Intergroup Relations

Relations between Italians and others in Canada have been varied and fluid, differing from one period to another and from place to place. They were greatly influenced by the prevailing intellectual currents of the time, by international affairs, and by the specific ethnic mix within any locality. During the early part of the twentieth century, imperialist English-Canadian nationalism and nativism placed Italians on the long list of non-preferred immigrants from beyond the borders of the desired areas of Britain, the United States, and northwestern Europe. The struggle by Italians to reverse their evaluation as undesiderable immigrants made steady progress until World War II, when the image of “enemy alien” was added to the earlier stereotypes that connected them to padrone exploitation as bosses and workers and to criminality as both petty criminals and alleged mafiosi.

Within specific locations, relationships became part of the local economic and social order. In the earlier twentieth century, Italians were recruited, along with eastern Europeans, Newfoundlanders, and American blacks, to work in the steel mills of Sydney on Cape Breton Island, where conflict soon emerged with Anglo-Canadian workers over “white” jobs. In Quebec their integration with the francophone Catholic majority progressed significantly while they still maintained a separate cultural identity. Italians in Montreal lived alongside French Canadians, shared a common working-class experience, and attended the same churches and schools. Intermarriage occurred mainly with francophones rather than anglophones, with whom cultural, religious, and class difference was much greater.

In northern Ontario, Italians came into contact with Finnish, Greek, and Hungarian workers, among others, with whom they established common ground at the Lakehead as strikers against the Canadian Northern and Canadian Pacific railways. In British Columbia during the second decade of the century, they were drawn to the new pulp and paper mill at Powell River, where they lived near Scandinavians and Ukrainians in an area known as Balkan Village. In Toronto, where central-city Italians and Jews resided in adjacent neighbourhoods and were brought together in the clothing industry, the two groups shared the common experience of nativist prejudice. Italian immigrants realized that the “Gentiles only” signs which appeared in some parks and beaches in the city included them as well. In 1933, when a swastika gang provoked a riot at Christie Pits during a baseball game between Jewish and mainstream teams, the Jewish youths were aided in the six-hour fight by neighbourhood Italians, who felt similarly threatened by the appearance of racism.

The greatest strain between Italians and mainstream Canadian society occurred during World War II. After fascist Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, immigrants had increasingly to bear the brunt of anti-Italian sentiment. Canada entered the war in the fall of 1939 on the side of Britain against Nazi Germany, inevitably leading to hostilities with fascist Italy when Mussolini joined the fray in June 1940 on the German side. The War Measures Act made it possible for the federal cabinet to suspend civil liberties and regulate any aspect of society deemed necessary for the conduct of the war. With regard to Italian Canadians, this meant that overnight many were designated enemy aliens. The suspension of legal rights applied not only to fascist sympathizers and the non-naturalized, but even to Canadian citizens of Italian origin who had been naturalized after September 1929; this treatment was made even harsher when the date was rolled back to September 1922.

All fascist and associated organizations and newspapers were declared illegal and ceased to function. People on the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s lists of suspects – often collected through less than reliable methods – were quickly rounded up and arrested without right of habeas corpus. Approximately six hundred were interned (one-third from Ontario), of whom more than two hundred were naturalized citizens. Most of the internees were held at Camp Petawawa, about 160 kilometres northeast of Ottawa, and some in Fredericton. The detainees were, for the most part, prominent men in their community, and their seizure was at least partly intended as an example to other Italian Canadians. All those over sixteen years of age who were designated enemy aliens had to register with the registrar of enemy aliens, carry identity cards, and report monthly to the RCMP. Furthermore, they were restricted from working in munitions plants, and the custodian of alien property was authorized to confiscate their property.

