Out of Italy: Our Italian friends in the North

Hugh Shankland

Details

ISBN: 978-0-85716-025-6
RRP: £18.99
Released: October 2011
Format: Hardback
Extent: 192pp
Illustrations:  (TBA)

Book Overview
There is a lot more to find out about Italians in the North-East of England than their phenomenal success in changing the region's eating habits. Though the book considers the Italian connection since Roman times, its emphasis is on the Italian contribution to North-East life in the last 250 years. Italian-Swiss stuccoists decorated many of the region's best-known historic buildings; a colony of skilled craftsmen from Como specialised in manufacturing optical instruments in Victorian Newcastle; and there have also lived among us gifted Italian architects, artists, glass-blowers, statuette makers, mosaic workers.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century economic distress in their own country brought over numerous Italians to try their luck in the North East, and many went on to found their families' fortunes by working the streets and back lanes of towns and colliery villages as organ-grinders, chestnut sellers or ice-cream men. By 1920 some three thousand Italians were settled peaceably in the North East, only for them to have to endure divisive, painful wartime years when Italian-born fathers were interned as 'enemy aliens' while their sons and daughters enlisted in the British forces.

Thousands of Italian prisoners-of-war were billeted all over the region in 1943-46 and some opted to settle. During the manpower shortage of the immediate post-war years many hundreds of Italian men and women were contracted to work in Britain and again not a few stayed, some of them starting up well-known catering businesses in the North East. These, and many other topics, are considered in the book.

About the Author
Hugh Shankland has spent many years researching the lives of Italian immigrants the North of England. He has had the fortune to spend many years in Italy soaking up their language and culture and developing a sense of what it means to be Italian. He used this to good effect when he published a book called a 'Simple Guide to Italy'. A former Head of Italian at Durham University the author is enjoying the opportunity to write. He currently lives in Durham.