King of the Impressionists: The Italian Roots of Eduardo ‘Farfariello’ Migliaccio

Documented family tree & key facts

Eduardo Migliaccio — stage name “Farfariello”. b. Santi Quaranta, Cava de’ Tirreni (Salerno), 15 April 1880; d. Manhattan, New York, 27 March 1946.
Parents: Ernesto Migliaccio (Naples, 6 January 1843 – Philadelphia, 1 November 1909) × Almerinda Tragni (b. Siracusa, c.1853 – Brooklyn, 26 September 1934).

Paternal line — the Migliaccio printing dynasty (Naples → Cosenza → Salerno)

Gaetano Migliaccio (b. c.1748, Naples), book-merchant, founder of the Cosenza press × Angela Della Monica (d. Naples, 15 March 1786) — furthest documented
 ↓
Francesco Migliaccio (Naples, 21 December 1783 – Naples, 26 December 1854), printer × Maria Carolina Vitale (b. Naples, 29 November 1789), daughter of Luigi Vitale, Vice-Chancellor of the Court of First Instance of Naples (m. July 1815)
 ↓
Raffaello Migliaccio (Naples, 26 September 1817 – Cava de’ Tirreni, 24 July 1889), Salerno publisher; Knight of the Crown of Italy (1884)
 ↓
Ernesto Migliaccio (Naples, 6 January 1843 – Philadelphia, 1 November 1909) — emigrated 1890
 ↓
Eduardo “Farfariello” (1880–1946)

Maternal line — Tragni

Donatangelo Tragni (of Altamura; career soldier, sergeant of the 8th Line) × Michela Migliaccio (of Campobasso) — furthest documented
 ↓
Almerinda Tragni (b. Siracusa, a garrison town, c.1853) → Eduardo

Note: the mother’s maiden name was also Migliaccio — but a Campobasso homonym, unrelated to the printers. A true coincidence.

Worth knowing

Two knighthoods an ocean apart: grandfather Raffaello was made Knight of the Crown of Italy for his presses (1884); Eduardo received the same order for his art (1940). His brother was General Teodorico Migliaccio.

Documented by original acts (Naples, Cosenza, Salerno and Cava de’ Tirreni civil and parish registers; U.S. records of the American branch). Behind Gaetano stands a Naples bookseller house at San Biagio dei Librai since c.1676, but the exact links to those earlier printers are not yet proven by act and are left out.

Two grandsons of the same Salerno knight went out into the twentieth century by opposite doors. One stayed in Italy, put on a uniform, and rose to General of Division, his chest heavy with medals for valour. The other sailed for America, put on a wig and a false nose, and became the comic voice of a million homesick immigrants. His name was Eduardo Migliaccio. On the stage he was Farfariello, and for forty years he was the mirror in which Little Italy saw its own face.

The surprise of his life is not that a poor boy made good. It is the opposite: that the grandson of printers, publishers and magistrates — a family that had furnished an entire province with its books, held a palazzo on the Salerno seafront and a knighthood from the King — chose, of all the roles he might have played, to become the cafone fresh off the boat.

The birth record

Eduardo Migliaccio was born on 15 April 1880, in the hamlet of Santi Quaranta, in the comune of Cava de’ Tirreni, province of Salerno. His birth act (no. 227) records the father, Ernesto Migliaccio, thirty-seven, a landowner (possidente), presenting the child before the mayor, Cavaliere Giuseppe Trara Genoino, and declaring that his wife Almerinda Tragni, twenty-five, had given birth to a son in the family home. The boy received five names — Eduardo Raffaello Egidio Ernesto Isidoro — the whole paternal house written into a christening: Raffaello for his grandfather, Ernesto for his father, Egidio and Isidoro for two of his father’s brothers. Who those men were is where the story opens out.

A dynasty of printers: from a Naples book-street to Cosenza and Salerno

The Migliaccio were printers — and not printers of the ordinary kind. For most of the nineteenth century they were the reigning press of an entire province, a house a modern historian has set beside the Manuzio of Venice: a true dynasty that would leave more than seven hundred imprints from a single Calabrian city.

