From Two Ancient Lands: The Scalise-Alghini Family's Chicago Story

At eighty-seven, sitting in a restaurant booth in Phoenix, Arizona, Frank Scalise carries within him the dust of two ancient Italian lands—the sun-baked hills of Calabria and the fertile plains of Emilia-Romagna. His weathered hands rest on the table as he recalls a story that spans continents and generations, a tale of grandfathers who left everything behind to converge in the same American city, never knowing their bloodlines would merge in the grandson who now tells their story.

In the spring of 1905, Francesco Scalise—"really, it's Francesco in Italian," Frank explains with the precision of someone who has carried his grandfather's true name like a sacred trust—made his way from the mountain town of Sersale to whatever port would carry him to America ^[1]. Sersale sits in the heart of Calabria, perched in the Sila plateau where chestnut forests meet olive groves, a landscape that has remained largely unchanged for centuries ^[2]. In Francesco's time, this was a world of subsistence farming and seasonal migration, where men would leave for months to work the wheat harvests in Puglia or the sulfur mines of Sicily, sending every lira home to families who measured prosperity in sacks of grain and barrels of oil.

The Calabria that Francesco left behind was a land caught between ancient traditions and modern desperation. The unification of Italy had brought heavy taxation and military conscription, but little of the industrial progress that was transforming the north ^[3]. Young men like Francesco faced a stark choice: submit to a life of grinding poverty in villages where the soil was rich but the opportunities were few, or join the great exodus that was emptying the towns of the Mezzogiorno ^[4]. The decision to leave Sersale meant abandoning not just family, but an entire way of life—the feast days of San Giuseppe, the olive harvest that marked the seasons, the dialect that carried the accumulated wisdom of generations.

“Both sides of my family went to Chicago from the original country.”

— from the original recording

Today, Sersale remains a town of fewer than five thousand souls, its medieval center crowned by the ruins of a Norman castle. The young still leave for Rome or Milan, but now some return, drawn by European Union development funds that have transformed parts of Calabria into destinations for agritourism and cultural heritage tourism. The chestnut forests Francesco once knew still cover the hillsides, but the shepherds' paths have become hiking trails marked in multiple languages for visitors seeking the "authentic" Italy that Francesco's generation fled.

A year before Francesco's departure, Frank's maternal grandfather had made his own fateful decision in Bologna, the elegant capital of Emilia-Romagna. "My mother's side of the family, from the Alghinis, came from Bologna, Italy in nineteen o four," Frank recalls, his voice carrying the weight of a family story repeated across generations. The Bologna of 1904 was a different Italy entirely from Francesco's Calabria—a city of medieval towers and Renaissance porticoes, where the university founded in 1088 still drew scholars from across Europe ^[5].

The Emilia-Romagna that the Alghini patriarch left was Italy's breadbasket, a region where the Po Valley's fertile plains supported a more prosperous agricultural economy than anything known in the south ^[6]. Yet even here, in this land of plenty, the social upheavals of the early twentieth century were creating their own pressures for emigration. Socialist organizing among farm workers, the rise of agricultural cooperatives, and the mechanization of farming were disrupting traditional relationships between landowners and laborers ^[7]. For skilled artisans and small proprietors, America offered opportunities that even prosperous Emilia-Romagna could not guarantee.

Modern Bologna remains one of Italy's wealthiest cities, its historic center meticulously preserved under UNESCO protection. The covered markets where the Alghini family might once have sold their wares still bustle with vendors offering the region's famed tortellini, prosciutto di Parma, and Parmigiano-Reggiano. The porticoes that provided shelter from medieval winters now shelter tourists seeking the "Slow Food" movement that began in this very region—a conscious effort to preserve the culinary traditions that immigrants like Frank's grandfather carried to America in their memories and their recipes.

