THE FIRST ITALIANS IN AMAGANSETT

Amato DiSunno brought with him in his suitcase a twig from his grape arbor in Italy. That grapevine is still growing today, filled with delicious white muscatel grapes.

PEGGY DISUNNO

At the turn of the century, the families of Dellapolla, DiSunno, Napolillo, and Natale were neighbors and friends in Nusco, a small village in the province of Avellino in central-southern Italy. The men were farm laborers, fortunate if they worked for three or four months out of the year. They were adventurous and yearning for full-time employment.

The Dellapollas, Joseph and Philomena (a sister to Carmine DiSunno) arrived in Amagansett in 1901 and bought land on Montauk Highway.near the Cranberry Hole Road intersection. Seven years later, Joseph's brother, Amato, arrived alone with $20 in his pocket. Like many other immigrants, he had been told that money grew on trees in America.

One of the possessions Amato brought with him in his suitcase was a twig from his grape arbor in Italy. That grapevine is still growing today, filled with delicious white muscatel grapes.

Amato was a little man, five foot one. His wife died early, leaving him to raise six children alone. In 1908, he bought from Joseph Cozzens a two-room house next door to his brother (across the street and down a few houses from Vicky's Veggies.) New rooms were added as he earned the money. Amato believed you should never buy anything unless you could pay cash for it. The children remember sleeping in two double beds in the same room. The windows had lace curtains made by their mother.

Amato Dellapolla worked for the Long Island Rail Road, which was across the street from his house, for 18 years. He spent a great deal of time working in a large garden, raising pigs and chickens and making his own wine, beer, and sarsaparilla. The basement of the homestead still has a section where the vegetables were kept for winter storage.

Mary Dellapolla Curles, Amato's daughter, who is 75 years old, remembers draining cooked tomatoes in pillowcases, squeezing out the pulp by hand to make tomato paste, burying cabbages and carrots in the sand for the winter, and rotating potatoes in the basement every time they started to sprout.

They never had such things as ketchup, butter, mustard, or mayonnaise. The children were told these were not good for them. Mary remembers that her father made his own lard, sausage, and salted meats. He would gather codfish heads left on the beach by fishermen, cook them, and save the white meat for dinner.

During Prohibition, Amato made and sold bootleg liquor, along with many other people on Long island, and stored it underneath the vegetables in the cellar. He used the extra money to buy more property. Besides owning enough land in Amagansett to house all his children, he also owned a house in Long Island City.

The Amagansett Grade School was close by, on the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Main Street. Mrs. Curles remembers going to school a year earlier than the rest of the children, at age 4. There was no mother at home and she needed a babysitter.

It was at school that the sounds of prejudice were first heard. Words like "dago," "guinea," and "wop" were new to these children. (Mrs. Curles was told that "wop" meant "without papers.") Amato taught his children to be proud and not get angry when they were teased, and in time, the teasing stopped. The children understood that their elders in Amagansett's "Little Italy" (a common name for Italian settlements in the early 1900s) were well respected in the larger community.

Social activities were frequent. Some men joined an Italian American club that met at Catalino's restaurant on Main Street, the site of the Stephen Talkhouse restaurant today. Many Saturday nights, the families would go to the DiSunnos' for social visiting. On Christmas Eve, the Dellapollas and other families would take lanterns and walk to the Catholic Church in East Hampton, about six miles away. Roasted chestnuts and bacalla (codfish soup) would be served. Easter was also a special holiday, with Easter bread and strugulla served.

The families would also gather for the birth of a baby. The mothers in Little Italy would be midwives for each other, with Dr. David Edwards of East Hampton arriving in time to cut the cord.

Mary Dellapolla Curles still lives in the homestead. Across the street is her son, Dennis. On one side of Dennis is Mary's brother, Stephen, and next to him, her nephew, Stephen Jr. On Dennis's other side is Mary's niece, Elaine Semb Jones, who runs Vicki's Veggies, carrying on the family tradition. Most of the vegetables are home-grown.

The DiSunnos were the second Italian family to arrive in Amagansett. Carmine DiSunno came from Nusco in 1906 at the age of 16, and went to work for the L.I.R.R. After a year, he got permission from the railroad to go home to marry, but while he was home, he received notice to report for military service. Carmine fought in the Italian-Turkish war in 1911 and 1912, becoming an officer in an elite cavalry group.

After the war, he returned to America, and lived with his sister Philomena and her family. Within two years he had earned enough as a hostler on the railroad to send for his wife, Concetta, and two small daughters, Mary, 4, and Anne, 1. In 1918, he bought a house across Bunker Hill Road from Ed Bennett, where the family lived until 1921.

