Never Looked Back: Carmela DeLio, née Perri (1845–1929)

Carmela DeLio about1905

Carmela Perri was born on August 28, 1845, in the small Calabrian village of Gesuiti, in what was then San Vincenzo La Costa. She entered a world that still belonged to the old order—an Italy of kingdoms, duchies, and Papal States, not yet a single nation. By the time she turned fifteen, the Risorgimento had begun to remake that world. In 1861 the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed, the same year the United States tore itself apart in civil war. Carmela came of age while one country was being born and another was being broken.

On March 19, 1877, she married Raffaelo DeLio. They worked the land as farm laborers. In 1880 their son Angelo was born. Life in rural Calabria offered little enough for a growing family, and like so many others from the Mezzogiorno, Raffaelo eventually went ahead to America in search of work. Carmela stayed behind with their boy until the time came to follow.

In December 1887 she and eight-year-old Angelo boarded the steamship Bolivia in Naples. The winter crossing brought them into New York Harbor on January 4, 1888. They stepped ashore at Castle Garden, the immigrant station that preceded Ellis Island, and began the next leg of their journey. From New York the family made its way west to Chicago, settling among the growing Italian neighborhoods that would become known as Little Italy. Raffaelo found work as a trackman for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, laying the iron that was stitching the country together.

Carmela would give birth to four children in all. Two did not survive infancy. The eldest, a boy named Carmen or Carmine, died young. Another child—whose name and gender remain unknown—was also lost. Angelo, the boy who had crossed the ocean with her, lived. In 1891, in Chicago, she gave birth to a daughter, Emilia.

Carmela in the backyard on DeKalb St ca 1927 

She lived long enough to see the turn of the century, the Great War, and the restless years that followed. The world of her childhood—agrarian, pre-industrial, still half-medieval in its rhythms—gave way to streetcars, electric lights, automobiles, and radio. She had left a fragmented Italy and grown old in an America racing into modernity. On February 22, 1929, her long passage ended.So much of her daily life is lost to us now: the sound of her voice, the stories she told, the particular weight of the losses she carried. What remains are the outlines—a birth in a Calabrian village before Italy existed as a nation, a winter voyage on the Bolivia, a life built in Chicago’s Little Italy, and a death just months before the crash that would usher in the Great Depression. It is a life that stretches across nearly eighty-four years and two continents, from the final days of the old Italian order to the threshold of the modern American century. The approaching anniversary of her birth offers one small, concrete way to keep her place in the family’s longer story from fading.