L’altra Italia in Toronto
by Giuliana Colalillo, Ph.D.

The images captured in this exhibition invite us to explore the italianità of the common people, the contadini. These unskilled peasants turned miners, loggers, construction workers, seamstresses and factory workers, immigrated to the United States, South America, and later to Canada by the thousands from an Italy which had little in common with the grandeur of Rome or the cosmopolitanism of Milan. Not Paved with Gold gives a positive appraisal of the sacrifice and quiet dignity of the Italian immigrants who came to the New World in search of a better life—if not for themselves, then for their children and grandchildren.

By the time many of these images were made, the second, and by far the largest wave of Italian immigration to Canada was coming to an end. Whereas the peak years of Italian immigration to the United States occurred at the turn of the twentieth century, Canada received its largest number of immigrants from Italy after World War II. Fully 40% of the influx of postwar Italian immigrants who undertook the trans-Atlantic journey in the 1950s and 1960s to Canada made Toronto their home. This Canadian city thus joined the ranks of New York City, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo as one of the largest Italian settlement areas outside Italy. Between 1951 and 1981, a period during which Toronto’s population doubled, the population of Italian descent grew tenfold from 30,000 to over 300,000. The ambiente captured in these photographs reflects a community which, by the early 1970s, has “arrived” and feels comfortable in its own geographical space..

Robert Harney, a Harvard-educated American who became the pre-eminent historian of Italian-Canadians while teaching at the University of Toronto, noted that we must be careful not to write a history “which searches for the ‘great tradition’ at the expense of the ‘little tradition’ of common people.” He warned of the danger of limiting our academic attention and literary efforts to telling the stories of the notabili, while ignoring the stories of the ordinary Italians who built our cities, worked in our factories, and raised their families in the United States or Canada. This exhibition and the book on which it is based, lives up to that advice and gives presence to the faces and the everyday activities of the common Italian immigrant. Eschewing ancestor-worship, the images in the exhibition give proper place and perspective to the history created and bequeathed to us by our peasant, artisan, and labourer parents, grandparents and great-grandparents.

The post World War II Italian immigrant diaspora saw over one million men, women and children leave the war ravaged and impoverished regions of the Italian Mezzogiorno—the entire southern part of the country - as well as several northern districts. Conditions for welcoming Italian immigrants to Canada changed following World War II especially once the Enemy Alien Act, which banned Italians from immigrating to Canada, was lifted in 1947. Many of the people portrayed in this exhibition likely disembarked at Pier 21 in Halifax – the Ellis Island of Canada.

Similar to the experience in the United States, the Italian immigrants in Canada saw themselves as Calabrians, Abbruzzese, Molisans, Friulans, Sicilians, and so on—in other words, they identified strongly with the region of Italy from which they came. For most of the Italian newcomers, it was the first time that they had met paesani from other parts of Italy, or had to understand another Italian dialect, often quite unlike their own. This diversity of language and the need to communicate using a vocabulary resonant with an urban environment gave birth to Italiese (Italian + inglese, i.e., English), a unique form of word construction which combines English language words with Italian sounds and word endings. The homogeneity attributed to the Italian community by the larger Canadian society took shape only over time, and largely in the second and third generations.

It was Toronto’s West End, specifically the stretch of College Street between Euclid Avenue and Crawford Street—now known as Little Italy—that became the meeting place where this mixture of italianità was focused. This area was a lifeline: a place to meet friends and relatives, play a game of bocce in the local park, or a round of briscola in a backyard. Replacing the Jewish and Anglo-Saxon residents who were moving away, the Italian immigrants soon became the proud owners of the proverbial “casetta in Canada” (a popular Italian song of the 1960s), one of the Victorian homes on tree-lined streets such as Euclid, Manning, and Clinton. Having their own house was a critical factor in realizing their success in ‘l’america.’

Paralleling the American experience, Italian immigrants in Canada were involved in pivotal, if tragic events, which paved the way to subsequent reforms in safety and labour laws, thereby creating more humane working conditions and providing improved benefits for all workers. In once such instance, the death of five Italian immigrant construction workers who died while excavating for water mains at Hogg’s Hollow (Toronto) in 1960, forced the government to establish a Royal Commission of Inquiry which resulted in a major overhaul of Ontario’s workplace and safety laws.