Predictably, the reaction of mainstream Canadians reflected the official government policy. Italian-Canadian store owners were boycotted and had their shop windows smashed, workers were shunned by fellow employees and fired from their jobs, residents were taunted by catcalls and spied upon, and even tombstones on Italian graves were vandalized. Newspaper stories often added to the harassment, and some cities denied Italian Canadians municipal employment and relief. Especially for the wives and children of internees, the refusal of public assistance was devastating. Friction between Italians and French Canadians, however, was less noticeable than with anglophone Canadians. Quebec remained opposed to intervention in the war, and indeed the mayor of Montreal, Camillien Houde, was interned with leading Italians as a security risk.

Despite renewed prejudice against Italian Canadians during the war, there can be little doubt of the group’s loyalty to its adopted land. Members of the community contributed significantly to the war effort. Many young men volunteered for the Canadian armed forces, and some rose to officer rank. The Tascona family of Saint-Boniface, Manitoba, for example, contributed four sons to the armed forces, and several members of the Italian community in Ottawa volunteered for the Royal Canadian Air Force, a number of whom died in action. Italians in the small town of Coleman, Alberta, expressed their loyalty to Canada by donating $1,000 towards the purchase of four ambulances. In Trail the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company was able to guarantee the loyalty of all its Italian employees, who proved themselves by working with record-breaking efficiency on government contracts. Italian-Canadian women contributed to the war effort through their work with the Canadian Red Cross. A mother and daughter from Copper Cliff, Ontario, on two occasions received citations from the Red Cross for their wartime volunteer work. In Toronto, construction magnate James Franceschini opened shipyards and built minesweepers for the government at probably the lowest cost in Canada. However, when Italy entered the war, he too was interned for a time at Camp Petawawa and his businesses were confiscated by the government.

The horrors of World War II and their link to racism led to a relatively more tolerant Canadian society in the post-war period. But nativism had deep roots, and it resurfaced with the advent of mass immigration in the 1950s. During the decade, while tens of thousands of grateful Italian immigrants entered Canada, their reception by the mainstream did not differ much from that extended to earlier compatriots. This response was reflected in the English-language press. While there were notable exceptions, such as Saturday Night magazine, for the most part the press expressed suspicion, if not outright hostility, towards the new immigrants. All the well-worn prejudices were replayed throughout the 1950s and 1960s: Italians congregated in unassimilable ghettos; they were prone to violence; they imported the mafia and fascism; they undermined the moral fabric of the society. To this litany was added the new grievances that immigrants despoiled valuable agricultural land by adding to urban sprawl, posed a Communist threat (the party in Italy was the largest in the West), and, as cheap labour, drove out the native-born during the “brain drain” to the United States during the 1950s.

A number of journalists, such as Frank Drea, Pierre Berton, and Peter Newman, defended the hard work and family values of Italians and pointed out they were adding to the cultural vitality of Canada. More immediately important, however, were the views of policy makers such as Hugh Keenleyside, politicians such as New-foundland’s Jack Pickersgill, or employers such as the Steel Company of Canada, who argued for new immigration as necessary for economic prosperity and indeed for Canadian independence itself.

The most tenacious of the stereotypes was that of the mafia. The marshalling of government statistics showing Italians to be among the most law abiding in Canadian society and erudite studies illustrating that the mafia was far from the only ethnic syndicate that organized crime along big-business lines were no match for Hollywood images, which overtook Canadian culture with the spread of television. The stereotype, which had first arisen in the American south in the 1890s, underwent a resurgence in the Cold War era, when people were fascinated by alleged foreign conspiracies. The mass media played the major role in expanding the term “mafia” to include other ethnic crime, and indeed any supposed clique of undue influence. Usage of the epithet became so elastic that in 1984 a British Columbia cabinet minister likened even Canada’s staid chartered banks to the mafia. But no matter what the content, the term inevitably rebounded on the Italian community. The suspicion that the image generated affected young and old, rich and poor. Movies such as The Godfather, released in the 1970s, by placing crime within its cultural content, had the deleterious effect of subsuming under the mafia “mystique” the very institutions and values that constituted the Italian community’s strengths and formed the foundation for its survival. Relationships connected to the family, such as padrino (male godparent), and even the family itself, along with traditional, interrelated values such as honour and respect, were all undermined by being linked with the mafia mystique.

