The Two Italies of Fiorello La Guardia: From Foggia to Fiume

Documented family tree & key facts

Fiorello Henry La Guardia — Mayor of New York City (1934–1945); U.S. Congressman. b. New York (Greenwich Village), 11 December 1882; d. New York, 20 September 1947.
Parents: Achille La Guardia (b. Foggia, 26 March 1849), musician × Irene Coen (of Trieste; d. Budapest, 21 October 1915).

Paternal line — La Guardia (della Guardia), of Foggia, traced to Melfi (Basilicata)

Pietro della Guardia, of Melfi (Basilicata), son of the late Antonio — furthest documented; the sole “di Melfi” anchor is Raffaello’s 1807 baptism
 ↓
Raffaele La Guardia (b. Foggia, 8 February 1807), municipal employee; widower of Teresa del Conte († 1834), then m. Rosa Maria di Maria (Foggia, 18 December 1835)
 ↓
Achille La Guardia (b. Foggia, 26 March 1849), bandmaster — emigrated to New York
 ↓
Fiorello La Guardia (1882–1947)

Maternal line — Coen & Luzzatto, a Jewish-Italian family of Trieste

Isacco Coen × Fioretta Luzzatto — furthest documented
 ↓
Irene Coen (d. Budapest, 21 October 1915) → Fiorello

Worth knowing

The “two Italies” met in one man: a Catholic bandmaster’s son from Foggia and a Triestine Jewish mother. The records correct a persistent error — Achille was born in Foggia, not Cerignola.

Documented by original acts (Foggia parish and civil registers; the Melfi origin of the della Guardia; New York birth return; Budapest death record of Irene Coen). Names earlier than those marked “furthest documented” are not yet proven and are left out.

To millions of travellers, “LaGuardia” is the airport where they land in New York. Behind the name stands Fiorello Enrico Raffaele La Guardia — the “Little Flower,” the mayor who in the 1930s and 1940s became the very face of the city. And behind the man stands a family tree that, more than almost any other, shows how plural Italy has always been. For in Fiorello’s blood two worlds meet that, in the divided Italy of the nineteenth century, had never touched: the Catholic, rural South of his bandmaster father, and the cultured Jewish world of the upper Adriatic of his mother, born in Fiume. To reconstruct a family like this is to cross from one archival system to another — and it is exactly the ground on which a professional genealogist is measured.

The father: from Melfi to Foggia, from the bandstand to the American frontier

Achille La Guardia was born in Foggia on 26 March 1849 — and it is worth pausing here, because countless biographies, Wikipedia among them, say Cerignola. His birth act says otherwise: Foggia, son of Raffaele La Guardia, a clerk, and Rosa Maria di Maria. It is the difference between what is repeated and what a document proves. Further back the family carries roots further south still: Raffaele was the son of Pietro della Guardia, of Melfi, in Basilicata, and of Colomba Ricciardi. Rosa Maria di Maria was in fact Raffaele’s second wife: he had first married Teresa del Conte in 1833, but she died the following year, and he remarried at Foggia in December 1835. Achille did not follow the plough but music: he graduated from the Naples Conservatory in 1866 and became a bandmaster and composer. It was music that carried him to America, where he wore an unusual uniform — that of bandmaster of the 11th U.S. Infantry. For years the family lived the life of the frontier garrisons — Fort Sully in Dakota, Watertown in New York, Fort Huachuca and Fort Whipple in Arizona — and Fiorello grew up the son of an Italian musician among the prairies of a still-wild America.

The mother: Fiume, the Coen, and the Luzzatto line

Irene Coen was born in Fiume (Rijeka) in 1859, in the Jewish world that flourished in the ports of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She was the daughter of Isacco Coen and of Fioretta Luzzatto — and this is no minor detail: it is almost certain that the name Fiorello comes from that of his grandmother, Fioretta. A flower passed from one generation to the next. The grandmother’s surname opens an important door. The Luzzatto were not Sephardic Jews, as one sometimes wrongly reads, but an Italian Jewish family of Friuli: originally from San Daniele del Friuli, they had taken refuge in Trieste after the expulsion of the Jews from Venetian territory in 1777. From that house of scholars and poets had come one of the greatest minds of nineteenth-century Italian Judaism, Samuel David Luzzatto, the “Shadàl.” Irene belonged to that family.

Two worlds meet: Trieste, 3 June 1880

Achille and Irene met, so the story goes, during a tour — love at first sight. On 3 June 1880 they married in Trieste, in a civil ceremony before the Mayor, Ricci Bazzoni. The act keeps a detail worth a portrait: she declared her religion “israelita,” he “none.” A Pugliese bandmaster and Freemason and a Jewish girl from Fiume, joined by the civil power alone of the most cosmopolitan city on the Adriatic. That very day they sailed for America. Their children were born in New York: Gemma in 1881 and Fiorello on 11 December 1882, in a house in Greenwich Village, at 7 Varick Place.

The genealogist’s challenge: two Italies, two archives

This is where a family like the La Guardias tests anyone who does this work seriously. The father’s line is reconstructed where you would expect: in the civil-status acts and parish registers of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies — Foggia, Melfi, the basilicas of the Tavoliere. The mother’s line lives in another documentary universe entirely: the registers of the Jewish community and the Austro-Hungarian acts of Fiume and Trieste, written between Italian, German and the formulas of Jewish tradition. In Trieste, the maternal grandparents rest in the Jewish cemetery of Via della Pace; Achille, who died in the city in 1904 of a heart attack, was buried instead in the Anglican cemetery, with Masonic symbols — the two souls of the family divided even in death.

Fiorello, a man of two worlds

It is no surprise that such a crossing produced a man of frontiers. Fiorello spoke seven languages — English, Italian, German, French, Hungarian, Hebrew and Yiddish — and, not by chance, between 1901 and 1906 he worked at the American consulates of Trieste, Fiume and Budapest, on his mother’s lands. Then the Great War closed the circle on his father’s side: an officer and aviator of the U.S. Army, Fiorello was stationed at Foggia, where he trained pilots on Caproni bombers, walking the very streets Achille had left half a century before. And there is a last Triestine echo: in 1919 he married Thea Almerigotti, herself from Trieste.

An echo that became history: Gemma

The weight of the maternal root would reveal itself fully a generation later, and tragically. Fiorello’s elder sister, Gemma La Guardia Gluck, had married a Hungarian Jew and lived in Budapest. In 1944, as a Jew and as the sister of the anti-fascist mayor of New York, she was arrested by the Nazis and deported to Ravensbrück, which she survived, leaving one of the most remarkable testimonies of the century. The same Luzzatto line that had given Italy a great scholar gave history a survivor. There is no better way to grasp how much every single branch counts in a genealogy.

The documents behind the story

From a Foggia basilica to a Budapest register — the primary acts that anchor this genealogy. Click any document to enlarge it.

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