Giuliana

Giuliana is the mountain village in Sicily where Domenico Onofrio Tempesta places the beginnings of his family history and his own life story. In his account, the village is not merely a birthplace: Mount Etna’s eruptions shape the fortunes of the family before he is born, while local stories about danger, survival, and heroism help form his sense of destiny. Giuliana later becomes the point of departure from which Domenico and his brothers leave for the New World.

Setting and the shadow of Mount Etna

Domenico presents Giuliana as a place living under the threat of Mount Etna. In 1865, lava from the volcano destroyed the hazelnut and almond groves of his maternal grandparents, Alfio and Maricchia Ciccia, ruining the land that had supported them. Four days later, the earth cracked open, killing Alfio and his three sons. Maricchia, overwhelmed by grief, later died by suicide. The account makes the volcanic landscape an active force in the family’s history: land that had sustained a household is made unproductive, and a catastrophe reorganizes who remains to carry the family forward.

The only surviving Ciccia child was Concettina, later known as Concettina Tempesta. During the eruption, she escaped the lava by climbing a cedar tree. She had gone back down in an attempt to retrieve a rag doll, and burned her right hand before climbing to safety again. The scar remained with her throughout her life. Domenico recalls repeatedly hearing the story of that survival and loss, so that Giuliana’s natural history becomes part of the family’s remembered history: even a child’s ordinary attachment to a toy is set against the larger danger of the volcano.

Family life and local memory

After Maricchia’s death, eight-year-old Concettina was placed with an elderly widow who worked as a seamstress and lacemaker. The widow taught her the craft, and Concettina became skilled at lacemaking. Her work connected her to the village church, where the widow dressed the altar and its statues, including the celebrated Statue of the Weeping Vergine. Concettina’s life in Giuliana thus includes both the consequences of catastrophe and the practical work through which she made a place for herself in the community.

Domenico’s account also describes Concettina as experiencing screaming fits and strange dreams as she grew up. She said that she could hear moths, which she understood as the souls of the dead unable to reach heavenly light. At times, she shut herself in her room, bolting the window and extinguishing the candles in an effort to escape what she heard. These claims belong to the family story as Domenico tells it; they also show how grief and spiritual belief are woven into his portrait of the household in Giuliana.

In 1874, Concettina married Giacomo Tempesta, a sulfur miner. His work took him from Giuliana each week to mines in the foothills of Mount Etna, nine or ten kilometers away. He returned to the village on Saturdays. Domenico locates his own conception within that routine, presenting his parents’ life together as the immediate background to a story that would soon be marked by the volcano again.

A village hero and a claimed destiny

In 1879, according to the story passed from Concettina to village women and repeated in Giuliana, Giacomo heard the first signs that Mount Etna was awakening. He took a bell from the magistrate’s cow and rang it as he ran through the village, warning people of the danger. The villagers later honored him with a medal. Its gold surface bore the impression left when the magistrate bit it to test its metal, a small physical mark that remained part of the family’s account of Giacomo’s public recognition.

Domenico says the villagers connected the timing of his conception with the eruption and treated him as destined for greatness, the unborn son of a hero. He was born in Giuliana on May 11, 1880; Pasquale followed in 1882 and Vincenzo in 1883. In the autobiography, Domenico turns local memory into a personal origin story, presenting his father’s reputation and the village’s belief in his special destiny as foundations of his own self-image. That account is not a neutral portrait of the community: it is Giuliana as remembered and interpreted by an older narrator who wants to preserve his family name and make his life exemplary.

Departure from Giuliana

The brothers’ eventual departure is also shaped by life in their family home. Domenico describes Concettina’s increasingly frequent screaming as one reason he and his brothers wanted to seek their destinies in the New World. He accepted the burden of leaving first as the eldest son, allowing Pasquale and Vincenzo to accompany him. In July 1901, the three signed on as steerage passengers aboard the SS Napolitano. They sailed from Catania on September 11, despite their mother’s objections and her fear that their leaving would leave her destitute.

Giuliana’s importance therefore lies in the way the narrative holds together place, inheritance, and departure. Its damaged farmland and volcanic danger precede Domenico’s birth; its stories confer public stature on Giacomo and a sense of election on his son; and its household ties make emigration both a pursuit of opportunity and a painful separation. The village remains the starting ground of the family history even after the brothers leave it behind.