The mafia stereotype was an extraordinarily effective weapon by which the established elites could (through ad hoc expediency, rather than by design) successfully block challenges to their hegemony by mobile Italians in the political and economic fields. The mystique, based on gangland reality, had mass appeal; it could be converted into profit by promoters such as film-makers, journalists, and restaurateurs; and it was almost endlessly elastic. By the late 1980s the Globe and Mail had shifted away from reports on gangland celebrities to much more subtle, but pernicious, coverage of rising Italian-Canadian businessmen and politicians. The subtext contained the same message of nefarious dealings. The impression given by the press was that Italian-Canadian developers in the Toronto area were able to amass significant wealth, not because of lackadaisical planning regulations or business acumen, but because of supposed suspicious connections and civic corruption. Young up-and-coming politicians were able to win suburban nominations and elections, not because of energetic recruitment of party members and community self-interest, but because of their alleged manipulation and raiding of riding associations. Within the Italian community it was popularly perceived that the passing over of two Italian-Canadian police superintendents for the office of chief in Toronto during the 1980s and of a senior cabinet minister for the leadership of the Ontario Liberal Party in the early 1990s had at least as much to do with prejudice as merit.

The Italian-Canadian struggle against prejudice made steady progress, however, and was more effective than the analogous campaign in the United States. Three events were important markers in this process. In 1979 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation aired a television program entitled “Connections,” dealing with organized crime. The choice of subject was fair enough, but the program’s extensive focus on mafia figures misrepresented the phenomenon as being ethno-specific, and the portrayal cast aspersions upon the entire Italian-Canadian community. Members of the group from Vancouver to Montreal were outraged by the distorted reportage, and a Gallup poll conducted shortly after the program showed that their anxiety was well founded. Fully 40 percent of Canadians linked Italians with crime; more disturbing, of those who viewed the CBC program, 47 percent made the linkage, compared to 37 percent who had not seen it. Another study conducted by sociologists on ethnic groups in Toronto in the late 1970s found that over one-quarter of Italian Canadians had experienced intolerance and one-third believed that the group was the object of discrimination by employers, figures that were generally surpassed only by Jewish and coloured minorities. Nonetheless, prejudice was beginning to be effectively challenged. Protests spearheaded by Senator Peter Bosa were lodged against the mainstream media; the recently formed National Congress of Italian-Canadians became more active within the community and in political lobbying; and a new generation of talented writers was emerging, one capable of holding up a different mirror of Italian Canadians to themselves and to the dominant society.

The second major event marking a change in relations between minority and majority was Italy’s winning of the World Soccer Cup in July 1982. Spontaneous celebrations among tens of thousands of Italian Canadians broke out in cities from Calgary to Hamilton. In Toronto huge crowds thronged Little Italy for a week-long series of festivities. The World Cup had a tremendous impact on Italian Canadians, especially the native-born. It was as if those who had been timid in admitting their heritage had virtually overnight discovered the confidence to celebrate it. Official multiculturalism had provided the objective conditions for Italians to assert their ethnic identity, but the process had been kept in check by debilitating stereotypes. The soccer cup victory served as a cathartic release of ethnic identity and pride. The neutral field of sport presented Italian Canadians with the first major positive event since the war with which all could identify and which could invite participation from the mainstream. Even a decade earlier the spilling over of celebrants onto the streets and the noise of car horns would have been resisted by local authorities. The fact that the Italian flag was flown over city hall in honour of the victory and mainstream Canadians joined in the festivities bore witness to the extent that multiculturalism was being internalized in Canada’s large cities.

