We luckily saw a poster for this festival in DeLaurenti - the Italian gourmet store in Pike's Place, and planned to attend after Irene returned from NJ & PA. ---Left: one of the champion pizza twirlers, from Maggiano's restaurant chain. Right: a small part of the festival.
---Left & Right: photos of the grape-stomping contest . There were three competing groups - the pizza twirlers from Maggiano's won, as they produced more wine from their stomping. Check out the hat on the moderator.
We also went to the exhibit "Una Storia Segretta". For decades, Italian immigrant families who lived through World War ll in the US, did not want to talk about the curfews, confiscations of fishing boats (and their livelihood), forced moves from coast towns, police searches of their homes, and internments in camps such as at Fort Missoula, MT, which we visited. The majority of Italian-Americans did not know about this (Irene's mother didn't), but researchers are fleshing out this obscure footnote to American history: the treatment of 600,000 Italian citizens in the US who were classified as "enemy aliens" after the war began. You can somewhat understand the reasoning behind it, as Mussolini signed on with the Axis powers, so the US had to be sure there were no spies here. --- At the start of the war, Italian-Americans represented this nation's largest group of foreign-born residents. They numbered five million, and all but 600,000 had become citizens. Curfews and confiscations began hours after the bombing at Pearl Harbor, even before war was declared on Italy. The police swept through Italian-American neighborhoods in many cities, seizing from Italian citizens firearms, radios, cameras and flashlights that could be used as signaling devices. Most of the 600,000 were not allowed to travel more than 5 miles from their homes without police permission. That restriction kept a San Francisco man, Giuseppe DiMaggio. from visiting the Fishermen's Wharf restaurant owned by his son, Joe, the baseball legend. The police seized the fishing boats of about 90% of the San Francisco fleet, as they were owned by Italian-Americans.
