For centuries, the paesani of Roseto worked in the marble quarries in the surrounding hills, or cultivated the fields in the terraced valley below, walking four and five miles down the mountain in the morning and then mak- ing the long journey back up the hill at night. Life was hard. The townsfolk were barely literate and desperately poor and without much hope for economic betterment until word reached Roseto at the end of the nineteenth century of the land of opportunity across the ocean. In January of 1882, a group of eleven Rosetans—ten men and one boy—set sail for New York.
They spent their first night in America sleeping on the floor of a tav- ern on Mulberry Street, in Manhattan’s Little Italy. Then they ventured west, eventually finding jobs in a slate quarry ninety miles west of the city near the town of Ban- gor, Pennsylvania. The following year, fifteen Rosetans left Italy for America, and several members of that group ended up in Bangor as well, joining their compatriots in the slate quarry. Those immigrants, in turn, sent word back to Roseto about the promise of the New World, and soon one group of Rosetans after another packed their bags and headed for Pennsylvania, until the initial stream of immigrants became a flood. In 1894 alone, some twelve hundred Rosetans applied for passports to America, leav- ing entire streets of their old village abandoned.
In 1896, a dynamic young priest by the name of Father Pasquale de Nisco took over at Our Lady of Mount Car- mel. De Nisco set up spiritual societies and organized festivals. He encouraged the townsfolk to clear the land and plant onions, beans, potatoes, melons, and fruit trees in the long backyards behind their houses. He gave out seeds and bulbs. The town came to life. The Rosetans began raising pigs in their backyards and growing grapes for homemade wine. Schools, a park, a convent, and a cemetery were built. Small shops and bakeries and res- taurants and bars opened along Garibaldi Avenue. More than a dozen factories sprang up making blouses for the garment trade. Neighboring Bangor was largely Welsh and English, and the next town over was overwhelmingly German, which meant—given the fractious relationships between the English and Germans and Italians in those years—that Roseto stayed strictly for Rosetans.
If you had wandered up and down the streets of Roseto in Penn- sylvania in the first few decades after 1900, you would have heard only Italian, and not just any Italian but the precise southern Fog gian dialect spoken back in the Ital- ian Roseto. Roseto, Pennsylvania, was its own tiny, self- sufficient world—all but unknown by the society around it—and it might well have remained so but for a man named Stewart Wolf. Wolf was taken aback. This was the 1950s, years before the advent of cholesterol-lowering drugs and aggressive measures to prevent heart disease.
Heart attacks were an epidemic in the United States. They were the leading cause of death in men under the age of sixty-five. It was impossi- ble to be a doctor, common sense said, and not see heart disease. Wolf decided to investigate. He enlisted the support of some of his students and colleagues from Oklahoma. They gathered together the death certificates from resi- dents of the town, going back as many years as they could. They analyzed physicians’ records. They took medical histories and constructed family genealogies. “We got busy,” Wolf said. “We decided to do a preliminary study. We started in nineteen sixty-one.
The results were astonishing. In Roseto, virtually no one under fifty-five had died of a heart attack or showed any signs of heart disease. For men over sixty-five, the death rate from heart disease in Roseto was roughly half that of the United States as a whole. The death rate from all causes in Roseto, in fact, was 30 to 35 percent lower than expected. Wolf brought in a friend of his, a sociologist from Oklahoma named John Bruhn, to help him. “I hired med- ical students and sociology grad students as interview- ers, and in Roseto we went house to house and talked to every person aged twenty-one and over,” Bruhn remem- bers. This happened more than fifty years ago, but Bruhn still had a sense of amazement in his voice as he described what they found. “There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn’t have anyone on welfare. Then we looked at peptic ulcers. They didn’t have any of those either. These people were dying of old age. That’s it.” Wolf’s profession had a name for a place like Roseto—a place that lay outside everyday experience, where the nor- mal rules did not apply. Roseto was an outlier.