The events of July 1982 proved to both Italian Canadians and others that they had become an integral part of Canada’s cosmopolitan identity. Along with Italian food and fashion, which became increasingly popular within mainstream society, sport contributed to the new positive images that were increasingly displacing earlier ones. In the autumn of 1983 Simpson’s, a prominent department store chain, in conjunction with Italian agencies, launched a major merchandising campaign to promote Italian fashion, interspersed with cultural displays, throughout southern Ontario. In the winter of 1985 the Toronto Star, in a comprehensive review of seven major groups in the city, including Canadians of British origin, reported sympathetically on Italian Canadians and spoke approvingly of the “Italianization” of Metropolitan Toronto in areas ranging from the group’s contribution to street life to successful fund-raising for community projects. Indeed, the incorporation of Italians and their culture into the mainstream during the 1980s progressed at such a pace that more recent ethnic groups saw Italian Canadians very differently from the way they perceived themselves. At the end of the decade, Share (Toronto, 1978– ), a newspaper for Canadians of West Indian and black origins, spoke of the “Anglo-Jewish-Italian establishment” in Toronto, a reference which, while surprising to Italians, indicated the extent of the change.

A third marker in the evolving minority-majority relations took place in 1990, when Prime Minister Brian Mulroney responded to demands by the National Congress of Italian-Canadians that the federal government make restitution to the community for the suspension of civil liberties and internment during World War II. The prime minister offered an official apology as part of a series of initiatives to redress wartime wrongs or discrimination in immigration – the Japanese and Ukrainians with regard to the former, and the Chinese and Jews concerning the latter. For many Italian Canadians the issue signified much more than their wartime treatment. It marked recognition of how they had been poorly treated and designated as non-preferred immigrants. The federal apology, as well as righting a wrong, signified acceptance of Italians into Canadian society on a equal footing. In short, it served as a ritual of incorporation.

Women were instrumental in changing social perceptions, which after all had been based on narrow, male stereotypes. In the late 1980s and 1990s, lawyer Annamarie P. Castrilli, as president of the NCIC, chair of the University of Toronto’s governing council, vice-chair of the Toronto Crime Inquiry, and Liberal MPP, energetically devoted herself to the cause of ethnic equality. Connie I. Roveto, a Montreal-born businesswoman on the senate of St Michael’s College in Toronto and director of the Ontario Film Development Corporation, in 1993 proved that it was possible to overcome even double barriers on the basis of merit when she was appointed president of one of Canada’s leading financial management companies. Professor Penny Petrone of Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, as well as being a student of her own culture (Breaking the Mold, Toronto, 1995), brought her appreciation of Canada’s rich native literature to others with the compilation of First Peoples, First Voices (Toronto, 1983), for which she was made an honorary chief of the Gull Bay Ojibwa. Many others similarly broke new ground and opened up new perceptions of Italian Canadians.

Concurrent with the improvement in relations between Italians and the Canadian mainstream and their greater incorporation, the post-war era witnessed the emergence of regional associations within the Italian-Canadian group. That Italy was a nation-state of regions with local cultures, dialects, and histories was recognized by the republican constitution of 1948, which provided for the election of regional assemblies. Cold War politics, however, retarded the implementation of regional government, except for border regions such as Sicily where minority concerns were particularly pressing. In 1963, after relations with Yugoslavia had stabilized, the region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia was also given special autonomy. This was followed in 1970 by the extension of regional government to the remaining fifteen regions from Veneto to Calabria. The process had a profound effect on regional groups in Canada as the Italian regions used their new powers to promote trade and tourism by forging links with their immigrants abroad. Several regions formed associations for their people nel mondo (throughout the world), trade missions were launched, programs for emigrant youth set up, conferences on emigration organized, cultural exhibitions mounted, and regional representatives appointed.

