The Man Who Was Nofrio: The Palermo Roots of Giovanni De Rosalia

Documented family tree & key facts

Giovanni De Rosalia — actor, playwright and poet; creator of the beloved stage character “Nofrio.” b. Palermo, Sicily, 8 June 1864; d. Brooklyn, New York, 8 November 1934.
Parents: Antonino De Rosalia × Gaetana Arra (m. Palermo Cathedral, 1845).

The line — De Rosalia, of Palermo, Sicily

Antonino De Rosalia × Gaetana Arra (m. Palermo Cathedral, 1845) — furthest documented
 ↓
Giovanni De Rosalia (b. Palermo, 8 June 1864) × Francesca Gaudio (b. Montalto Uffugo, Calabria, 9 Feb 1882 – d. Brooklyn, 13 Feb 1968)

His wife’s family — Gaudio, of Montalto Uffugo (Cosenza), Calabria

Giovanni Gaudio × Maria Villecco → Francesca Gaudio (b. 9 Feb 1882).

Worth knowing

Two Souths — Sicilian and Calabrian — met on a New York stage. It was De Rosalia’s 1934 Brooklyn death certificate that opened the whole documented tree.

Documented by original acts (Palermo parish registers; the New York death certificate). Names earlier than those marked “furthest documented” are not yet proven and are left out.

For the Sicilians who crowded the theatres of Lower Manhattan a century ago, one name on the playbill was enough to fill the house: Nofrio. Ragged jacket, checked trousers, braces a size too big, forever tangled in a misunderstanding he had caused himself — Nofrio was the Sicilian greenhorn every immigrant recognised, because he was a comic mirror of themselves. Behind the mask stood a Palermo actor, playwright and poet named Giovanni De Rosalia; and behind De Rosalia — as always in this work — stands a document. His New York death certificate, filled out in Brooklyn in November 1934, records in a clerk’s hand what half a century of stage fame had blurred: born in Palermo, Sicily, the son of Antonino De Rosalia. It is where the genealogy of a legend begins.

From Palermo to the Bowery: a professore of the theatre

De Rosalia was born on 8 June 1864 — the date recorded in his Sicilian baptismal register. His New York death certificate says 1865, but that was the informant’s slip; the parish register is the better witness. He came to the theatre not as a clown but as a professore: a cultured man who had acted professionally in Sicily with the Compagnia Cavaliere Scandurra until the turn of the century, and who, once in America, first tried to make a living with “serious” theatre — Alfieri, Zola, Shakespeare. He reached New York around the turn of the century — his death record counts thirty-five years in the United States — and by 1903 was staging classical drama for the colony. Prose theatre paid badly, though, and De Rosalia, who also wrote a regular column for the New York weekly La Follia, soon turned his learning to a more profitable art: comedy in Sicilian dialect.

Nofrio, or the return of the vastasata

Nofrio was not invented from nothing. The name and the character descend directly from the vastasate palermitane — a rough popular theatre of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Palermo, named for the vastasi, the porters who performed it, whose recurring hero was a comic servant called Nofriu, or Onofrio. De Rosalia took that old Sicilian mask, put it on a boat, and let it loose in New York. What he added was a language. Together with the Neapolitan Eduardo Migliaccio — “Farfariello,” the other great comic of the colony — De Rosalia helped forge americanese, the mixed tongue of the immigrant streets in which u bossu is the boss, a giobba the job and a fatturìa the factory. It was a “New York Sicilian” that every southern Italian, whatever his region, could follow — and laugh at.

Two hundred records: Nofrio on Victor, Columbia and OKeh

What carried Nofrio far beyond the Bowery was the phonograph. Between 1916 and 1928 De Rosalia recorded close to two hundred sides for Victor, Columbia, OKeh and Vocalion — three-minute farces pared down to two or three voices, sold across the country and pressed again in Italy and Britain into the late 1930s. On many labels he appears as “De Rosalia-Gaudio,” or simply “Mr. and Mrs. De Rosalia,” for his wife and stage partner, Francesca (Frances) Gaudio, played opposite him. For a time he even ran his own label, Nofrio Record, founded with the impresario Clemente Giglio. To the Italian-American public Nofrio was what Cal Stewart’s “Uncle Josh” was to native audiences: the countryman blundering, endearingly, through the machinery of the modern world — Nofrio Arrives in America, Nofrio Studies English, Nofrio at Coney Island, Nofrio Wants to Be a Congressman.

