A man named Ulysses took a long, treacherous sea journey. Not that Ulysses. This one left his native Arezzo in the early eighteenth century, fleeing a likely furious family and church, and years later disembarked in a new world at a place that would later be called Beaufort, in a region that would later be called South Carolina, in a vast land that would later be called the United States of America. That was 1732, and he—Ulysses Anthony Albergotti—was the only Italian stepping off that boat. How strange is that for an Italian American immigration story?
To say that my forebear was the only Italian on the boat is technically true, I suppose. In his company were his English wife, Prudence, and their five-year-old daughter, Mary. In his remaining years in this new world, Ulysses fathered three more children, one of them a male who would father two of his...