The activity emanating from the homeland met with a ready reception among several sub-communities that had been transplanted by the post-war immigrants, soon resulting in the institutionalization of regionally based activity. It was no accident that out of fourteen regional associations in Canada, all but two were founded after the 1970 empowerment of Italian regions, one-half in the 1980s. Interestingly, the growth of regional associations, rather than being at cross purposes with the evolution of an Italian-Canadian community and identity, often worked in tandem with it. Such was especially the case with southern regional associations, which were constituted as umbrella federations seeking to incorporate home-town and provincial clubs, and which endeavoured to promote their own version of italianità at the expense of local allegiances. In this sense, the regional associations formed an aspect of the post-war consolidation movement, rather than being at odds with it. Moreover, it is far from clear to what extent the regional associations have been successful in promoting local identities. Especially for southern Italians, in both the Old and New Worlds, home-town allegiance and self-identification (campanilismo) was traditionally much more salient and organically rooted than regional loyalty, upon which was superimposed by the central state a politically constructed sense of italianità, especially during the Mussolini regime. The extent to which the recent expansion of regional associations represents a successful attempt to interject a meaningful sense of identity between paesanismo and that of being Italian-Canadian is an open question. While they are supported by some immigrant males, the regional associations have been largely unsuccessful in recruiting women or second-generation Italian Canadians in their activities.

The singular exception to this pattern is the experience of the Friulians in Canada, who began to organize on a regional basis well before World War II and formed their first club, the Famée Furlane, in Toronto in 1932. Because of the foresight of its officers, who refused to endorse the fascist regime of the time, the club survived the wartime turmoil that destroyed many other community organizations and was able to build anew with the arrival of a large number of friulani in the 1950s. Throughout Canada other Friulian clubs were quickly established in Montreal and Vancouver (1958), Winnipeg (1960), Windsor (1961), Calgary (1967), Hamilton and Oakville (1968), Ottawa (1969), and Niagara (1972). The network of regional organizations was brought together in 1974 under a national body, the Fogolârs (Hearth) Federation of Canada, which hosts biennial conferences to discuss issues and policies of common concern.

Historically, the territory of Friuli passed through Celtic, Roman, and Germanic periods and gained local autonomy between 1077 and 1420 under the patriarch of Aquileia. Friuli was joined to the Venetian republic until it was annexed by Austria around 1800. It became part of Italy after voting for union in 1866. Reflecting its history as a border region, immigrants from Friuli were bound together by a distinctive local culture (including a unique cuisine) and folklore, by their common experience as itinerant building tradesmen, and by a Romansh, alpine dialect that some believe to be a distinct language. In the major Friulian communities, such as Windsor and Vancouver, community centres have been constructed, and in Toronto the group recently expanded its facilities at the Famée Furlane to include senior citizens’ housing. Moreover, Canada’s Friulians have been successful in involving women and youth in their community organizations. The Società Femminile Friulana (Friulian Women’s Society) of Toronto dates back to 1938. Despite obvious successes in establishing regional organizations and preserving a distinctive culture, the future of Friulian identity in Canada – and even more so that of other regional groups – is uncertain. A recent survey found that half had married outside the group, language courses in Friulian have met with negligible response, and the attraction of a dynamic Italian-Canadian culture has made it the central marker for many of the Friulians’ offspring.

For the Italian-Canadian ethnic group generally, incorporation into the mainstream has been facilitated by a culturally engrained Catholic sensibility rooted in Mediterranean heterogeneity. The growing inclusiveness of the mainstream was matched by that of the Italian-Canadian ethnic minority. The latter’s openness to other Canadians took both individual and collective forms. Individually, Italian Canadians formed personal friendships, business partnerships, and political alliances with a variety of other Canadians. Most clearly, however, beyond the immigrant generation, they have moved swiftly to intermarry. A major study of ethnicity in Toronto conducted in the late 1970s found that, of six groups of European origin (including the British), Italians placed relatively low importance on endogamy as necessary for the retention of ethnic identity. Much more relevant were social and cultural obligations – helping another to find a job, speaking Italian, supporting group needs and causes. Such activity was seen as important, even among the third generation, by at least 20 percent. In other words, for Italian Canadians ethnicity was much more a matter of relationships and culture rather than biology. In Toronto over one-third of the second generation married outside the group, and more than 70 percent of the third generation. In Montreal the rate of exogamy was even higher. Over three-quarters of Canadian-born Italians married into other ethnicities. While the majority of marriages in English-speaking Canada were with the British and in Quebec with the French, Italians have formed unions across the whole spectrum of the ethnic landscape: with others of European origins and with Jews, blacks, Asians, and native Canadians.

