The Italians’ jobs

Sep 27 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

The Italians’ jobs

A Liverpool writer’s ancestors started Liverpool’s Little Italy – and now their story is to be read in Rome. David Charters reports

WHEN her pale blue eyes were no higher than a fish-fryer’s counter, the little girl in the fluffy-wool cardigan and party frock, whose name is full of religious mystery, wondered about her ancestors from the old country.

What romance they offered, as they lined up in her imagination – boxers, singers, organ-grinders, workers in mosaic and terrazzo, musicians and ice cream scoopers.

Now she has put them into her first book, to be presented to the Italian Government in Rome next month.

It tells of the Italians, who settled in Liverpool in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, forming their own community in what is now the city’s Vauxhall neighbourhood.

Although there is a healthy dollop of Irish in the mix, the Italian strain is still evident in the smile of Debra D’Annunzio, that little girl, now a local historian.

The story begins in 1878 when the British Empire was spreading rapidly, and Michele and Fortunata D’Annunzio came here from Atina, in the Comino Valley. With them, they brought their children, Felice, Maria-Grazia and Filipo.

They were hardy, God-fearing people, eager to establish themselves in a strange land, but they were by no means destitute. Michele quickly bought the house at 55, Gerard Street, which he converted into a “welcoming hostel” for other Italian immigrants.

In this way, Liverpool’s Little Italy was formed. As they shared the same Roman Catholic faith, the Italians mixed freely with the Irish families, who were often poorer, having come over in the wake of the potato famine in the 1840s.

Filipo D’Annunzio married Mary Swindley. Their son, Laurence, married Agnes Saunderson, whose daughter, Patricia D’Annunzio, now 63, had one child, Debra.

“Phew,” she says at the Cot’n Bar on Old Hall Street, Liverpool. “We got there in the end.”

With that, Debra opens a presentation copy of her book, Liverpool’s Italian Families, and takes a sip from her cup of cappuccino, another reminder of the ancestral home.

From St Teresa’s Primary School, Vauxhall, Debra advanced to Mary Help of Christians school, Croxteth, but her academic potential was not fully realised, until she entered a Reach Out scheme in the late 1990s and secured a BA honours in social and economic history from Liverpool Hope University.

That gave her the confidence to write a book – a project which has enjoyed support from members of the old community, including Terry Cooke, whose Little Italy book was published in 2002.

Among her other supporters are Flo Clucas, deputy leader of Liverpool Council, who is from an Italian family, and Nunzia Bertali, the Italian consul for Merseyside.

They are to present the book to the Italian Government on October 10, when they will be in Rome attending a seminar about the Arandora Star, a ship belonging to Liverpool’s Blue Star Line, torpedoed by a German U-Boat in 1940, while carrying German PoWs and Italian internees from here to Halifax, Nova Scotia. More than 800 lives were lost.