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TUTTA LA FAMIGLIA

Portrait of a Sicilian Cafe in America

Paul Cary Goldberg

TUTTA LA FAMIGLIA

Portrait of a Sicilian Cafe in America Paul Cary Goldberg

LECTURIS

For Lee

TUTTA LA FAMIGLIA Portrait of a Sicilian Cafe in America

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.

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 saltcured 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.

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.

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, housepainters, 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

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.

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 7

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 buyback 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 September, 2019

Intimate candid portraits of everyday life at a corner espresso bar in the port city of Gloucester, Massachusetts, USA. Photography by Paul Cary Goldberg and text by Frank Viviano