No, it was different in the U.S. Even the children of the actual immigrants often understood Italian but didn't speak it very well. There was this mania to be "AMERICAN", and that meant eating hamburgers, playing baseball, speaking English. That's all it took, and you were completely accepted. My husband is third generation from southern Italy, but he doesn't speak a single word of Italian. All of his cousins married out except for him. When his grandmother met me she almost fell to her knees in thanksgiving.
I became her absolute favorite, and she would teach me all her Neapolitan recipes, and tips on keeping your man happy. To wit, when it's about time for him to come home, change your apron, comb your hair and put on some lipstick.
. However, as she said to me, while her grandson was a very good boy, all the same I should tell him what she told her husband before they got married: your house and clothes will be clean, there'll be good food on the table, and I'll raise your children right, but if you ever raise a hand to me in anger, don't go to sleep after that because you'll never wake up! Trust me, she meant it.
She was a pip! Oh, and no smoking in the house, and only one glass of wine with supper! She also believed in white magic, if you know what I mean, and so on Christmas Eve one year she taught me how to get rid of the mal occhio and unwanted guests and all sorts of other things. I didn't have the heart to tell her I didn't believe in any of it. I loved my grandparents and great aunts and uncles so much, and couldn't spend time with them the way I wanted, so I sort of adopted her.
Strange thing is that my husband, without speaking a word of Italian, is far more an Italian man in a very old-fashioned sense than my male cousins in Italy. I call it the diaspora effect.
My Greek American friends tell me it's the same thing with Greeks. Italian Americans are less clannish than the Greeks though. Everyone intermarries. Well, almost everyone but me. A Southern Italian was about as "foreign" as I could imagine going. Oh, my husband even studied the "classics" in university: Latin, Greek literature, the history of the Greek and Latin cultures etc.to keep in touch with his "roots".
That reminds me. By the time of Mussolini in Italy people were not only taught Italian and Roman history(well, the version he approved), but were all instructed in "standard" Italian, i.e. Tuscan as modified by Manzoni etc., lingua toscana in bocca romana. At least that's the way it was everywhere north of Rome except perhaps for the Veneto. It was your patriotic duty to know those things. My father, as I said, without being at all fascistic, rather the opposite, was a great Italian patriot in the tradition of Mazzini, who was his hero. He was also an anti-cleric. So, we had portraits of Mazzini and Garibaldi on the wall, not the Pope.
He knew a lot of Dante by heart and other Italian poets, mostly self taught, and the lyrics and melodies of all the Italian operas. Those were my lullabies. He was a brilliant man, my father, especially in mathematics, with many talents: a great voice and wonderful artistic skills on top of everything else. He apprenticed to a sculptor in Carrara for a while. If only Italy had the opportunities that people are afforded in America.
Actually, I went back to Italy more often than they did. My father could only go for two weeks at a time on visits. I went during the summers for much longer, even the summers during university. I studied there too. It was very important to me. Then, with work and children, it was two to three weeks at a time maximum. Now, I can call my own shots and go for longer. I still plan on retiring there for five or six months a year. The mistake I made was in not speaking to my children only in Italian. I did some of the time, but not always, so although they can understand a lot they're not fluent. It was difficult because it left my husband out if we all spoke Italian, and I was uncomfortable with that, as was he. I joke sometimes and say that when I'm old and doddering and have dementia my husband won't understand a word I'm saying, and neither will the nurses.
Speaking of the language, it was indeed difficult to communicate with some of the old Italian people here in the U.S., and their children only knew a smattering of dialect as well. In Italy, again because of Mussolini it was important to speak standard Italian. My father was manic about it. He spoke it beautifully and he wanted that for me too. He went to the extent of forbidding anyone from speaking even the Lunigiana dialect or his own Parma dialect in front of me. Then he'd teach me some verses and make me show off my "pure" Italian. Yes, he'd have me sing too, in my puffy party dress and white lace topped socks and black Mary Janes. Just like the movies.
My "American" cousin told me he thought I was the Virgin Mary when I came from Italy, a Virgin Mary with a gold cross necklace and little golden drop earings in my ears. You can imagine how I went over with the jeans and sneaker set at my school.
The nuns thought so too. I was the Virgin in every May Day parade and pageant I can remember.
Yes, great artichokes in California. Have you been there? I think Castro is still the artichoke capital of the world. Every spring I get a bag shipped to me of the tiny, tender ones, and fry them Jewish style and make a pasta with the rest. The restaurants in California can be very good, and they're very "Mediterranean". In one in Monterrey, which we adored, they served small ones as gratis appetizers. The self-important waiter started to tell us how to eat them. My father interrupted and said, young man, I was eating artichokes before you were born.
Outside of a restaurant my father saw a huge fig tree behind the restaurant. It was groaning with the weight of the figs, and the floor was littered with them. He went in and asked the owner if he could pick some. The owner was glad to get rid of the excess. He should have been preserving them, of course. My Dad still wore those caps that older Italian men wore. He filled it with figs. All these "Americans" gathered round asking what they were and how to eat them! I think he filled that cap five times.
I have my father's genes for cold weather, and quite enjoy winter, but my mother was a Mediterranean through and through. She detested the cold and liked nothing better than to curl up and fall asleep in the sun. Meanwhile my father and I would be under the trees because we burned so badly. Fwiw, the climate in Santa Barbara is very like the climate in Liguria, imo. It's cool and pretty rainy in winter, and hot and pretty dry in the summer. I can't abide humidity, and neither could my father. They're mountain people his family, having lived for more than 500 years up in the Apennines, still cool in the summers, and snow eight months a year it sometimes seems. No offense to anyone from the Po plain, but I would not ever choose to live there, not even in Parma itself. It's cold and wet in the winter and brutally hot and humid in the summer. Firenze, one of my favorite cities, has an unfortunate climate as well imo.
My grandmother, like all Italian mothers and grandmothers, wanted to keep the family together. The seven oldest would never go back to Italy. My father was the last hold out. He was the toughest man I ever met, the strongest, but even he couldn't say no to his mother forever, and he was in his thirties.
One last story: when my father got his first project for over a million dollars, he went out with his partners to celebrate after work, something he never did. His mother lived with us. Once it was past nine o'clock she paced and paced in her long white nightgown with her long white braid swishing around, muttering, just wait till he gets home, Menelich. I'll fix him. My mother begged her not to get upset, as she wasn't. When he came home, a little the worse for the wear, it must be said, she asked him what he thought he was doing. She didn't like the answer. She slapped him right across the face and said, "A decent man comes home to his wife and children at a decent time. I don't care how old you are (He was over 40), until the day I die I'm still your mother. I thought he'd have a heart attack, but he took it.
I always wonder who started the absurd idea that Italian women are weak.
Well I could go on reminiscing forever, but I don't want to bore you. It's been fun, though.