Film series to tie Italians with West

Alessandro Trojani wants to let the folks back home know what happened to all those Italians who journeyed to the American West and never came back — not just the adventurers who went looking for gold in California, but all those impoverished men who found their way to out-of-the-way places like Helper, Utah.

He calls his project "Italians in the Gold Rush and Beyond," which is described on his Web site, www.IGRB.net, as "the most complete multimedia database of Italians in the North America from the Gold Rush to today."

It's the Italian experience in the American West that has captivated Trojani, a professor of political science and education at the University of Florence. "In Italy we don't know anything about the West. Only New York," he explained recently, in a lecture at the University of Utah that wandered back and forth between Italian and English.

Three of Trojani's students are in Utah this summer making a documentary, the first of several that will explore the Italian-American experience in states that most Italians know little about, despite the 2002 Olympics and the NBA. It was Salt Lake City's Italian Center of the West — a small meeting place with a big name and lofty ambitions — that first drew Trojani's curiosity to Utah.

Students Filippo Tofani, Giammarco Sicuro and Simone Gallorini are spending the next month in a small editing room at KUED-TV, where footage of historical photos, red-rock scenery and their interviews of Italian-Americans will be fashioned into a documentary that they hope will eventually be shown on KUED, as well as in Italy.

Next year, Trojani will send students to either Phoenix or Denver to make another documentary for the "Gold Rush and Beyond" series. He hopes, eventually, that his films will help Italian-Americans all over the West connect with each other.

Utah's first known Italian immigrant was Giuseppe Toronto, who arrived in 1849. Toronto is believed to be the first Italian Catholic who converted to Mormonism. He moved first to Boston and then to Nauvoo, Ill., where he immediately handed over his life's savings — $2,500 in gold pieces earned peddling fruits and vegetables — to President Brigham Young of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The first big wave of Italian immigrants, Protestants who had been converted to Mormonism by Lorenzo Snow, arrived in Utah in the 1870s from the Valdesi region near the French border. Other Italians arrived between 1890 and 1920, looking for work in the mines and the railroads. They came from both northern and southern Italy and settled mostly in Carbon, Salt Lake, Tooele and Weber counties.