Pioneers

Abstract

Long suppressed in Italy, a bottom-up community-building thrust promptly resurfaced again among Italians in San Francisco, this time under more favorable circumstances. With the right to speak, to publish, to assemble freely, and (eventually) to vote came the liberation of social energy, a fevered networking rarely seen in the old country. Like other groups, no sooner had an Italian stepped ashore in the city than he would look for an in-group language newspaper to read, a restaurant in which to dine, a hotel in which to stay, or a church in which to worship. Out of this type of fraternizing, a scattering of Italian adventurers, backed by the Royal Sardinian governmen’s consul, gathered together one fine day to set up the enclave’s first institution, Societa’ Italiana di Mutua Beneficenza (SIMB). On October 17, 1858, in a hall on what would later be called Grant Street, 164 people, including Domingo Ghirardelli, Count Leonetto Cipriani, and Federico Biesta, elected Nicola Larco, the enclave’s leading merchant, president. The newly elected officers then hired Dr. Emanuel D’Oliveira as the society’s physician to provide medical care for members. By January 1860, with 450 men and women as members, the society was seen to contain close to $3,000 in its treasury.³

We—the Italians of California alone—have yet to answer the mother country’s pleas. Why? Does the love of the motherland not burn in our breast? Or have we already forgotten that Italy is still vilified, still tyrannized by its enemies?

Nicola Larco, San Francisco, 1857¹

Settling in America is worse still—that’s the land of forgetting one’s country… Men who stay in America fall out of the ranks.

Giuseppe Garibaldi to Alexander Herzen, London 1854²