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Orange Blossoms, Bootleg Liquor, and an Acrostic: My Grandparents’ Wedding

Last Christmas, when I was writing about Pietro Yon, composer of the Christmas song Gesù Bambino and probable guest at my grandparents’ wedding, one of the images I considered including was this souvenir of the occasion, a beautifully-decorated remembrance of the wedding guests in the form of an acrostic. But since this item has an Easter connection rather than a Christmas one, I decided to save it until now.

Wedding Acrostic
Souvenir of Julius and Josie’s Wedding

Under the heading “NOZZE: Julius Valentino ~ Josephine Boatti” (Nuptials of Julius Valentino, my grandfather, and Josephine Boatti, my grandmother), the names of the guests are arranged in squares and rectangles, with one letter in each name highlighted in red, forming an acrostic. Moving from left to right, the acrostic reads, “FIORI DI ARANCIO LA PASQUA CHE VI UNISCE VI PORTI FELICITA PARENTI AMICI PRESENTI LONTANI LO AUGURANO.” The words are in all caps and there’s no punctuation, which makes translation more challenging. I separated it into two sentences, which I have rendered thus:

With orange blossoms, may Easter which unites you bring you happiness. Your family and friends, both those present and those far away, wish you the best.

The text of the acrostic exhibits several interesting features. It begins, “With orange blossoms.” Orange blossoms, also illustrated in the background, have long been associated with weddings, and, like the white bridal gown, were popularized by Queen Victoria’s 1840 wedding to Prince Albert. I don’t think I can see actual orange blossoms in my grandmother’s bouquet; it looks to me like just roses and lilies-of-the-valley. She doesn’t say anything about her bouquet in her memoir, although she does mention that her dress came from Macy’s. She also says, quite casually, that because the wedding took place during Prohibition, “he got all the liquor from the ship” (Julius was working for Italian Lines at the time).

Josie's wedding portrait
Josie in her wedding dress

The acrostic continues, “may Easter which unites you bring you happiness.” My grandparents were married on April 20, which in 1924 was Easter Sunday. My grandmother wrote in her memoir, “They did not want me to get married on Easter Sunday, but somehow or other I must have looked at the priest with a very sad expression because we managed to get that date.” The Catholic Church does not allow weddings during Lent, as it is a penitential season, but as far as I know Easter Sunday is ok. Probably the priest was just reluctant because Holy Week and Easter are so busy and it would have been more convenient to pick a later date.1

Finally, the acrostic uses the Italian verb augurano for what the family and friends are doing. I have translated augurano as “wish you the best.” The related noun, auguri in the plural, means “best wishes.” My grandmother used to write molti auguri in my birthday cards, or “with all best wishes.” The history of these words goes back to ancient Rome, where augury was a form of divination. Divination refers to determining the will of the gods by means of observing some aspect of the natural world. A prophet—mantis in Greek—is one who is skilled in reading the book of nature. That is why many forms of divination end in the suffix –mancy.2 The insect known as the praying mantis is named for its resemblance to a prophet making a pronouncement.3

praying mantis
Praying mantis in a prophetic pose

Augury is the form of divination that involves interpreting the behavior of birds. When Romulus and Remus were arguing over which of them should have precedence in their new city, they decided to settle the question by asking the gods. It didn’t go well, as the ancient Roman historian Livy relates:

For this purpose Romulus took the Palatine hill and Remus the Aventine as their respective stations from which to observe the auspices. Remus, the story goes, was the first to receive a sign—six vultures; and no sooner was this made known to the people than double the number of birds appeared to Romulus. The followers of each promptly saluted their master as king, one side basing its claim upon priority, the other upon number. Angry words ensued, followed all too soon by blows, and in the course of the affray Remus was killed.4

Had the fight gone the other way, of course, the capital of Italy would be called Reme.5 We no longer consult the flight of birds before undertaking something important, like building a city or getting married, but Italians still wish one another good omens—molti auguri—and even in English we say that something “augurs well.”

In addition to the text of the acrostic, the guest list is also quite interesting. Disappointingly, the name of Pietro Yon does not appear, although I am reasonably certain that I identified him in a group wedding photo. Perhaps the artist only included those names that were needed to make the acrostic. Of the names that do appear, the one that jumped out at me was “Hon. La Guardia.” In 1924 La Guardia was not yet an airport, or a Broadway musical, or even the mayor of New York City, but he was, I discovered, a U.S. Congressman (hence the “Honorable”).6 This souvenir was framed and hung in my grandparents’ house for years, and I remember once asking her about La Guardia. As I remember, she said something like, “My parents invited all kinds of bigshots.” Now I’m not sure if she meant that a bigshot like La Guardia was invited and came to the wedding, or that he was invited and therefore included on the guest list that the artist worked from, but didn’t actually show up. In any case, La Guardia’s presence is not noted in any of the newspaper articles about the wedding that my father transcribed in the memoir.

My grandparents were married for 70 years, until my grandfather died in 1994. That Easter Sunday wedding, with or without actual orange blossoms, did augur well for them.

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‘Round Yon: Connections to Gesù Bambino

I’m not ashamed to admit it—I love Christmas music. I love listening to it, singing it, and playing it. One of my favorite Christmas songs is “Gesù Bambino,” composed in 1917 by Pietro A. Yon. The song combines a beautiful melody in the form of a Pastorale (a dotted rhythm in six-eight or twelve-eight time) with the tune to Adeste Fideles. There are innumerable performances on youtube. Here’s Luciano Pavarotti singing the Italian version.

