Review by Choice Review
Musician John di Palma receives credit for being the first Italian to reside in Colonial Philadelphia. His arrival, sometime before 1757, marked the modest beginning of what, over time, would become a thriving ethnic community. Its history, as conveyed in this extensively researched study, often appears as a collection of only marginally connected vignettes as opposed to an integrated narrative, but such rendering no doubt captures accurately the city's early Italian American presence. In the aquatic parlance so often used metaphorically to describe immigration, what began as a trickle grew to be a small but steady stream, and before the tide of mass Italian migration, these urban pioneers had established ethnic neighborhoods and a variety of other cultural institutions. Immigration scholars will appreciate this effort to depict and analyze the often overlooked pre-mass immigration period. Those with a more general interest in either Philadelphia history or Italian immigrants will find the book both interesting and enjoyable. Recommended for academic and general readers. R. F. Zeidel; University of Wisconsin--Stout
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
