A century ago, they fled the poverty of their homeland to seek their fortunes on the streets of London, Glasgow, Newcastle and the valleys of south Wales. In so doing, Italian immigrants wrought a revolution in Britain's catering industry, one whose benefits are still being felt to this day.
Perched on a rocky outcrop above the broad, tree-clad valley of the River Ceno is a cluster of medieval houses around a 9th-century castle. In the distance, mountains rise from the plains of northern Emilia-Romagna, giving the small, fortified town of Bardi an enviable setting. Every summer, its tiny population swells dramatically. Cars with UK plates fill the commune. But these are not ordinary British tourists, but people of Bardi descent returning to the land their forebears quit four generations ago.
For Bardi has the distinction of having produced a vast number of Italians whose roots are now so firmly planted in the UK. Much of the Italian population of south Wales and elsewhere hales from this spectacular backdrop, having forsaken their poverty-stricken homeland for Britain's 'gold-lined' streets at the turn of the last century. In villages like Bardi, the peasants toiled on unproductive land. The families were large, the plots small, illiteracy high and the rewards meagre, so when news reached them from nearby seaports that Britain was going through an economic boom, they upped sticks and went.
"Stones still mark the tiny strips of land they left and primitive tools and sledges can still be found. Overgrown orchards and small patches of vine still produce their fruit, but the men who tended them left long ago," says Colin Hughes, whose excellent book, Lime, Lemon & Sarsaparilla, charts the exodus.
The Contis, Rossis, Sidolis, Basinis, Gazzis, Servinis and so on now speak with Welsh, Scottish and English accents. And with their emigration came the spectacular arrival of a British culinary heritage, for the Italians immediately realised what Britain was lacking in cafés, restaurants and shops.
My voyage around Britain's Italy starts over the Welsh border, in postcard-pretty Abergavenny. At Luigi's café on the High Street, there are waxed, checked tablecloths, Tiffany shades, old Italian photos and the general feel of a bygone age. This place has been in the Basini family for generations and most of the items on the menu are around £5.
Only 20 years ago, places like Luigi's were dotted all over the UK; mosts town had at least one Italian caff, not to mention sundry restaurants serving up veal and pasta, accompanied by chianti, followed by tiramisu. Italians also had a monopoly on fish and chip shops and ran the ice-cream business. These institutions, however, are becoming a thing of the past as the younger generations of British-Italians move away from catering into the more 'respectable' professional realms of business, law, accountancy, medicine, teaching, banking and engineering.
I ponder this as I finish my foaming cappuccino before setting off for Aberdare, in the heart of the old mining belt of the Welsh valleys. Here, I meet 62-year-old Robert Servini, a third-generation Italian, who is now a prosperous businessman working in the catering industry.
"When my grandfather Giacomo came over in 1902, Britain was still going through the Industrial Revolution. It was sucking people in and was a welcome release from the poverty of the hillbilly farms of Emilia-Romagna, where he was one of 11 children," Robert says over tea in the summerhouse, in the midst of his impressively landscaped garden.
"God knows how he found time to get into catering because he was working 12 hours a day, six days a week, down the mines. He was paid in gold sovereigns to avoid inflation; I think this was the first time he had been paid in actual money. He returned to Bardi to find a wife, brought her back to Wales, produced nine children, set up a string of temperance cafés and escaped the mines."
Giacomo found that the wine-loving, Catholic Italians got on famously with the teetotal, Calvinist, Welsh-speaking West Walians, who had also come to the Valleys for work. They rapidly realised that a booze-free alternative to the British pub would do very well, so created the first café society. Several families followed Servini's example: the Bernis (later famous for Berni Inns), the Rabaiottis, the Sidolis and the Bracchis. Indeed, 'bracchi' is still a generic name in Wales for a café.
Robert's father was the eldest of the nine and did well at school, despite the burgeoning family businesses. He won a scholarship to Oxford, where he was a contemporary of Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and John Betjeman in the heady 1920s, before being hauled back to Wales to work in the family business. At this time, Italian shops and cafés in the UK rarely went in for fancy Mediterranean fare: they stocked Oxo cubes, pork pies, sold chips and beans on toast. They even changed their way of making ice cream to suit the British palate, adopting the creamier approach of the Parisians.
The Second World War proved a tricky time for the UK's Italian community. Churchill's instruction to imprison every Italian male between the ages
of 16 and 70 as an enemy alien ("Collar the lot!" he famously said, after Mussolini joined forces with Hitler in June 1940) created general panic and considerable antipathy. Windows were smashed and businesses went underfoot in the mass hysteria.
Robert's father was imprisoned on the Isle of Man and his grandfather deported to Canada on
the Arandora Star, a converted troopship that was sunk by a U-boat just off the coast of Ireland in July 1940. Giacomo was one of 486 to perish.
