The animator of “Progress Italo-Americano”, the first newspaper for our compatriots in the United States, died a hundred years ago. He also wrote for the “Corriere”
Determined to escape the destiny of a clerk in whom “one ceases to be men to become pulleys”, quit the post office of which his mother was “happy” and left in great secrecy for America, Adolfo Rossi landed in Nuovaiorche in the summer of 1879 with four shillings in his pocket. The equivalent of five lire, the cost of a word in transatlantic telegrams. The rest, a little treasure he was counting on for food and lodging for a couple of months, had been taken out of his pocket the night before, while he slept in the ship’s fluffy third-class bunk.
Others, robbed of the poor nest egg when they were finally there, in the “cheerful and beautiful America / sister America” dreamed of in the songs of the time, would have abandoned themselves to despair. Some killed themselves. Several drowned the defeat in the liquors of infamous hovels to end up victims “of those scoundrels who hang out around Castle-Garden, who attack immigrants, rummage them, suffocate them and then throw them into the river …”. Not him. He wasn’t the type to despair. He accepted the humblest daily jobs, he went hungry (“Some evenings I dined with Strauss valtzers overheard in the public garden”), he was an apprentice in an eyewear factory, sold cold water and Chinese fans on the Coney Island beach, employed himself as a kitchen boy for a pastry chef, learned to make the ice cream maker studied English from an “old American lady, rich, a lover of Italians” until, seriously, the chance of a lifetime.
“In 1880, only one weekly newspaper in Italian was published in New York, entitled” L’Eco d’Italia “”, he says in the book An Italian in America the legendary reporter whose centenary of his death in Buenos Aires in 1921 is remembered this year, “when a daring and enterprising Italian, Mr. Carlo Barsotti, decided to forge a daily one”. Having made a fortune with hotels that rented rooms “as big as the cells of the friars”, it had nothing to do with publishing. But his problem was another: among the mass of Venetian, Ligurian or Sicilian peasants who arrived illiterate, how many knew I don’t speak English, but at least Italian? Write it down, then …
Thus it was that the young Adolfo found himself the first editor (he wrote the Italian news page, he wrote the “last transatlantic dispatches” translated from English, he the titles, he the editorial) of “Il Progresso Italo-Americano », Destined to become the best-selling (one hundred thousand copies) and authoritative Italian newspaper in America. A formidable experience, interrupted by a period spent in Colorado to the construction of the railway to the West (“What is the point of emigrating to America to stop in a sea port, without knowing the immense solitudes and lakes and mountains of this great continent?”) and concluded with the decision, now that he knew everything about profession, to return to Italy. This time in a first class cabin, but with the same spirit. What drove him, during a storm in which everyone was vomiting their soul, to be tied to a ship’s mast to experience the pleasure “of being covered by the very high waves and disappearing from time to time for a moment under the liquid element” .
In short, a phenomenon. And “in Italy, where journalism was only then beginning to free itself from the rhetorical tradition of men of letters to become an instrument of information (and power)”, explains the historian Giampaolo Romanato in the book The Italy of shame in the chronicles of Adolfo Rossi, he “came as a breath of fresh air” and found himself in front of “a road all downhill”. Already the first article in the “Corriere”, shoulder to shoulder, at first, wiped out years and years of wigs. He wrote that the director had asked him to go to Petersburg to see the burial of the Tsar but that, having heard of a ferocious robbery of a landowner in Tortoli, Sardinia, he had changed his mind by hijacking him there. To which he replied: no problem, “in the ready-made suitcase I only have to replace the tailcoat with a pair of boots and the Baedeker with a revolver.” Textual. Since then for our newspaper, as first signature and then editor in chief in the days of the riots in Milan repressed by Bava Beccaris, he did everything. From reports in Veneto to those in the Horn of Africa, from the Time.news of the opening of Parliament in Rome to that of the aid sent by readers to Calabria after an earthquake, aid for which he was the guarantor.
Free spirit, distrustful of politicians, very sensitive to the issues of misery, rights and exploitation, as recalled by Pier Luigi Bagatin and Luigi Contegiacomo in Matteotti’s Polesine. Journalistic inquiries by Adolfo Rossi and Jessie White (published by Cierre and Casa Museo Matteotti) as soon as he felt some embarrassment he went away. From “La Tribuna” to “La Sera”, from “Corriere Toscano” to “Secolo XIX” … Until he got bored with newspapers (he dreamed of making his own, “with little chatter and a lot of news, without personal anger and grudges” ) to go and be an emigration inspector. Denouncing for twenty years in his extraordinary relationships land bestial conditions in which the Italians lived swallowed up by misery, violence, serfdom almost everywhere from South Africa to Brazil, from Argentina to the United States already described in An Italian in America: «In New York it is almost ashamed of being Italian. The vast majority of our compatriots, made up of the poorest class of the Southern Provinces, live in the least clean part of the city, called the Five Points. It is an agglomeration of black and revolting houses, where people live stacked worse than beasts. Large families live in one room: men, women, dogs, cats and monkeys eat and sleep together in the same airless and lightless closet ».
Perhaps no one has ever better recounted the life of the Carusi slaves of the pick-pickers in the sulfur mines, little more than children, naked, forced to climb overburdened tunnels over a hundred meters long: «” Last week the Caruso Angeleddu, aged thirteen , was killed by his pickaxe with eight blows “. “And the pickaxe wasn’t arrested?” “They never arrest them. Who takes care of the carusi? The Carusi, when they die killed, according to the authorities they always died a natural death ”». None of the Polesan laborers: «Every time an ox or a cow dies of some disease in a stable in the Polesine villages, the district veterinarian orders its burial. (…) But as soon as he moves a few steps away, a wild scene occurs. Twenty or thirty peasants armed with shovels, hatchets, scythes and knives rush forward, unearth the animal and cut it up, each trying to get the best pieces. (…) As soon as they have taken their share of the booty, they run home and put the meat and bones to boil in the pot where they make polenta. Generally it is the insipid, nauseating flesh of beasts that suffered a long illness and swallowed all sorts of medicines; but what would the hungry poor not eat? “
October 22, 2021 (change October 22, 2021 | 20:31)
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