Below is a portion of a family history that I wrote on the Lo Schiavo and Catanzaro families who originated on the island of Sicily. The resources I used for this section were particularly informative as I strove to understand the lives of these ancestors.
The sexes held distinct roles in Sicilian society. The
father was the head of the household with the mother carrying out the decisions
of her husband and handling the families’ finances. The wife’s main objective was to pick wives
for her sons when the time came and to make sure they had a dowry for all the
daughters and a bridal gift for all the sons.
Church marriage used to be the only form of marriage until 1870 when civil
marriage took precedence. After that, you will often find a couple marrying
twice, both ecclesiastically and civilly.[1]
The peasant class in Sicily consisted of five
general types of occupations: agriculture, fishing, peddlers, traveling
artisans and small shopkeepers. Those
who lived in coastal were often fishermen whose work provided food as well as
income for their families. Any excess
catch, over and above what a family needed, was sold to provide for other
necessities. Fishermen were considered a “lesser” class of peasant because they
had only one useful skill, while the other peasant groups were thought to have
several.[2] A farm worker worked hard for very little
wages, often leaving for work before dawn and returning long after sundown. Others plied whatever skills they had:
entertaining, herb or firewood gathering…even grave digging could produce a
small fee, which could put some type of food on the table.[3] Even now you can hear remnants of the old
ways in the cries of the peddler[4]
as he makes his way through the streets of a Sicilian town. His cries ring out and the centuries-old
dance between peddlers and their customers continue. Older women barter from their third-floor
balconies and, after reaching an agreement, lower their baskets by rope for
their agreed-upon product.
Most Sicilians were Catholic and their lives
centered on their families and the Church.
Yet polytheism, in the forms of paganism and superstitions, was also practiced. These practices were interwoven into the
Sicilian culture and practiced alongside Catholicism. Even as late as the 1930’s, the dead were
sometimes buried without shoes, a leftover practice from the Saracens. Paganism could be seen in the type of patron
saints revered, many of whom were not biblical but rather came from the Greek
and Roman gods of old.[5] Even the use of amulets or other decorations
to ward off “malocchio” or the Evil Eye can be more closely linked to paganism
then anything else.[6]
The average person in Sicily did not speak the Italian
language as we know it, but rather their own dialect.[7] Similar to Italian in many respects “…the
Sicilian prefers the i and u, which give it a Moorish or Turkish
physiognomy; …[and] terminates both
masculine and feminine plurals in i.”[8] Clothing styles were markedly different
between the classes, at least through the first third of the twentieth century.[9] The poor often wore berets or scarves upon
their heads and a cloak to hide the quality of the clothes underneath while the
rich sported regular hats and clothing made of fine textiles.[10]
[3] Phyllis H. Williams, South Italian Folkways in Europe and America,
p. 22. The average wage for a Sicilian man working the fields was $.30 a day
for ten hours of work. Primitive means
of cultivation made the work difficult and the progress slow. See also Spencer di Scala, Italy from Revolution to Republic , pp.
154-155.
[4] In Sicily, a
“venditore ambulanti”or traveling peddler sells his product on the streets of
the town by calling out what he has to sell along with the price of the
product. At one time a horse/mule and a
cart was commonly used but now you’re more likely to see them use a very small
truck to cart their product. They sell
anything from bread to vegetables to fruit, herbs and many other products.
[5] Phyllis H. Williams, South
Italian Folkways in Europe and America, pp. 135-138.
[6] Alan Dundes, The Evil Eye: a casebook, (University of
Wisconsin Press, 1991), information on the Evil Eye is found throughout the
whole book; digital images, Google Books
(http://books.google.com/: accessed 17
July 2009).
[7] George Smith and William Makepeace Thackeray, “Sicilian
Folk-Songs”, The Cornhill Magazine
(Smith, Elder and Co., 1877), p. 444; digital images, Google Books (http://books.google.com/:
accessed 28 April 2009).
[8] “Dialects and Literature of Southern Italy”, The Foreign Quarterly Review (Treuttel
and Wurtz, Treuttel, Jun, and Ricter, 1830), p. 181; digital images, Google Books (http://books.google.com/: accessed 28 April
2009).
[9] Jane
Holowitz, Economic development and social
change in Sicily, p. 52.
