“When We Come From Italy, We Take It With Us”: The Italian-American Gardens of The Italian Garden Project
Translated from Il Giornale del Cibo published on April 27, 2021
Food is migration. Just think of all those products that, from the Americas, crossed the vast Atlantic Ocean, crammed into the holds of ships, and arrived in Europe conquering lands and palates, such as the now ubiquitous tomato, paradoxically become a symbol of Italian style, the highly versatile potato, pumpkin, pepper, and the list goes on. A route and an exchange of new flavors which, however, since the 19th century has been reversed, due to those millions of Italian emigrants who have poured into the US port cities, with suitcases full of clothes, dreams and seeds, and they bought a house and pieces of land, which they took care of. Slowly, trees, plants and varieties of Mediterranean crops - from artichokes to citrus fruits to vines - began to take root and flourish, despite the hostile and harsh climate, changing and shaping the profile of the streets and neighborhoods.
Just to "map" this sort of urban gardens with an all-Italian flavor and tell the stories of the families who take care of them, the Italian-American Mary Menniti started the Italian Garden Project. According to Mary, in fact, it is still possible to identify historically Italian neighborhoods by the presence, for example, of fig trees in the backyard. As she recounts in a beautiful interview with Atlas Obscura magazine, “I literally walked through Brooklyn looking in the backyards, and I can say it: 'Oh, there is a fig tree in the garden and a Madonna. This is an Italian-American garden”.
Today, therefore, we cross the ocean and go back in time, ready to leaf through old black and white photographs and go hunting for the memories of a generation that brought a piece of Italy to America. Ready for this journey into the past?
Mary Menniti, the Italian-American who "saves" an (almost) forgotten heritage
From the surname it is easy to guess the Italian origins of Mary. Her grandfather, in fact, from Caserta, was part of a generation of Italians who, especially from southern Italy, embarked on large ships and sought a new life overseas, in the hope of a better future for themselves and their family. But on this journey they were not alone: hidden in suitcases and trunks, tucked into the corners of the boats, were seeds and branches of what would later become Sicilian cucuzza, artichokes, thistles, chicory, vines and, above all, figs. For these migrants, cultivating gardens in the small patches of land they had as a garden, as well as being a real means to survive and access products that they would never otherwise have found, was a way to stay connected to their roots. Michele Vaccaro, a Calabrian immigrant in Pittsburgh in the 1970s, whom Mary met, explains “when we come from Italy, we bring Italy with us. We never forget where we come from."
Mary learned a love of gardening from her grandfather. “When I started looking bored during the summer, my mom would send me to work in the garden with my grandfather. As I picked up a hoe and hit the ground ineffectively, my grandfather laughed and said, 'If there was a war, you would starve. That 'you' - I knew - was me, my brothers and the others who were the young people of the '60s and' 70s. He was right. Compared to this hard-working Italian immigrant from the province of Caserta, my generation was very spoiled”.
As she says, as soon as she had her own house, she tried to make her grandfather's teachings her own in his garden, but then, when again she moved to another house which, however, was not suitable for cultivating a vegetable garden, Mary found herself spending time in other people's gardens. "The town of Sewickley, Pennsylvania, where I moved, has a wonderful Italian community that still gardens in the traditional way and, like my grandfather, most of this community know a lot more about self-reliance than anyone I've ever met". Speaking of gardens, she says his favorites "were the ones that reminded me of my childhood, with rows of tomatoes and peppers, pole beans and chard, garlic, fennel and, of course, fig trees”.
Thanks to this passion for horticulture, to the memories transmitted by her grandfather and to the knowledge of other Italian-Americans, Mary started what, today, is the great The Italian Garden Project initiative.
The Italian Garden Project and the Garden-Stories Archive
The project stems from a sad awareness: the more Mary spends time in these gardens, the more she realizes that they will be destined to disappear. " Gardeners are aging , and given that Italian immigrants have always had such a strong belief in education and insist that their children focus their energies on school and career, this heritage is not being passed down as it was for generations ". The risk, therefore, is to lose an inexhaustible source of stories, wisdom, traditions and memories and, as she explains on the project website , she has begun to feel the urge to preserve this knowledge before it is too late.
And that's how Mary gets to work. In the last ten years she has traveled to every corner of the States. The purpose? Documenting these gardens, collecting the testimonies of those who care for them and their stories, collecting them in a large archive. The gardens she photographs, including spades, hoes and religious figurines, are full of Mediterranean relics, many of which were smuggled generations ago in suitcases: Sicilian tomatoes, dozens of varieties of chicory, turnip greens and citrus fruits typical of our Southern Italy. But above all, as we have anticipated, the fig trees, a symbol of this emigration.
We therefore find the stories of the garden in Orangevale, California, by Domenico Bellocci, born in Mola di Bari, immigrated in 1969, or that of Maria Ottombrino, born in the province of Avellino and arrived in the States in '75, in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Or again, the story of Nick Ranieri who emigrated to Flushing (Queens) again from Mola di Bari, in the 1960s, whose first thought went to fruit trees. When he saw that some neighbors had persimmon trees, he thought of taking one too, but the fruits that the American tree gave were not good. So why not go and get some stems from the tree of some of his fellow villagers, who had brought them directly from Italy to graft them into his? That's it, and the result was incredible. Shortly after it was the turn of the figs, whose small branches, however, "all arrived in the suitcase" from Italy. And so on, the archive is full of stories like these, complete with photographs showing the faces of these gardeners dedicated to an ancient art.
The Italian-American gardens as precursors of the Urban Garden
In recent years, there has been a real boom all over the world of the phenomenon of urban gardening, from the garden on the balcony to community gardens where anyone can grow their own plants. This growing green trend is linked not only to the desire for an extra touch of green in the middle of the "gray" of the city, but above all to the need to ensure healthy and nutritious food, of which the origin is known: the gardens are therefore real sustainable means of subsistence able to guarantee even better health conditions.
Among the precursors of these modern urban gardens, the Italian-American gardens are certainly a perfect example: handkerchiefs of a few square meters, crushed by skyscrapers and hampered by a very rigid winter climate, anything but Mediterranean, yet so efficient. “These gardens are interesting not only from the point of view of the abundant production of vegetables, fruit and aromatic herbs, but also from an environmental and sustainability point of view. Italian gardeners were eco-friendly before anyone started using the term. Rain barrels, composting, seed saving: any form of resource conservation has always been a way of life for them” says Mary. And in fact, the gardeners-growers have tried to get the maximum benefits from those small plots while being careful not to waste anything. Therefore, they produced compost themselves thanks to the organic waste for fertilization and they used to collect rainwater to reuse it for irrigation.
Recycling, thrift and even resilience: for Mary, these gardens are testimony to the fortitude of their growers, who, in order to cope with the climate and protect the plants from the cold, wrapped them in canvas or even buried them underground. As in the case of fig trees, silent symbols of generations of Italians who have left their homes behind. And it is to these specimens that Mary has dedicated a festival held every year in her hometown of Pennsylvania. But to preserve the memory of the garden-stories we talked about, in addition to the archive of the Italian Garden Project, there is a better way, which allows you to follow in the footsteps of these Italian seed traders. The idea of a collection of seeds linked to the Italian-American culture, with the aim of starting an exchange with gardeners-growers from all over the country.
And who knows that from these, as well as flowers, other new, beautiful stories will not be born.