“Daddy son’spostato con una bella ragazza.
E avuto i figlioli magnifici.
Non rimpiango adesso.”
“Daddy married a beautiful girl. And had magnificent children. I don’t regret it now.”
All my life I have been lucky enough to live just above my grandmother. Until I left for college, I would pass her every morning while she sat in her blue-grey recliner. She was usually doing her Italian crossword puzzles that my father bought her weekly from the store in Grand Central. She’d look up from her very thick, very old glasses, and ask me, “Where you go?” in very broken English. Of course, she knew where I was going. I was heading off to school, a place she remembered as a convent where nuns taught her how to read and write. I was getting an education, something I assumed as a child she was never fortunate enough to receive. Little did I know, as I began to question her life and the lives of my other family members who grew up in a place unfamiliar to me, I learned so much and began to question so much more.
“Dad, when Nanna was little…” began so many of my questions to my father.
“I don’t know. She never really talks about it,” was always his answer.
But I wanted to know so much more. So at the age of 19, I finally decided to question her myself. As the admittedly favorite grandchild (don’t tell my siblings) I knew if she’d tell anyone, it would be me.
Benito Mussolini’s famous balcony speeches
Teresa was born on June 2nd, 1928. It was just her and her younger brother, Cesare, living with their mother Cristina. Cristina didn’t work, had a history of alcohol abuse, and couldn’t support both of her children in the proper way. Teresa was taken away from her unfit mother at age six to live in a convent, the equivalent of today’s orphanages.
“Mio padre non c’era,” she told me. Indeed, her father was not around while my grandmother was growing up. He was part of the earliest fascist resistance movement in Italy, and he was known as a “partisan.” For speaking out against Benito Mussolini, he was arrested and transferred to a concentration camp in Germany. In a time when a dictator promised incredible change, Teresa recalls being shuffled from the convent into town squares to see Mussolini’s speeches. This wasn’t because she supported him, but because she’d be arrested if she didn’t. Teresa saw her father once more, when he searched for a successfully found her still living in the convent around age 18. But after that, she never saw him again.
In the convent, the nuns taught her how to read and write perfect Italian, giving her an education she never would have gotten in that time period. “I only remember being in school, being in church, or attending funerals held at the church.” Her mother was allowed to visit one Sunday every month, when Cristina would bring her daughter bread to eat that was much better than what she ate at the convent. But that was all that she saw of her mother until Cristina’s death. Teresa’s brother left the convent when he was just a little boy. Hilariously, he didn’t like what the nuns had to say, so he kicked one in the shin and ran away.
Teresa left the convent at age 21. She moved to Torino where she worked for a countess as a maid. Though she disliked staying there, Teresa didn’t know anyone else. She didn’t know whee else to look for work. Teresa eventually worked as a cook for the heirs of the Martini and Rossi vermouth brand. But in time, she met the woman who would eventually become her son’s godmother, Contessa Alina Moschetti. Alina had two sons, and respected Teresa’s education so much as to make her the family’s tutor.
When she was was 24 years old, Teresa took advantage of the free time she had from taking care of the Moschetti children. That’s when she met Santo Lagana on a night she went out dancing. Santo was a women’s shoemaker living in Torino, who swept Teresa off her feet. After she finished cooking dinner for the Moschettis, she was allowed to go out for three hours at night. Santo would pick her up in his car, a luxury most Italians did not have at the time, go to the movies, and return her back home. After many years of dating, Santo promised her he’d marry her. “I’ll marry you, I’ll marry you, I’ll marry you,” Teresa told me that he’d say. “But he didn’t.”
Teresa discovered he never proposed because his family in southern Italy did not approve. This time in Italy saw plenty of opposition from north and south, and Teresa and Santo’s relationship was caught in the middle. Santo’s parents tried anything to stop them from marrying, including blocking all the paperwork needed to apply for a marriage license from ever reaching Torino, and sending Santo’s brother to Torino to try to bring him back. Neither strategy proved successful, and Teresa and Santo were married on June 6th, 1958. Prior to this, Teresa was luckily reunited with her little brother, Cesare, upon her return to Pinerolo.
“I’ll always remember,” she began, “he was playing bocce. After so many years,
there he was, this beautiful young man. I couldn’t believe the man he had become without a mother and without a father. He was a man of honor.”
Teresa and Santo on their wedding day, June 6th, 1958
Teresa, Santo, and their son, Anthony
Shortly after, on October 30th, 1958, Teresa and Santo welcomed their son, Anthony, into the world. The young boy’s parents gave him ann incredible life. He was surrounded by family from both sides who, upon his birth, united in support of Teresa and Santo’s marriage. Santo ran an incredible shoemaking business, and had the resources to take his family on vacation, buy a car, and take part in other things once considered luxuries in the struggling Italy. But Santo was missing something — his family.
Santo’s father and brother pioneered their family’s immigration to the United States in the early 1960s. They couldn’t find work, and America was the land of opportunity. So they travelled first, paving the way for Santo’s other siblings to follow. Before he knew it, Santo was the last of his family still living in Italy. Urging Teresa to follow his family overseas, she disagreed. They had everything in their home in Torino, a wonderful business, a beautiful son who was getting an education, and Teresa had just been recently reunited with her brother. But Santo insisted and, as a loyal wife, Teresa followed.
Setting sail on the ship Michelangelo, the family left from the port of Genoa on July 14th, 1966. A week later, they arrived in New York City, and travelled a few dozen miles north to Port Chester, New York, where the family since lives. Set up by Santo’s brothers and their families, Teresa, her husband, and their son, settled into a basement apartment on Sand Street. When they walked in, all that was in their house was a refrigerator and a bottle of water.
Fortunately, the family had plenty of money saved to furnish a home, but finding work was difficult. Santo, who had his own shoemaking shop in Torino, had to work under someone else until he could afford to buy his own shop in Bronxville, New York. Teresa worked at a bathing suit factory in Port Chester, where she eventually was the voice of a picketing movement rallying against the factory’s poor working conditions. And Anthony attended Catholic school, growing up in a community of Italians, Irish, Jamaicans, African-Americans, and Cubans.
When I asked my Nonna if she wished she had stayed in Italy, she paused. “Adesso, no,” she began. Now, no. Teresa grew up on her own, without a mother and without a father. She was even without a brother for her entire adolescence, only reuniting with him for a few years before she moved to the United States. She was opposed by her husband’s family, only to have to move against her better judgment to follow them. But she understood, because of just that: family. She had her own now — a husband, and a son. And she wanted to keep them by her side as long as she could.
“[Anthony] married a beautiful girl. And had magnificent children. I don’t regret it now,” she says. Indeed, there are now four surviving generations of the Lagana family that Teresa has lived to witness. Teresa, her son and his wife Rosa, their three children including myself, my brother Santo, and my sister Cristina, and their children, my nieces and nephew, Alexia, Kaylee, and Cameron. Teresa lives with her family, was the beginning of this family, a successful one that, by her hands, grew to love each other.
Nonna, Nonno, and me at my confirmation, 2011
Teresa the day of Alexia’s birth. The beginning of the fourth living generation of Laganas.
Teresa’s brother, Cesare, and his wife, Mariuccia, Pinerolo 2013
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