Gloucester’s Maria “Mia” Millefoglie, a fisherman’s daughter, began exploring her Sicilian family’s history and unearthed a story that ran far deeper than she ever imagined.
She came to the idea of writing later in life and set out to develop a memoir, which would take her on a journey of tracing three generations of her family from Sicily. The story begins with her great-grandfather who was abandoned as a baby in Sicily in 1870 and later became a stowaway on a voyage to America.
Throughout her memoir, she weaves together the complex web of relationships from Terrasini, Sicily, to Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Millefoglie, who earned a master of fine arts degree from the University of Southern Maine in 2022, now shares her story in “Daughters of Stone and Tide: Loss and Resilience in a Fisherman’s Family,” published by the University of Massachusetts Press. A community event will take place Saturday, Sept. 19, at 2 p.m. at Sawyer Free Library in Gloucester.
The author too was adopted as an infant by her Gloucester Sicilian fishing family and knows well the undercurrents and feelings of abandonment, compounded by being raised decades ago in a tight Sicilian community in Gloucester. Her family descends from generations of fishermen, so Gloucester, the nation’s oldest fishing port, would be a natural draw for a new life in the United States.
“Mia learned early that bloodlines dictate identity and tradition shapes fate. College is forbidden; marriages are arranged, and no one abandons the family,” according to the press release.
When she was 19, Millefoglie worked in a fish-packing plant and got caught up in the city’s drug culture. So she decided to leave.
Only many decades later, she began to seek out her family’s buried stories, tracing the lineage from the Sicilian orphanage to Gloucester, and the “invisible inheritance that shaped them all.”
During her extensive research, Millefoglie discovered that both her grandfathers had been classified as “enemy aliens” following the Pearl Harbor attack in 1942. After that attack, foreign-born individuals, particularly from the Axis nations of Germany, Italy and Japan, fell under that classification. Many were arrested. In the case of her grandfathers, they were prohibited from fishing — their livelihood — and they were not allowed on the Gloucester waterfront.
Fluent in the mother tongue of her parents, Millefoglie knows the tightrope of life immersed in the world as a first generation immigrant.
“(This memoir) is for those who know the ache of displacement — the immigrants, the descendants, and the dreamers who still feel the pull of a homeland they may never see again. It is for the families who built lives on courage and compromise and for the daughters who carry their stories forward,” she said. “What’s woven throughout this story is not too dissimilar to what we see today with new immigrants.”
Just last year, Terrasini became the sister city of Gloucester, in a recent acknowledgement of the strong ties among residents on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
The author notes that the Millefoglie family all came from the village of Terrasini, Sicily, and lived in the same neighborhood in Gloucester.
“They clung together and created their safe community in the confines of the Fort,” she added.
Prior to the Sicilians, the Fort was the home to generations of Irish immigrants and fishermen who came before the Sicilians.
“I try to chronicle the broader story of immigration and attempt to show from an insider’s perspective what it was like in the daily life in the fishermen’s community,” said Millefoglie. “The immigration story hasn’t really changed. The names have changed and where they come from has changed and why they came to this country, but their resilience and bravery has not changed.”
Reflecting on her more than four years of research, Millefoglie said that if she had a takeaway, it would be one of encouraging others to learn the stories of their families.
“If I could put my grandmothers and grandfathers and my parents at a kitchen table, I would ask them details about their lives,” she said. “And I would tell people, make that phone call and sit at the table and ask the questions you never have before so that you will have those stories before they are gone, because when they are gone, it’s gone forever. The voices will be silenced.”
Millefoglie hopes the book will showcase the resilience of fishermen and their families, especially the wives.
“It is about what they all have endured throughout the centuries, and Gloucester needs to be very proud of that history,” she said. “I write about what the sea gives us and what the sea takes away. There is a cost to this work at sea. Perhaps it is that universal story, especially with immigrants, about that quest for belonging and what do we inherit over generations — it’s still a question for me.”
Gail McCarthy may be contacted at 978-675-2706, or gmccarthy@northofboston.com.