Given this outward-looking orientation, it is not surprising that the major Italian-Canadian organizations have been open to all. The social-service agency COSTIIIAS in southern Ontario has evolved from a body supplying aid to Italian immigrants to an all-purpose agency providing everything from family counselling to computer skills. By the 1990s fewer than 30 percent of its clientele were Italian; most were more recent immigrants from other Mediterranean countries, Latin America, Asia, and Africa. In Vancouver the Italian Cultural and Recreational Centre made its conference halls available to the general public; its art gallery promoted the work of artists from various origins; its language school taught English, French, and Spanish, along with Italian; and books from its large library could be borrowed free of charge. The Italian Committee for Educational and Cultural Activities donated major book collections to universities in Calgary and Regina, as well as to various institutions in Victoria, Prince Rupert, Trail, and Lethbridge. In Toronto the annual CHIN Radio International Picnic has emerged as a major multicultural event, though its Italian roots have been maintained. In the Italian Soccer League based in the metropolitan area, the Gran Sasso (Abruzzi) Club, which won the league championship in 1986, consisted of an interracial team. Out of the fifteen players, six were Italian Canadians, five black, two Hispanic, and one each Polish and Anglo-Canadian.

The Italian Canadian Benevolent Corporation has developed several successful community projects in the Toronto region that have functioned as bridges to other Canadians. Senior citizens’ housing, facilities for the handicapped, and especially the cultural-recreational complex, while rooted in the Italian-Canadian community, are accessible to the general public. The Columbus Centre has become an important base for many groups ranging from boy scouts and the Canadian Mental Health Association to the region’s large Somali community. The various facilities employ over five hundred people, many of whom are not Italian. During the autumn of 1992, as part of its celebration of the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s encounter with the Americas, the Columbus Centre extended its practice of displaying native art by featuring an exhibition of five noted Manitoulin Island artists and marked Thanksgiving with a sweetgrass ceremony conducted by artist Leland Bell (Bebaminojmat).

The same year the Toronto Star, in a twenty-four page supplement dedicated to Italian Canadians, noted the community’s fund-raising abilities and philanthropic contributions. Businessman Rudolph Bratty sat on the boards of four medical centres and the Canadian Council of Christians and Jews; Ottawa-raised Ron Barbaro, an insurance executive and chair of the Metropolitan Toronto Zoo, received the coveted Gardiner Award for his work with AIDS victims; and Elio Rosati, a decorated World War II veteran with the Royal Canadian Air Force, as well as volunteering within the community, dedicated himself to veterans’ affairs and was governor of Humber Memorial Hospital for seven years. In addition to such notable examples were the many individual contributions made by average Italian Canadians to the general welfare.

A case in point is provided by the Order of the Sons of Italy of Ontario, which, interestingly, in the early 1990s had as its president Chris Bennedsen, a Scandinavian married to an Italian. Before World War II, the Order, with both male and female lodges, had moved beyond the original purpose of providing benefits to its members. During the war it held fund-raising drives for the Canadian Red Cross, and in the next decade it raised money for victims of Hurricane Hazel, which devastated southern Ontario in 1954, and of the Springhill mine disaster four years later in Nova Scotia, both of which claimed dozens of lives. The post-war era also saw the order expand its scholarship program for Ontario universities and establish an award at the University of Winnipeg. In 1973 the Josephine Lavey Provincial Scholarship was founded in honour of the woman (née De Martile) who, as administrative officer, had been the backbone of the organization for over twenty-five years.

