Italian Festival: Day Three

Why is this photo of Jenny DiPaolo (nee Borzillo) so shaky? There was an "eruption" of Mount Vesuvius (see photo below) on Tuesday night at St. Anthony's Italian Festival.
Ralph Sianni next to some family pictures.

Giovanni Bucci, the Chicago artist who created the Mount Vesuvius display. Bucci also created last year's Trevi Fountain.

The mottled-orange fiberglass volcano - behind the church - spews a cartload of steam and spit fire.

By VICTOR GRETO

Here's what the Italian Festival was about on a steamy Tuesday evening.

Think of two people, one dead, one living, as a pair of meaningful bookends.

Before I start, though, pretty please: Stop whining about the $5 to get in; the cops that don't know where the entrance to the place is; even the steamy air that seems easier to swallow than to breathe.

It's summer: Deal with it.

Right now, we're talking about Peter Ferraro, an immigrant who owned a blacksmith shop somewhere in Montchanin in 1890. He's dead now, but there is a picture of him on a long board displayed near St. Anthony's church, at the very beginning of a set of exhibits of Italian-American families who had come from the Campania region of the Italian peninsula all those years ago.

Soon and perhaps without his quite understanding why, Mr. Ferraro's business will be as useful to society as a physician who believes in the "balance of humors" theory of health.

Still, his arms folded, his back arched, his face hard to make out, but his mouth grim, he looks as proud as anyone I've ever seen in a photo.

I don't care what he looks like: He's the quintessence of every honest immigrant. Just as Jenny DiPaolo (nee Borzillo), a living, breathing woman I met sitting nearby the exhibits, is as proud about who she is as anyone I've met for a long time. She's a South Philadelphia chick who always has lived there and always will. She was watching her friend perform a traditional Italian dance. I was standing nearby looking for a pen I misplaced, and after looking for it with me, she looked at me and smiled.

"It's there," she said. "Your ear."

I had stuck it there so I wouldn't lose it.

"I do that all the time," she said.

Jenny attended Wilmington's Italian Festival because, well, it was as close to South Philly as she could get while not being there.

"You know how people go all over the world?" she asked me, after I stopped blushing about the pen, and after we both groused about how digital cameras don't capture action shots very well.

"Not interested. I stay in South Philly."

Like Wilmington's Little Italy, South Philly's Italian neighborhoods are fragmenting.

But, like Peter Ferraro, and others I saw at the festival, Jenny DiPaolo is there to stay. She loves her Flyers, she carries around a picture of Sylvester Stallone in her pocket - I asked her about whether she liked him or not, and she whipped it out - and we sat reminiscing about growing up a long time ago, about lace-tied sneakers thrown over telephone wires, about going to front-row seats at Flyers games decades ago courtesy of her father's connections.

Oh, and Barbra Streisand was the first act at the Spectrum, and Jenny was there. "It's so noisy where I live," she told me. "Sirens. Guns going off. I love it. It's the only way I can sleep."

Well, there's the family behind her that likes to sing karaoke at 2 a.m. some mornings, which bothers her, but life in the city is full of stuff like that - people are people, remember? - and she wouldn't have it any other way.

In between these wonderful bookends pulsed a slow-moving festival, as slow as the air. I spoke with Giovanni Bucci, the Chicago artist who created the Mount Vesuvius display set up by the side of the church. He set it off for me, and the speakers grumbled like my old man after his second pack of cigarettes of the day.

The mottled-orange fiberglass volcano spewed a cartload of steam and spit fire.

"We did it in such a rush," Mr. Bucci told me. "There's always room for improvement."

Yep.

He told me that a lady cried when she saw all the photographs of Campania he had plastered to the left side of the exhibit. It's always about pictures.

I liked talking to Ralph Sianni, whose family pictures were displayed on the other side of Peter Ferraro's defiant picture. Mr. Sianni's mother and father, Antonius and Cecilia, emigrated to Wilmington in 1921 from the town of Castel Morrone, in the province of Caserta in the region of Campania near Naples.

One more thing about old photographs. Near Ferraro's picture was a picture of an industrial truck operator, Julia Capella, sitting and subtly smiling at the camera during one forever-gone moment during 1919. She's beautiful, wearing high laced boots and bloomers, scarf and necklace, her right hand resting on her left thigh, and her left hand resting lightly on a steel door.

An industrial truck operator?

"Why not?" one onlooker said.

Sure. Why not.

Contact Victor Greto at 324-2832 or vgreto@delawareonline.com.