15 Things Your Italian Grandparents Never Threw Away

In 1908, Lewis Hine photographed an Italian mother and her three children at Ellis Island and named the picture after their lost baggage. More than a hundred years later, that family still had something they carried over from Sicily. This is a countdown of fifteen things Italian-American families used to save, and what each one was being saved for. The bread crusts drying in the oven. The brown beer bottles waiting for sauce day. The plastic on the good couch, the sanguinaccio signs on Arthur Avenue, the palm behind the crucifix, and the drawer full of bomboniere. Then the soap-box gardens on tenement rooftops, the fig trees wrapped and buried every winter, the Mass cards in the prayer book, the lucky fava bean from the St. Joseph altar, the seeds carried over from Calabria, the corredo in the attic, the grapevine cuttings, the money set aside for somebody else's ticket, and the trunk at Number One. Details come from the Tenement Museum, Atlas Obscura, L'Italo-Americano, Pittsburgh Quarterly, 64 Parishes, U.S. Catholic, and Louis Takács's research on Hine's photograph. Subscribe for more Italian-American stories: https://www.youtube.com/@MulberryStreetMemo