Montréal à l'italienne/Italian Montréal

On the notions of home and migration, anthropologist Michael Jackson writes, “Once we have left our childhood places and started out to make up our own lives, . . . we understand that the real secret of the ruby slippers is not that ‘there's no place like home’ but rather that there is no longer any such place as home: except, of course, for the home we make, or the homes that are made for us” (2013, 158). One of the few objects that I brought home with me from my maternal grandmother's kitchen in Italy when I visited in 2012 is an old handmade aluminum ladle, an artifact she had used to stir, skim, and pour broths and sauces into bowls. The cultural biography of my grandmother's mestolo (in Italian, or cuppino, in the local Molisan dialect) is embedded in the multilayered emotional and sensorial memories that my grandmother constituted in her home, and later, that my mother and I recreated in our respective homes and imaginations in Montreal. As anthropologist Maruška Svašek reminds us, “Emotional processes do not solely occur when individuals share space and time with each other or with objects, but also occur when they are engaged in inner dialogues, recalling or imagining other people, past selves, places and other phenomena” (2012, 12). Stepping into the kitchen area—one of the five defining spaces of the new Montréal à l'italienne/Italian Montréal exhibition at the city's Pointe-à-Callière Archeology and History Complex—reanimated a chorus of childhood memories of my family engaged in the rituals of cooking and preserving food and gatherings with family and friends. The experience was immersive and mnemonic, and its highly sensorial traces remain indelible.Home and its many objects and memories of Italian families who immigrated and settled in Montreal in the twentieth century constitute the pulsating heart behind this new inclusive exhibition. With more than 325 objects belonging to nearly fifty families and organizations in Montreal, this sociocultural overview of some of the most prominent objects found to this day in Italian homes represents a thousand and one experiences of Italians who arrived in Canada, particularly in the postwar years. Developed as part of the museum's mission to acknowledge Montreal's diverse communities of the past and present, the exhibition adopts a community-based approach to render homage to Italian Canadians and their remarkable involvement in and contribution to the economic, social, and cultural fabric in Montreal.It is appropriate that the Pointe-à-Callière Archaeology and History Complex curate an exhibition of this nature on the formidable Italian intergenerational presence in Montreal. Situated in the oldest part of the city of Montreal, Quebec, Canada, it was founded in 1992 as part of the celebrations marking the city's 350th birthday. Its artifact collections derive from the First Nations of the region, the French and British presences, and other communities who have made the city their home. The museum, constructed on pilings for the purpose of preserving the historic and archaeological sites that it stands on, protects some of the largest archaeological collections in Canada.The story of the Italian presence in Montreal is told in five distinct gallery spaces, each echoing a sociocultural historical importance. Visitors are first greeted in a setting reminiscent of Windsor Station, a Montreal symbol of the Canadian Pacific Railway's prominent role in the nation's history, followed by a commercial street that represents the place of arrival and engagement of throngs of Italian men, women, and children moving to Montreal over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.The theme of work marks the initial steps into the exhibition, which features display cases containing original objects, such as tools (including a nineteenth-century sewing machine, a masonry trowel), black-and-white photographs, textiles (for example, a family's embroidered tablecloth), and audio narratives that illustrate the diversified world of labor that occupied many Italian men and women upon their settling in Montreal. It highlights the handwork of Italians involved in the railroad, construction, and transport industries and the needle trade and domestic work industries that contributed to the expansion of postwar Montreal.Next we enter the café, that quintessential meeting place that since at least the seventeenth century has served as a social space for discussing news, art, politics, philosophy, sports, and work. Posters, photographs, the front pages of newspapers, and memorabilia on themes featuring the women's movement of the 1970s, trade unionism, and workers’ rights adorn the walls in a display case alongside excerpts from documentary films (e.g., Caffè Italia Montréal, by Paul Tana; Ho Fatto il Mio Coraggio, by Giovanni Princigalli; Trois camarades de Montréal, by Bruno Ramirez and Princigalli, and even a TV commercial for Fruiterie Milano by Roberto Zorfini) that cover aspects of Italian life, including the Italian national soccer team's momentous World Cup victory in 1982. A wall commemorating the names of the more than six hundred Italians detained in Canadian internment camps during World War II under the authority of the War Measures Act forms the back of the café. Here, strangely enough, the names are featured with no comment, marking an unexplained silence despite a resurging academic and artistic interest in the subject and coinciding with this year's formal apology issued by Canada's prime minister Justin Trudeau.From the café gallery, we cross over to galleries devoted to the Italian home and its polyphonic representations. Unlike any other space of the exhibition, the home space magically brings to life the senses—from the tactile to the auditory, from the visual to the olfactory. Old family photographs, passports, and naturalization papers are featured alongside wrought-iron keys of migrants’ family homes in their native Italy. Kitchen and cooking tools used in the 1950s and 1960s are placed adjacent to traditional objects for food preservation—a demijohn, among the wine making accessories found in many Italian migrant homes in Montreal, a pasta maker for spaghetti alla chitarra, and images of women and men proudly standing by the rows of homemade tomato-sauce jars and home-dried charcuterie in their cantina. The abundance of fresh produce in Italian cooking signaled that a fresh food market was a stone's throw from home. In the exhibit, the Jean-Talon Market, the queen of markets close to where many Italians had settled in the postwar years, occupies a visibly iconic role both historically and in today's Montreal.One of the exhibition's prominent missing pieces are letters of Italian migrants and their families in Italy and elsewhere in the diaspora. Surprisingly, the exhibition features no signs of such letters—that ubiquitous epistolary exchange that was a life source for many an Italian soul whose attachment to their families and homeland remained resilient, despite having made the hard decision to migrate to faraway Canada. With nearly half a million Italians settling in Canada in the postwar years—a period marked by prohibitive costs associated with traveling and telephone calls—the flow of correspondence needed to be constant. While time has withered this tangible site of memory in some households, other Italian families have held onto these precious cultural archives.The Catholic Church represented a major meeting place for Italian families in Montreal. Samples of the glasswork of Italian Canadian artist Guido Nincheri and the surrounding religious art reminiscent of the postwar era signal the dynamic cultural and religious life that many Italian families enjoyed in these years. Lifecycle celebrations represented by heirloom objects including a baptismal dress from circa 1928 and a wedding dress from 1976 are accompanied by a section spotlighting community bands and their instruments. Traditionally adorned dolls from the twenty regions of Italy cover the wall featuring the origin towns and areas of Montreal's Italian community. The exhibition concludes with a focus on the manifold cultural, scientific, business, and political contributions of today's Italian Montrealers. The work of renowned abstract artist Guido Molinari and of Vittorio Fiorucci (creator of the little green man symbolizing the Montreal International Comedy Festival) is juxtaposed with a selection of objects and books authored by the city's Italians and a wall of digital photographs representing today's thriving community.As part of a rising trend in creating a public discourse and collective memory of the mobility of people and their objects and ideas, the Pointe-à-Callière Museum joins museums in the Americas and Europe in underscoring the enduring significance of migration and home. Interactive COVID-19-friendly activities, part of the safety protocols in place at the museum, punctuate the audiovisuals, photographs, objects, archival documents, and first-hand accounts displayed in the exhibition. This timely exhibition has created a vivid, vital space for dialogue between anyone who has migrated abroad and the historical Italian presence in Canada and North America.

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