In the early 1970s the order adopted the Kidney Foundation of Canada as its official charity, although over the years tens of thousands of dollars were also raised for research and treatment of cancer, heart disease and stroke, muscular dystrophy, and thalassaemia major, a hereditary anaemia prevalent among people of Mediterranean, Asian, and African origins. Across Ontario the major lodges contributed to various community causes. In Sault St Marie, where the first lodge in Canada had been established in 1915, the order had sixteen different charitable and community campaigns under way in 1989. About the same time in Welland, various charities, including the County General Hospital, received sizable grants; in the early 1990s a meals-on-wheels program for shut-ins was sponsored in Thorold; $15,000 was earmarked by Hamilton lodges to erect a Ronald McDonald house; and in Niagara Falls $20,000 out of a pledged $100,000 for a CAT-scan machine had been donated by 1994.

The pluralist ethos that took root in Canada after 1970 has involved Italian Canadians in a plethora of multicultural activities from coast to coast. Cultural centres from Prince Rupert to Winnipeg and Halifax have become part of local multicultural events and exchanges. All-purpose events such as Italian Week in Ottawa, Festitalia in Hamilton, and Feste Italiane in Thunder Bay have been organized not only for Italian Canadians but, more important, as a means of facilitating cultural communication. Common elements of such programs, which stretch over several days, include exhibits on Italian-Canadian history, art shows at area galleries or colleges, and Italian theatre, film, and music (classical and operatic). Folkloric performances, food, and sport, especially soccer and cycling, and children’s entertainment provide more popular attractions. Moreover, Italian Canadians have become major participants in multicultural organizations such as the Sudbury Folk Arts Council and the Thunder Bay Multicultural Association, both of which by the early 1980s represented about twenty ethnic groups. The main purposes of such organizations are to facilitate cross-cultural exchange and coordinate activities, but also to eradicate prejudice and promote cultural pluralism through lobbying, conferences, and publications such as Northern Mosaic (Thunder Bay, Ont., 1975– ). They also provide input to provincial and federal consultative bodies on multiculturalism, advising governments on relevant issues.

The Italian Cultural Institute, with offices in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver since 1980, has been instrumental in presenting Italian culture, especially that of modern Italy, to Canadians. In the winter of 1990–91, it staged its largest arts festival, comprised of ten theatre productions, two film series, three conferences, and four exhibits of art, architecture, and photography. The festival ranged from a concert by the chamber orchestra of the Academy of Saint Cecilia to a cinematographic retrospective on Anna Magnani, and included activities in Toronto, Hamilton, Windsor, Ottawa, Montreal, Calgary, and Vancouver.

The Italian struggle against prejudice and for a legitimate place in Canadian society has expressed itself through the community’s claim for physical markers of its evolution. This process was under way in the interwar era in both Montreal and Toronto through such efforts as erecting monuments to early Italian explorers or the community’s contribution during World War I, but it was derailed by World War II and not really taken up again until the advent of multiculturalism. In the early 1980s Italian Canadians in Toronto had to battle stiff resistance on the part of the local establishment to donate a statue symbolizing multiculturalism to commemorate the city’s sesquicentennial in 1984. Although the Globe and Mail criticized the plan on ostensibly aesthetic grounds, no similar opposition was voiced when major monuments lauding the British connection were erected.

The following year a much warmer welcome accompanied the laying of the foundation stone for a new Marconi Museum to honour the radio inventor’s work in Atlantic Canada. The site chosen by the project committee headed by Judge René Marini was Glace Bay in Cape Breton, where Guglielmo Marconi had conducted his early wireless experiments – and ironically, encountered hostility – during the first decade of the twentieth century. In the 1980s Italian Canadians in Kingston were active in reclaiming a chapter of the group’s history. Supported by the Catholic Church and local historical societies, Phil Quattrocchi, a Canadian army veteran, in 1990 erected a monument commemorating several Italians who had been killed in a 1913 explosion while working on a nearby railway. Lastly, in the early 1990s York University took an exemplary step in celebrating ethnic pluralism by designating its new central square Piazza d’Italia in recognition of the local Italian-Canadian community and Canada-Italy relations.