The Mulberry Street Memo

Stories from when Italian meant something.

Between 1880 and 1924, more than four million Italians crossed the Atlantic and built lives in American tenements, factories, and back-alley kitchens. They sent money home, bought houses on bricklayers' wages, and figured out how to feed eight people on twenty-two cents.

Most of what they knew was never written down. The recipes, the savings systems, the regional rules carried from Palermo and Naples and Calabria they passed from mother to daughter in dialect, in basements, in the language of a generation that learned English second.

Then the second generation forgot, the third generation never asked, and the fourth generation found a Facebook group and started wondering what their grandparents actually did all day.

The Mulberry Street Memo is for them. 
Benvenuti.