Both men, Francesco from the mountains and the unnamed Alghini patriarch from the plains, chose the same destination: Chicago. "Both sides of my family went to Chicago from the original country," Frank states with the certainty of family lore that has been repeated across decades. This was no coincidence—by 1905, Chicago had become the third-largest Italian city in the world, after Rome and Naples ^[8]. The city's Italian population had swelled to over 100,000, creating a complex ecosystem of regional neighborhoods where Sicilians clustered along Taylor Street, Neapolitans gathered near Hull House, and northern Italians found their own enclaves ^[9].

The Chicago that welcomed both grandfathers was a city transformed by fire and ambition, where the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 had cleared the way for architectural innovation and economic opportunity ^[10]. Italian immigrants found work in the city's expanding infrastructure—building the elevated train lines, digging the Sanitary Canal, constructing the skyscrapers that were making Chicago famous worldwide. The Near West Side, where many Italian families first settled, was a polyglot neighborhood where the sounds of Italian dialects mixed with Polish, Bohemian, and Yiddish ^[11].

For Francesco, arriving from Calabria with skills honed in mountain agriculture, Chicago offered construction work and the possibility of eventually opening a small business. For the Alghini grandfather, coming from Bologna's more sophisticated commercial culture, the city's growing network of Italian banks, import businesses, and professional services provided pathways to prosperity that would have been impossible in the rigid social hierarchies of early twentieth-century Italy.

Frank Scalise, born in 1939, represents the fulfillment of both grandfathers' American dreams—and the gradual fading of their Italian memories. "I was born in 1939, so I'm 87," he says, a man who came of age during World War II, when having Italian heritage in America carried complicated meanings ^[12]. He grew up in a Chicago where the Italian neighborhoods of his grandfathers' generation were already transforming, where second and third-generation Italian Americans were moving to the suburbs and entering professions their immigrant ancestors could never have imagined.

The Chicago of Frank's childhood was still recognizably Italian in pockets—St. Philip Benizi Church serving the Sicilian community, the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel drawing thousands to the Near West Side, Italian-language newspapers keeping the community connected to news from the old country ^[13]. Yet it was also a city where Italian Americans were becoming simply Americans, where the regional distinctions that had mattered so much to Francesco from Calabria and the Alghini patriarch from Bologna were dissolving into a more generic "Italian" identity.

By the time Frank reached his eighties, he had witnessed the complete transformation of Italian Chicago. The old neighborhoods had been scattered by urban renewal and suburban migration. The Italian-language newspapers had folded. The regional societies that once recreated the social structures of Sersale and Bologna had given way to more general Italian-American organizations that celebrated a unified Italian heritage that had never existed in the fractured Italy his grandfathers had left behind.

Now, sitting in a Portillo's restaurant in Phoenix—a city that barely existed when his grandfathers arrived in Chicago—Frank serves as the living link between two worlds. His presence in Arizona represents another chapter in the ongoing American story of mobility and reinvention, but also of gradual forgetting. The specific details of life in Sersale, the particular traditions of Bologna, the exact circumstances that drove both grandfathers to Chicago—these are fading with each generation, replaced by broader narratives about Italian immigration and American success.

Yet in Frank's careful preservation of his grandfather's true name—"really, it's Francesco in Italian"—there is something profound about the persistence of identity across time and space. In his knowledge that one grandfather came from Calabria and the other from Emilia-Romagna, there is an acknowledgment that the Italian experience in America was never monolithic, that it encompassed mountain farmers and city dwellers, southerners and northerners, people who shared a language but not necessarily a culture.

The Heritage Preserver app that recorded Frank's story represents both promise and poignancy—the promise that these family memories can be preserved and shared, but also the poignancy of needing technology to capture what was once passed naturally from generation to generation. As Frank speaks into his phone in a chain restaurant in Phoenix, he is performing an act of cultural preservation that his grandfathers, arriving in Chicago with nothing but their memories and their hopes, could never have imagined. His story, bridging Sersale and Bologna, Chicago and Phoenix, 1904 and today, stands as testament to the complex legacy of Italian America—a heritage that is both disappearing and, through efforts like his, being consciously preserved for generations yet to come.