it was Aunt Rosie who kept the family legends alive. She told and retold the coming-to-America story of our great-grandfather Giovanni, Gio to his friends. The first American of the family, the one who worked himself to the bone in Sicily’s sulfur mines and then bravely came to the new country to labor in a toilet factory in Queens. He slept in the attic of a funeral home in Astoria owned by other Sicilians for more than ten years.