Now there is only one Servini café left, run by Robert's nephew in Aberdare. Robert himself is in the food manufacturing business; he is chairman of a firm that makes Chinese ready-meals, having realised there was more money to be made in this area than in running cafés. "The Italians were very happy to integrate into the British community," Robert concludes, "as are most European émigrés."
In London, I take lunch with Laura Santin, who runs Santini, a smart Italian restaurant in
Belgravia. It's a far cry from Luigi's or Servini's cafés in the valleys, and was the late Frank Sinatra's all-time favourite restaurant. Bill Clinton and Lady Thatcher have been seen there and, on the day
I pop by, the Duchess of York bustles in, seemingly in need of succour and sustenance.
Laura's family were successful hoteliers from the
chi-chi Adriatic resort of Jesolo, near Venice. Her father Gino worked his way up the ladder via the world's toughest catering college near Lake Maggiore, before coming to Britain in 1969. Santini was established in 1984 and has been run by Laura since Gino retired five years ago. "It's my job to take Santini into the 21st century by doing things slightly differently," she says. "That's what my father always did and I shall carry on the proud family tradition."
Like many of London's landmark bastions of Italian cooking, Santini uses Italian suppliers. One of the key ingredients to its recipe for success is its meat, which comes from Maren Meats of Hornsey, north London. From here, Giovanni Marenghi
has been supplying the Santin family for the past 35 years. "We get our beef from Scotland and Ireland and our veal from Holland and we like to think that we really look after our customers," Giovanni says.
En route for Scotland, I look in on Marcello Manca and John Cochran at Birmingham's oldest Italian, La Galleria, which opened in 1977. They've been partners since 1953 and have run restaurants in Manchester, Bristol, Swindon and Cardiff.
"Our old places, when we sold them on, were all taken over by Indians, Chinese or Greeks," Marcello says. "In the Seventies, Britain was full of Italian restaurants. We could pluck all the waiters we needed from Italy and it was a real boom time. But those days are behind us. Gone are the chianti flasks and fishnets. Gone, too, are the waiters.
There's no new generation coming through to wait or cook; now we use Poles and French. You have to move with the times." Marcello, along with Simon Rattle, was named by the council as one of the 100 people who have changed the face of the city in recent times.
Newcastle-upon-Tyne's first Italian opened in 1965. Pasqualino Fulgenzi is still at the helm at the Roma, in Collingwood Street. When he came to the Toon from Rome, aged 27, Pasqualino found ingredients hard to come by. "I got my onions and garlic from a bloke in Brittany, who came by once a year: we draped them across the ceiling," he says, with still a hint of an Italian accent. "No-one had heard of garlic and the fishermen used to give us king prawns for nothing as there was no market for them. We had to buy olive oil from the chemist."
In Edinburgh, Valvona & Crolla is an institution. It is a delicatessen, whose restaurant section at the back warrants a mention in The Good Food Guide. It's a family-run business, with Philip Contini, grandson of the founder, at the tiller. "Originally, the shop was set up to feed the Italian community, but Victor Crolla, my uncle, realised that the way to success was to persuade the Scots to eat Italian food," says Philip. "It worked." In 1906, Alfonso Crolla emigrated
to Bella Scozia from a hill village in the Apennines; a century on, Philip is resisting temptation to expand. "How many silk suits can a man wear?" he asks.
Down the road is Tinelli, a lovely, old-fashioned eaterie in Easter Road, near the Hibernian football ground. Giancarlo Tinelli has been here for 24 years, having been told by his father his hands were too unsteady to take over the family barber's shop in Lombardy. The wet-shaving world's loss was Leith's gain; his zabaglione is unrivalled.
"I'm not ambitious," says Giancarlo. "I cook for my locals and I know what they want. Little has changed here since I took over. That's the real charm of the place."
My tour of Britain's Little Italy ends in Glasgow, at Il Parmigiano, with brothers Stefano and Sandro Giovanazzi, the third generation to live here after their grandfather came over before the First World War. "Grandfather's family ran an osteria near Parma. When he came to Scotland, he went into fish and chips, as many did," says Sandro. We tuck into simply cooked crayfish, which, along with a flinty white from northern Italy, makes the telling of the family history all the smoother. "Like many Italians, he came across, he forged a bridgehead between Scotland and home, and the rest followed."
Others in the area include the Nardini family, as famous for its ice creams as for its actress scion, Daniela. The actor Tom Conti's family also came across at the turn of the last century. What these and other Italians brought to a grim Britain was a certain élan. They did not foist their own habits and tastes on the locals, but observed what was lacking before plugging the hole with such style.
As they fade from the scene, so other immigrants arrive. "I think you'll find the whole thing is quite cyclical," says Robert Servini. "What remains to be seen is how well our successors manage to integrate."