Banned by the regime

There is a strange political coda. When those American masters were reissued in Fascist Italy, Mussolini’s government took notice. An order of 20 April 1929, grounded in the public-security law of 1926, directed the prefectures to seize and destroy gramophone records “contrary to the national order” — and among the antifascist songs on the blacklist sat a run of otherwise harmless Nofrio comedies: Nofrio Arrested, Nofrio the Municipal Guard, Nofrio Shoots Off His Fireworks. A Sicilian everyman from Brooklyn had become, briefly, an enemy of the State.

The document behind the story: a death certificate in Brooklyn

De Rosalia died on 8 November 1934, of a cerebral haemorrhage, at 1672 Bay Ridge Parkway in Brooklyn; he was buried on 12 November 1934 in Calvary Cemetery, in Queens. It is his death certificate that does the genealogist’s work. It fixes his birthplace unambiguously in Palermo, names his father Antonino De Rosalia and his mother Gaetana Arra, sets his age at sixty-nine, and records his profession, simply, as “actor.” It also names his widow, Frances — Francesca Gaudio, born on 9 February 1882 in the province of Cosenza, in Calabria, into a family from Montalto Uffugo, the daughter of Giovanni Gaudio and Maria Villecco. Two Souths, Sicilian and Calabrian, had met on a New York stage. Frances outlived Giovanni by thirty-four years, dying in Brooklyn on 13 February 1968 and joining him in Calvary Cemetery. From that certificate the whole tree has opened: the Sicilian parish registers have since yielded his 1864 baptism and his parents’ 1845 marriage in Palermo Cathedral, with a parish in Calabria still holding his wife’s.

The Palermo records carry the line back several generations. And they spell the name a little differently: in the Palermo civil registers the family is Di Rosalia, not De Rosalia — the American form came later, across the ocean. Giovanni’s father, Antonino Di Rosalia, the son of Bartolomeo Di Rosalia and Marta Bruno, married Gaetana Arra — herself born in Palermo on 15 October 1821, a daughter of Rosario Arra and Rosa Serafino — in Palermo Cathedral on 27 September 1845. By then Antonino was no longer young: he came to the Cathedral a widower, having married a first wife, Carmela Martorana, at the Palermo parish of Santa Ninfa on 3 April 1830 and raised a family with her until her death on 25 August 1839 — Gaetana was a second marriage, and Giovanni a son of his later years. Antonino himself never crossed the ocean; he died in Palermo on 19 January 1893 — ninety-eight years old, his death act records — and it was only afterwards that his son took ship for New York. The trail is a precise one, quarter by quarter, through the parishes of old Palermo — Santa Ninfa, where Antonino had married; Sant’Oliva and Sant’Agata, where his eldest children were baptised; and the streets by the church of the Santissimo Salvatore, on the Cassaro, where Giovanni’s own household was later registered. Nor was Giovanni the only one of Antonino and Gaetana’s children to cross the ocean: his elder sister Giuseppa, born in Palermo on 12 May 1856, became Josephine in America and died in the Bronx on 30 July 1944. The comic who made a whole colony laugh belonged, like his audience, to a family that had traded Sicily — and one letter of its own name — for New York.

How Nofrio was saved

Almost none of this should have survived. Nofrio’s farces were cheap and ephemeral, printed on newsprint and pressed on shellac that shattered. That we can still hear him is owed to a handful of devoted collectors. The American librarian Joseph J. Accardi built the essential English account — published in Italian Americana in 2001, and gathered on his site accardiweb.com — from a stack of 78s his grandfather had owned and his aunts had refused to throw away; he worked with the Sicilian-language scholar Art Dieli to translate the surviving skits. In Italy the ethnomusicologist Giuliana Fugazzotto has done the same for the discs, cataloguing and restoring the ethnic records of the emigration, De Rosalia’s among them. Some two dozen of the sides have even been digitised, and Nofrio can be heard again today — streaming, on the Library of Congress’s National Jukebox. Thanks to them, a porter’s mask from eighteenth-century Palermo — carried across the ocean by a Palermo professore — is still making people laugh.

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