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The Calgary Italian Club
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the centre of Italian
associational life in Calgary was the Italian Club. It
was organized in 1955 when the Associazione
Italo-Canadese merged with the Giovanni Caboto Loggia.
As the club had no permanent home, meetings and other social
activities were held in Luca Carloni's Isle of Capri
restaurant until 1 May 1959, when a barn was purchased to
house the club.
The new club was no longer a benevolent society, but
operated purely as a social organization. It held
dances, bocce tournaments, banquets and festivals. Its
soccer team, "Juventus," gave young men the
opportunity to play their favourite sport. One of the
most popular activities was the annual picnic, which was
attended by members and non-members alike. The club
enabled new immigrants to meet other Italians, who often
provided assistance with lodging or employment and introduced
them to potential spouses...
The Italian Club thrived in the 1960s because it filled
the needs of a growing community. Members worked
together to establish a variety of services. In 1960,
in response to the problems many Italians had in trying to
secure loans from established financial institutions, they
created the Columbus Savings and Credit Union. In
1974, with the aid of grants from the federal government,
club members founded the Italian Saturday School and
Italians for Community Action (a television media
group). A Ladies Auxiliary, a bocce club and the
Sportsman Dinner Association were all extensions of the
Italian Club.
Neither the club nor the community has been successful in
establishing an Italian newspaper in the city of
Calgary. One possible explanation is that the number
of readers literate in Italian is insufficient to support a
local paper. The availability of alternative news
sources also makes it difficult for a local paper to succeed
financially. Some of the immigrants subscribe to
Italian newspapers published in other cities, such as Il
Congresso from Edmonton and L'Eco d'Italia from
Vancouver. Others keep abreast of events in the
homeland by reading newspapers from Italy, such as Corriere
della Sera of Milan or journals published by the Roman
Catholic Church in Italy, like Il Messaggero di Sant'
Antonio.
As the Italian Community has grown, it has become more
diverse and less cohesive. Economic competition has
fuelled class antagonisms. But the greatest obstacle
to the organizational unity of Italians in Calgary has been
regionalism. Immigration did not serve as a basis for
long-term community cohesion. Pride, arrogance,
traditional enmities and jealousy cause immigrants to regard
those from outside their region as distinct, inferior
types. This division is most prevalent between
northern and southern Italian immigrants. Northerners
refer to southern Italians as ignorant cafoni
(boors), while southerners call northern Italians by the
derogatory term polentoni (polenta eaters).
Regional hostility is so strong that any project requiring
cooperation from the Italian community is certain to create
controversy and has a high probability of failure. It
is perhaps for this reason that Calgary's Italians do not
organize cultural activities like the Settimana Italiana
(Italian week) held every July by Vancouver's Italian
community, or the Giovanni Caboto Days celebrated in
Edmonton's Italian community.
Reprinted from With Heart and Soul: Calgary's Italian
Community by Antonella Fanella, with permission from the University of Calgary Press and the author.
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