Sicilian Stories

When banks refused immigrants with calloused hands and broken English, one Italian-American's son made a decision that would change American banking forever — with a wooden plank and a handshake.

They came from Naples, Calabria, and Sicily — some barely eight years old, carrying shoeshine boxes bigger than their chests. They learned English on sidewalks and built the backbone of Italian America.

In the tenement apartments of East Harlem, an Italian midwife named Rosalia went where no doctor would go — until a smear campaign tried to silence her. The mothers of her neighborhood had other ideas.