From the Sulphur Mines of Sicily to the Supreme Court: The Italian Roots of Antonin Scalia
Documented family tree & key facts
Antonin Gregory Scalia — Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1986–2016). b. Trenton, New Jersey, 11 March 1936; d. Shafter, Texas, 13 February 2016.
Parents: Salvatore Eugene Scalia (b. Sommatino, Sicily, 1 Dec 1903) × Catherine Panaro (b. New York, 7 November 1905).
Paternal line — Scalia, of Sommatino (Caltanissetta), Sicily
Antonino Scalia (master carpenter, Sommatino) — furthest documented
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Salvatore Scalia (b. Sommatino, 26 Nov 1840), later sulphur miner
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Antonino Scalia (b. Sommatino, 9 Nov 1876), sulphur miner × Maria Di Pietra, seamstress (m. Sommatino, 9 Feb 1902)
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Salvatore Eugene Scalia (b. Sommatino, 1 Dec 1903), later professor of Romance languages — emigrated to New York
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Antonin Scalia (1936–2016)
Maternal line — Panaro, of the Alta Murgia (Puglia)
Gennaro Panaro (merchant) — furthest documented
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Fulgenzio Panaro (b. 30 July 1809)
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Vincenzo Panaro (b. Minervino Murge, 22 July 1852)
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Pasquale Panaro (b. Spinazzola, 17 Aug 1880) × Maria Luigia Satriale (m. New York, 30 Oct 1904)
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Catherine Panaro (b. New York, 7 November 1905) → Antonin
Worth knowing
The justice shared his given name with his grandfather, the Sommatino sulphur miner Antonino Scalia. From the sulphur mines of Sicily to the marble of the Supreme Court in three generations.
Documented by original acts (civil registers of Sommatino in Caltanissetta and of the Alta Murgia — Minervino Murge, Spinazzola — in Puglia; New York City archives). Names earlier than those marked “furthest documented” are not yet proven and are left out.
When Antonin Scalia took his seat on the Supreme Court of the United States in 1986, he became the first Italian American ever to sit on that bench. He was, in the language of his ancestors, the grandson of a zolfataro — a Sicilian sulphur miner. Behind the justice lay a family whose story runs through the civil registers of three regions of the Italian South: the sulphur town of Sommatino in Sicily, the tailors’ benches of the Apulian Murgia, and the hill country of Campania. This is that record.
Watch: a birth record of 1809, read line by line
Trenton, 1936
Antonin Gregory Scalia was born on 11 March 1936 in Trenton, New Jersey, the only child of Salvatore Eugene Scalia and Catherine Panaro. His father was a Sicilian immigrant and a professor of Romance languages; his mother was the American-born daughter of immigrants from Puglia and Campania. Scalia grew up in Queens, studied at Georgetown and at Harvard Law School, was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1986, and served until his death on 13 February 2016. What follows is not his jurisprudence but the Italian world he came from.
Sicily: the sulphur miners of Sommatino
On his father’s side, Scalia’s people came from Sommatino, a town in the province of Caltanissetta at the heart of Sicily’s sulphur country. For generations they were zolfatari — sulphur miners. The oldest Scalia the registers name is a master carpenter, Antonino Scalia, born around 1800. His son Salvatore Scalia was born in Sommatino on 26 November 1840, and by the time his own children arrived he was working the mines.
Salvatore married Carmela Sanfilippo, and their son Antonino Scalia — the justice’s grandfather and his namesake — was born in Sommatino on 9 November 1876. The birth act records the father Salvatore, and the two witnesses, all three as solfatari. On 9 February 1902, in the town hall of Sommatino, Antonino — twenty-five years old, a sulphur miner — married Maria Di Pietra, an eighteen-year-old seamstress, daughter of the late Calogero Di Pietra and of Giuseppa Millia. Both bride and groom signed the register in their own hands.
Their first child, Salvatore Eugene Scalia — the justice’s father — was born in Sommatino, at 25 Via Emanuele Filiberto, on 1 December 1903. Seventeen years later the family crossed the ocean together: Antonino, Maria and the young Salvatore reached Ellis Island on 22 December 1920 aboard the steamship Duca d’Aosta, having sailed from Palermo.
The scholar: Salvatore Eugene Scalia
The miner’s son became a scholar. Salvatore Eugene Scalia took his bachelor’s degree at Rutgers and his doctorate at Columbia, held a fellowship at the University of Florence, and taught Romance languages at Brooklyn College until his retirement in 1969. He died in Trenton on 5 January 1986 — a few months before his son was raised to the Supreme Court.
Puglia: the Panaro of the Alta Murgia
Scalia’s mother, Catherine Panaro, was born in Manhattan on 7 November 1905; her family came from the Alta Murgia, the high tableland on the border of Puglia and Basilicata. The Panaro registers reach back to a merchant: Gennaro Panaro, a negoziante, whose son Fulgenzio Vito Panaro was born on 30 July 1809. Fulgenzio, a man of independent means, and his wife Rosa Donio had a son, Vincenzo Panaro, born at Minervino Murge, in the Terra di Bari, on 22 July 1852. Vincenzo took up the tailor’s trade, and it was in the neighbouring town of Spinazzola, in Via Saraceno, that his son Pasquale Panaro — the justice’s grandfather — was born on 17 August 1880.
Pasquale, a tailor like his father, sailed for America around 1902 and was naturalised in 1917.
Campania, and the meeting in America
Pasquale’s bride came from a third region. Maria Luigia Sateriale was born in Pietradefusi, in the province of Avellino in Campania, on 15 April 1883; she had crossed to Ellis Island with her whole family — her father Antonio Sateriale among them — aboard the steamship Scandia on 20 May 1896. Pasquale Panaro and Maria Luigia Sateriale were married in Manhattan, at St Anthony’s Church, on 30 October 1904; their daughter Catherine was born the following year.
Trenton: the two families join
Around 1930, in New Jersey, Salvatore Eugene Scalia — the Sicilian scholar — married Catherine Panaro — the Apulian tailor’s daughter. Their only child, Antonin Gregory Scalia, was born in Trenton on 11 March 1936. His parents did not quite live to see the end of his story: Catherine died on 24 December 1985 and Salvatore twelve days later, on 5 January 1986; they were buried together at Saint Mary’s Cemetery in Trenton, months before their son’s confirmation to the Court.
In three generations the family had travelled from the sulphur galleries of Sommatino and the tailors’ benches of the Murgia to the marble of the Supreme Court. The documents below — from Sicily, from Puglia, and from the record offices of New York — are the trail they left.
The documents behind the story
Drawn from the civil registers of Sommatino (Caltanissetta), of the Alta Murgia in Puglia, and from the New York City archives. Click any document to enlarge it.
Sicily — Sommatino
Puglia — the Alta Murgia
America
Documented genealogical research by Clemente Suardi. To trace and document your own Italian family, act by act, request a free preliminary evaluation.