, a few weeks before his 97th birthday, having given the last full-length concert performance of any artist at that age in history.
Dino Paul Crocetti — Dean Martin — was born in Steubenville, Ohio, a steel town on the Ohio River, son of Gaetano Alfonso Crocetti and Angela Barra. His father had emigrated from Montesilvano, a coastal town in the Abruzzo region on the Adriatic, near Pescara. Italian was the language of the household; Martin didn't speak English fluently until he was five. He grew up among steelworkers and coal miners, the children of men who had come from the Mezzogiorno to work the American industrial frontier.
Martin became the most relaxed performer in American entertainment history — a quality that was entirely deliberate and entirely a performance. His partnership with Jerry Lewis in the 1950s was the most successful comedy act in American entertainment. His solo career, particularly the Rat Pack years, produced the image of Italian-American masculinity — effortlessly cool, faintly melancholy, beautifully dressed — that defined a generation's aspirations.
Film
Martin Charles Scorsese was born in Flushing, Queens, to Charles Scorsese and Catherine Cappa — both of whose families had come from Polizzi Generosa, a medieval hilltop town in the Madonie mountains of inland Sicily, near Palermo. His grandparents emigrated in the early twentieth century and settled in the Little Italy of Elizabeth Street in Lower Manhattan, where Scorsese grew up. The neighbourhood — its rituals, its loyalties, its violence, its codes — became the material of his entire career.
He directed Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, The Departed, and The Irishman. He has said that Little Italy felt like a village — that the blocks around Elizabeth Street were the only world anyone needed. That containment, that intensity of community, is in every frame of his work. He received the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997 and continues to direct in his eighties.
Francis Ford Coppola was born in Detroit, Michigan, but raised in Queens — his father Carmine Coppola, a flautist with the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini, had roots in Bernalda, Basilicata, the same remote southern Italian province that produced many of the characters in The Godfather. His grandfather Francesco, the original immigrant, had come through Ellis Island in the early 1900s.
The Godfather (1972) is still considered one of the two or three greatest American films ever made. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Its depiction of Sicilian-American family life, its moral complexity, its attention to the specific rituals of Italian-American community — the wedding, the food, the feast of San Gennaro — created a template for how America understood Italian identity for decades. The Godfather Part II won another Best Picture in 1974.
Politics and civic life
Fiorello Henry LaGuardia — "The Little Flower" — was born in Greenwich Village to Achille Luigi Carlo LaGuardia, an Italian army bandmaster from Foggia in Puglia, and Irene Coen, a Jewish woman from Trieste. He grew up in Arizona and on the Texas border, spoke six languages fluently (English, Italian, German, Yiddish, Croatian, and Spanish), and served as a bomber pilot in the First World War.
As mayor of New York from 1934 to 1945, he transformed the city: he broke up the Tammany Hall political machine, built the bridges and parks and public housing that are still the city's infrastructure, and read the Sunday comics over the radio to children when the newspapers went on strike. He wore a wide-brimmed black hat and was exactly five feet tall. He is broadly considered the greatest mayor in New York City's history.
Nancy Patricia D'Alesandro Pelosi was born in Baltimore, Maryland, daughter of Thomas D'Alesandro Jr. — himself mayor of Baltimore for twelve years — whose family had emigrated from Sambuca di Sicilia, an inland town in the province of Agrigento in south-western Sicily. Her mother, Annunciata M. Lombardi, was also of Italian descent. She grew up in Baltimore's Little Italy neighbourhood, the only daughter among six children.
Pelosi served as Speaker of the House of Representatives from 2007 to 2011 and again from 2019 to 2023 — making her the first woman, and the highest-ranking Italian-American, ever to hold that office. The office of Speaker is second in the line of presidential succession, after the Vice President.
Science and innovation
Enrico Fermi was born in Rome, the son of Alberto Fermi, a railway inspector, and Ida de Gattis, a schoolteacher. He was a prodigy — teaching himself physics from a used textbook bought at a market stall, gaining his doctorate at 21, becoming a professor at 25. He fled Fascist Italy in 1938 when he collected his Nobel Prize in Stockholm — he was of Jewish heritage on his mother's side, and the racial laws of Mussolini's Italy were already in force — and never returned.
Fermi led the team that built the world's first nuclear reactor — Chicago Pile-1, assembled beneath the stands of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago in 1942 — and was a key figure in the Manhattan Project. The chemical element fermium (atomic number 100) is named for him. He became an American citizen in 1944. His contributions to nuclear physics and quantum theory are foundational to modern science.
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