Well, Switzerland does in fact have a significant number of native Italian speakers (about 8% of the population), so that’s not really far-fetched. There’s not much if any difference in names or dialects between a Lombard from the Lombardy Administrative Region and a Lombard from the Canton of Ticino.
When I was a kid, I asked my Italian Grandmother about where we were from in Italy. I mentioned Palermo and she got very insulted at the idea we could have come from there.
Agreed. What was funny though was how the worse she was complaining about Those People, the farther north her great grand-dad had been mayor. I kept expecting that some day he’d become German, and later yet from the shores of the Baltic.
I visited Sicily with a friend from Genoa. He said as a Californian I probably felt more at home in Baja than he did in Sicily.
I don’t see how regional prejudices between areas in Italy are at all surprising. We certainly have regional prejudices here in the US. My father, who grew up in Nanjing, used to complain about the Cantonese - they ate disgusting food (“everything with four legs except the tables, everything that flies except airplanes”) and their ridiculous sounding sing-song dialect. And that was a country that had been unified for millennia - Italy has been unified less than two hundred years.
Just wanted to make a quick point about various swarthy people, which would probably apply to the various Med/Semitic area types (but the German angle still blows me away). In an era where most immigrants were doing physical, outside labor, the difference in color can be a lot more distinct. My heritage is Jewish, and I normally avoid the sun like a vampire with my office job, but even so I’m probably 2 shades darker than my wife who is a traditional ‘white’ western/northern European mix.
Spend a couple days in the sun, and now I look more like a person of Latino descent. And then you get my father, who, when my wife first me, thought was black. Because he has the super tight Jew-fro in black, and spends hours every day sunning himself with palm oil until he is (in his own words mind you) a bronze God.
I’ve seen similar patterns of tanning in people of Mediterranean descent, and swarthy, while a loaded term, is probably justifiable as a descriptive term compared to Anglo-Saxon types who tend to burn more than tan. Not that living your life on a farm wouldn’t get you tan, but the pics of my wife’s grandfather (who was a farmer up Minneapolis way) were many shades lighter than those of my family.
Italian is one of the four official languages of Switzerland.
No, the British royals came from and ruled Hanover; the Saxe-Coborg connection came later, with Victoria’s husband Prince Albert.
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Er, no. ‘Saxony’ is a very elastic geographic term. The original Saxon territories and the medieval duchy of Saxony only partly overlapped with what later became the electorate of Saxony. The electors of Hanover were descended from the Welf dukes of Saxony and their German territories mostly lay within what had been the duchy. Hannover is the capital of the modern state of Lower Saxony.
That the Hanoverians were ‘Saxon’ was a big deal after 1714, because it was used to imply an ancestral connection between them and their new English subjects. It was a bonus that through the dukes of Saxony, George I was also descended from some of the English Anglo-Saxon kings, separately from doing so via the Stuarts.
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Thanks. That’s what I thought.
One thing not mentioned here is that immigrants didn’t leave their old prejudices at Ellis Island. They brought them in, and added new ones against groups they’d never even encountered before. My father used to recall going to a very large high school in Chicago in the 1930s, where every ethnic group used every conceivable slur against every other ethnic group. Of course that didn’t stop him from going ballistic decades later when my sister joked that we must be part Gypsy.
This simmering tension was one reason why the cultural push throughout much of 20th Century America was for assimilation and a “melting pot” where everyone was cooked in the same stew and was supposed to limit their ethnicity to the foods they ate and the music they listened to in the privacy of their homes. Of course the stew still tasted mostly like Western European WASP, and a lot of people who didn’t look or sound right still caught the short end of the deal.
Which is a ridiculous pretension, since the same physical phenotypes can be found all throughout Italy from Agrigento all the way to Trentino-Alto-Adige, you just find a few more physiques on the Nordic side the closer you get to Germany, but the joke’s on them since the Sicilians are the ones more likely to have Norman blood and you don’t get more Nordic than that. 
A lot of this discussion reminds me of Luc Sante’s book Low Life
He describes wave after wave of immigrants from all corners, each reaching New York and each repeating the same cycle of immigrant poor in a particular section of the city, conflict with the previous wave from a different country, making good, improvement of the area they settled as they they become established and more wealthy, and conflict with the next wave of immigrant poor. The cycle running for almost the entire history of New York, sometimes with cycles from the same country separated by other waves.
No useful rule exists for who is picked upon other than them being the latest wave, and usually the cohort that picks on them the most is the previous wave.
Here in Oz it really has not been that much different, but without the extra few centuries that the US has had. When I was at school Italians and Greeks were the newcomers. Now they are establishment.
My grandmother told a similar story about Boston. Her parents immigrated from Sicily, and at one point decided to move from the Italian neighborhood, which was considered the worst as they were the most recent immigrant group, to the “better” Irish neighborhood–the next-most recent group. My grandma remembered being picked on by those kids–actually, I believe the word she used was “persecuted,” although this is all secondhand through my mother so I can’t be sure.
And also, you need only look across the Adriatic to a locale (at one time, a country) where despite being physically indistinguishable to outsiders, they hated each other enough to resort to multi-way genocide and ethnic cleansing.
I knew a fellow who was a refrigeration and A/C tech - when he went back to Yugoslavia to visit family, before all the troubles, he’d often rent a car and do some freelance work around the country. He said that you could come back to your car and find people had kicked dents in the sides, based on the perception of his ethnicity due to the region on the license plate. Even back then, the people hated each other.
Is that ethnic racism or regionalism? I have personally been pulled over by police twice for a DWC (Driving While Californian).
The one and only time I’ve ever been pulled over by the police I was driving a rental car with Oregon plates in Seattle. No ticket.
Yup.
All through the history of the USA, whoever was the latest group to show up in numbers large enough to be noticed gets put through this shit. They can’t possibly assimilate!
And then, all too often, their descendents hand the same crap out to whoever’s next up. It happens over, and over, and over again.
(Spoiler: of course they assimilate. And of course they change the culture a bit in the process. This will also all be true of the current dumped-on groups, and of whoever’s next up after that, and so on.)
Look at the “reasons” given right now for objecting to Muslims. Then you’ll know why people objected to Italians.
And every single one of them has been at least nominally Christian. And, while their specific versions of Christianity get discussed, it’s nearly unheard of for anyone to even bother discussing the possibility of a POTUS of any other belief or blatantly of none.
It’s the same ethnic hatred that drove Yugoslavian internal fratricidal warfare for a decade after the country fell to pieces. The ethnic regions over there tend to be fairly small.
I sometimes played for an Italian-Canadian soccer team growing up in Canada. I was a good player at the time and warmly welcomed. However, the team ended up splitting into Northern and Southern Italian teams due to people who could not apparently put aside their differences.