I am more familiar with the English lyrics, beginning “When blossoms flowered ‘mid the snows,” written by Frederick H. Martens. Here’s a performance by the Cathedral Singers.

Nowadays Pietro Yon might be considered a one-hit wonder, with “Gesù Bambino” being his one hit, but during his lifetime he was well-known as a virtuoso organist and composer, mostly of sacred music. Here’s a newsreel clip from 1930 showing him playing the organ at St Patrick’s Cathedral (he starts playing forty seconds in; sorry about the audio quality).

I recently discovered some unexpected family connections to Pietro Yon. My maternal grandmother, Josephine Valentino (whom we called “Nonni”), spent her last years in a nursing home. She had long expressed a desire to write the story of her life, and my father (her son-in-law) offered to help her. He would visit her once a week and tape record her reminiscences, transcribe them during the week, bring them to her on his next weekly visit for her review, and then start the cycle again. Working this way, they produced two volumes of memoirs, which he had duplicated and bound at a copy shop and sent to all the relatives. Producing these books, I think, was one of my grandmother’s proudest accomplishments.

Recently my son asked me a few questions about our family history, and to answer them I got out Nonni’s books. I hadn’t read them in a long time, and I found a few surprising things (look for later blog entries!). Nonni and my father chose some supplemental materials to go along with her text. These were mostly family photos, but in the section where she talked about her 1924 wedding at Sacred Heart church in Manhattan, my father transcribed newspaper accounts of the event. One of these articles listed some of the wedding guests, including, according to my father’s transcription, “Peter and Constantino Yon.” My first reaction upon reading this was, could that be Pietro Yon, the composer of Gesù Bambino? And if so, I wonder if it was the newspaper that called him “Peter” or if that was a transcription error on my father’s part?1 Next, I wondered if Pietro’s wife was named “Constantina” and if “Constantino” was a typo (again, either my father’s or the paper’s).

Some quick googling answered at least some of my questions. Pietro Yon was born in Italy in 1886 and came to the US in 1907.  From 1907-1926 he was the organist at St Francis Xavier church in New York City, and from 1926 until his death in 1943 he was the organist at St Patrick’s Cathedral. At least the chronology and geography, therefore, are consistent with his attending my grandparents’ 1924 wedding in New York City. Yon’s wife was named Francesca, not Constantina, but it turned out that Constantino was the name of Pietro’s brother, also a church musician.2 Wikipedia also helpfully informed me that Pietro Yon’s birthplace was in the Piedmont region of Italy, which is the same region my grandmother came from (she emigrated to the US as a child in 1910). The obvious next step was to check Google Maps, where I discovered that Yon’s hometown, Settimo Vittone, is only a couple of miles from Borgofranco d’Ivrea, where my grandmother’s family lived.

Next piece of evidence: the photographs. Here’s a photo of Pietro Yon from the internet:

And here’s a photo taken at my grandparents’ wedding reception at the Hotel McAlpin:

I’d say the gentleman on the far left is Pietro Yon. I’m not sure if Constantino is in the photo, as I couldn’t find a good image of him for comparison. (As an aside, check out the pageboys, dressed as Little Lord Fauntleroy. There’s a wedding custom that probably would profit from further research.)

I think it’s fairly certain that Pietro Yon attended my grandparents’ wedding. But the question remains, what was the connection? How did he (and his brother) get on the guest list? It’s possible, given the closeness of Settimo Vittone and Borgofranco, that the families knew each other in the Old Country. Or perhaps they just moved in similar Italian-American circles in New York City. I like to imagine my grandmother’s stepfather, Carlo Boatti, encountering Pietro Yon at an event—perhaps a dinner at some Italian-American society—and recognizing his accent. Just like in canto ten of Dante’s Inferno, where Farinata degli Uberti hears the character Dante’s speech and calls out to him, “O Tosco” (“Hey, guy speaking Tuscan!”)3 Maybe Carlo Boatti called out, “O Piemontese!” I was unaware of this family connection to Pietro Yon while either my grandmother or my mother was alive, so I can’t ask them how our family knew the Yons. I guess I’ll never know.

I found another Yon connection in the course of my research. Pietro’s older brother Constantino was also a musician. In addition to being the organist at St Vincent Ferrer church in New York City, Constantino was also a music instructor at the College of Mount St Vincent in the Bronx (affectionately referred to as “The Mount”). Pietro dedicated one version of Gesù Bambino to the college, presumably because of his brother’s connection to it.

Mount St Vincent is affiliated with the Sisters of Charity of New York, the same order who ran Holy Cross Academy for Young Ladies, the school attended by both my mother and grandmother. My mother, who graduated first in her class, was offered a full scholarship to Mount St Vincent, but she turned it down in favor of attending Hunter College, where she majored in music (another story for another blog entry). But if she had taken the scholarship, she might have studied under Constantino Yon. And to bring the connections full circle, the Sisters of Charity of New York are a branch of the order founded by Saint Elizabeth Seton, who left New York and settled in Emmitsburg, MD, where one of her other communities, the Daughters of Charity, have their Mother House right down the road from Mount St Mary’s University, also affectionately referred to as “The Mount,” and where I teach. And now I think I’ll go play “Gesù  Bambino” on my violin.