EAST BOSTON, Mass. This neighborhood of Boston hangs suspended in a sort of twilight zone, with jet planes flying in and out of Logan International Airport, but residents on the ground often living out their lives without ever venturing beyond their zip code. “Why would I go anywhere else?” asks 78-year-old Nunzio Fabrizio, a retired mailman. “I got everything I need here: wine, cheese, lottery tickets and the newspaper,” he says as he suns himself in the cool spring breeze off the Atlantic Ocean.
Our Lady of Perpetual Airplane Noise Church
But others aren’t so complacent. “Easy for him to say,” cracks Gaetano di Silva, a more recent immigrant from Reggio Emilia, Italy. “After forty years here, he’s a bland Italo-American, not like me, fresh off the boat.”
di Silva is one of many able-bodied men and women who were encouraged to come to this country in the past two decades by food conglomerates to meet rising demand for Creamy Italian Dressing, an old-world condiment that was native to rural regions of Italy, but which has fallen into disfavor lately as American palates have grown more sophisticated.
“The Creamy Italians will perhaps be the last wave of Italian immigrants to wash up on our shores,” notes sociologist Morton Kenderson of New England College. “They survived internecine warfare between pasta and antipasto forces, only to find themselves cast aside like some unwanted garnish on a plate of eggplant parmesan.”
Both men worship at Our Lady of Perpetual Airplane Noise Church on Maverick Avenue, but the social distinctions between the groups the two men represent are readily apparent even to an outsider. “The regular Italians, they’re oily,” says Mike D’Angelo, who left this insular area and moved to the suburbs for greater opportunity. “The Creamy Italians, I don’t know–they’re kinda thick if you ask me.”
Fabian Forte
Oily Italians made great strides in the 1960s, producing a string of smooth, suave singers such as Frankie Avalon, Bobby Darin, Dean Martin and Fabian Forte that countered stereotypes from the Sacco and Vanzetti era that Italians were dangerous anarchists. Creamy Italians have yet to match that success, and say they struggle by comparison to their countrymen who arrived here before them.
“It’s like as soon as they got into the castle, they drew up the drawbridge,” says di Silva, who spends his weekends fishing off East Pier here. “All they left us was a moat filled with oil and vinegar.”
Social workers say they try to help the newcomers, but the older generation of oily Italians considers the newcomers’ approach an offense to tradition, as well as unhealthy. “You looked at the recipe?” asks cab driver Vincent Canuzzo as he drops off a passenger at Terminal E here. “What kinda mook puts mayonnaise and sour cream in dressing?”
I feel guilty I have adopted Caesar as my dressing of choice.