Bunker Hill Road was named by Joseph DiSunno, Carmine's son. Herbert Mulford was the Supervisor at the time the road was to be given a name. There were two choices, and Joseph was asked to choose either Bunker Hill Road or Old Ancient Pass.

It was customary for Italian children to work in a family business at the age of 14. Mary, at 14, sold candy, cigarettes, bread, and worked a single gas pump selling Tydol gas in front of the family's house. She managed this business by herself. Her father worked for the railroad and her mother was busy with a large family and a large garden.

Eventually, Carmine built a larger store, selling many more items including tires, Italian pasta (brought out on the train in huge boxes) and Howdy orange soda, which was made and bottled in Amagansett by Joseph D'Amaco. This bottling company was next door to where the Farmers Market on Main Street is today.

In 1928, Mr. DiSunno built DiSunno Motors, adjacent to his store, to employ his five sons. Besides repairing cars, the sons pumped Sinclair and Gulf gas. In 1933, Carmine bought a franchise from Continental Motors; he sold two cars the first year, both Beacons. Later the garage started selling Studebakers. By 1966, DiSunno Motors, run by two sons (Charles and Joseph, who bought the business from their father in 1955), continued this successful business by becoming a Dodge dealership.

Carmine DiSunno was very protective of his family. His daughters could not go out alone with boys, even if their sisters went with them. He would accompany them on their dates.

The third family to arrive from Nusco was the Napolillo family. John Napolillo, about whom little is known, owned a cement-block plant.

His brother, Stephen, came to America at the age of 14. He worked in the coal mines of Pennsylvania, returning home three times with money for his family. On the third trip home, he joined the army to fight in the Italian-Libyan War. Stephen served Italy for seven years, spending time in Africa. At the end of his military service in 1918, the Italian Government offered him an education, but he decided to come back to America.

Amagansett at this time had dirt roads, no electricity or running water. Lucy Napolillo Cuomo, Stephen's daughter, remembers clinging to her father's leg at night as he carried his lantern through the backyard to go to work on the railroad. She would walk him to the railroad turnstile, near their home. Stephen eventually quit the railroad and became a caretaker for several large estates.

Stephen would often say the Italian women worked harder than the men. Laundry was done on a washboard, using water from a pump. The clothing, curtains, and bedding were made by hand. Stephen's wife, Sarah, made her own pasta, using a broom handle to roll out the dough.

Sarah would walk to the ocean on winter nights to pick up whiting from the beach. There were vats of Sarah's pickled whiting in the basement, along with homemade lard from the pigs and canned vegetables from the garden. The family raised chickens as well as pigs. Whenever the pigs were slaughtered, friends and family from up the island would come. There would be mattresses all over the house and the family would celebrate for days with their company.

When someone died, Italian men wore black armbands and the women dressed in black, sometimes for one entire year. Radios were not allowed to be played during the time of mourning.

The children used to play in the railroad boxcars in back of the house. The beach, the dunes, and the woods were not built up and belonged to the children to explore. Mrs. Cuomo remembers picking blueberries and selling them to the people in the mansions by the beach.

Although there were some incidents of discrimination in the grade school, Stephen taught his children always to be polite and never to answer back. He was a proud man and could often be heard repeating a phrase that was commonly spoken in this neighborhood: "God bless America."

The last family to settle in Amagansett was headed by Michael Natale. Michael fought for Italy in World War I and was taken prisoner by the Germans, who used him as an interpreter.

The Natales and the DiSunnos had been close friends in Nusco. Michael decided to join his friend Carmine DiSunno, and make a home for his family in Amagansett. Like so many other Italian men, he found employment with the L.I.R.R., working nights in Montauk, and stayed with the railroad until retirement in 1952. It was his job to keep the engine running all night.

Carmine sold Michael part of the DiSunno property and helped him build a house. Mary Natale Ryan remembers her parents working side by side in their vegetable garden. It was over an acre in size and included nontraditional foods such as rhubarb and strawberries.

Carmine's wife, Maria, like the rest of the women in this neighborhood, was a good cook, using her canned foods for meals. Maria and Concetta DiSunno were always helping people, Mary Ryan recalls. They would put bricks in the oven, wrap them, and put them on the chest of someone suffering from pneumonia.

The Natales' approach to death was somewhat different from their neighbors'. They did not place their deceased in the home for mourning and this family did not wear black for an extended time.

Michael's youngest daughter, Lucy Natale Bennett, lives in the homestead today. She cultivates an acre garden filled with flowers that she sells at her neighbor's vegetable stand.

Peggy Young DiSunno, a kindergarten teacher at the Amagansett School, wrote this for a course in Long Island history at the State University at Stony Brook.