Sarno (Salerno) -View Of The Vesuvius Volcano

Every family has to start somewhere and have its roots in a particular place and time. For the Sarnelli family, Generoso Sarnelli (born: 1896) and Filomena (nee Bifolco) Sarnelli (born: 1901) were born in the Vesuvian town of Sarno, Provicia di Salerno,in the Campania region of Southern Italy. Theirs is the true immigrant story of arriving to a strange new land with nothing, to make a better life for themselves and their family to be. Arriving in 1920 at Ellis Island by boat, they had five children; Generoso as a bricklayer by trade and Filomena a fine seamstress. They worked hard, led simple lives, bought a home and sadly, both passed-away only in their late 60's in the 1960's. When people say their grandparents spoke "Italian" in the home, that is a misnomer. The immigrants from Southern Italy at the turn on the 20th century were largely illiterate and unskilled. They spoke the regional "dialects" from the regions where they emigrated i.e., Neapolitan, Pugliese, Calabrian, Sicilian, etc. They spoke "Neapolitan", (Sarnese) ,which is not a dialect, but a separate, distinct, and older language than standard Italian, which was derived from the Tuscan dialect and used to create a national tongue for a unified Italy c.1871.