But the Migliaccio did not begin in Calabria. They came out of the oldest book-quarter in Naples — the Strada di San Biagio dei Librai, the street of the booksellers — where the name had stood over a shop-front since the seventeenth century. As early as 1676 an Andrea Migliaccio kept a bookshop there, and from 1700 issued works under his own imprint, taking for his printer’s mark an emblem of Fortune. Through the eighteenth century the house remained among the steady names of the quarter: a Cristoforo Migliaccio printed, at his own expense, the Naples editions of Ludovico Antonio Muratori’s Della pubblica felicità in 1755 and 1761; in 1771 the same treatise was reissued at San Biagio at the expense of Gaetano Migliaccio; and in 1781 a Gennaro Migliaccio gave to the press the folio of the funeral honours for the Empress Maria Teresa of Austria in the royal church of San Lorenzo.

It was the Gaetano Migliaccio of that 1771 imprint — a Neapolitan book-merchant, born about 1748 — who carried the family’s trade south. When Napoleon’s government reorganised the Kingdom, the decree of 9 August 1806 gave each provincial capital a printing press, and for Calabria Citeriore the Intendant put Gaetano forward. The state papers record him, as early as 15 October 1806, ready to open the press at Cosenza, with the Royal Treasury advancing him the money — some six hundred ducats in all — to travel to Naples for type and presses and fit out the shop.

What his son made of it was the dynasty. Francesco Migliaccio — a trained printer, baptised in Naples, at the church of San Gennaro all’Olmo, on 21 December 1783 — turned the Cosenza shop into the first press of Calabrian letters. Through the century, though eleven rival print-shops rose and fell in the city, the Migliaccio kept the lead by a wide margin. From their cases came the first twelve volumes of the Atti dell’Accademia Cosentina (1838–1891), the four volumes of the Società Economica di Calabria Citra (1820–1865), and — tellingly — the liberal newspaper Il Calabrese, for whose printing the family drew judicial investigation. It was a Migliaccio press, too, that printed Vincenzo Padula’s Il Bruzio in 1865.

Francesco married into another Naples — not of ink but of law and medicine. In July 1815 he wed Maria Carolina Vitale, baptised in Naples on 29 November 1789, daughter of Luigi Vitale, Vice-Chancellor of the Court of First Instance of Naples, and of Maria Teresa de Filippis, herself the daughter of a Naples physician. Their eldest child, Mariangiola, was born at Cosenza in 1816; their next, the son who would carry the house to its height, was born in Naples on 26 September 1817 — Raffaello Migliaccio. Francesco died in Naples in 1854; his death act names both him and his own father Gaetano as printers, two generations set down in a single line.

It was Raffaello who became the last and greatest publisher of the line. He carried the family’s craft south to Salerno, where the Premiata Stamperia di Raffaello Migliaccio grew into a house of real weight: official printer to the Prefecture of the Principato Citra, publisher of the review Il Picentino, and the press that gave Italy the first translation of Kant’s Logic in 1874. In 1870 he built the Palazzo Migliaccio, a Vanvitellian mansion that still stands in Salerno. King Umberto I made him a Knight of the Crown of Italy in 1884; in 1887 the Kingdom of Portugal named him its honorary consul in Salerno. He died in 1889 in the hamlet of Santi Quaranta at Cava de’ Tirreni, where his son’s family lived — and where, nine years earlier, his grandson Eduardo had been born.

This was the house into which Farfariello came: a book-street in Naples held for over a century, two provinces given their books, a review and a palazzo, a knighthood and a consulship, and behind them a Naples family of magistrates and physicians.

Two brothers, and a father who crossed the ocean

Raffaello’s son Ernesto Migliaccio was born in Naples on 6 January 1843. By his early thirties he had settled in Salerno, and there, in November 1875, he married Almerinda Tragni — a gentlewoman of twenty-one, born in Siracusa, daughter of Donatangelo Tragni, a career sergeant of the 8th Infantry Line, and of Michela Migliaccio of Campobasso. The mother’s maiden name is one of history’s small jokes: a Migliaccio of Molise, no relation at all to the printing house — a pure coincidence of a common southern surname, and a reminder of how easily genealogy can be led astray by a shared name.

Among Ernesto’s sons the roads could not have forked more sharply. One, Teodorico Migliaccio (1878–1947), stayed in Italy and became a General of Division, many times decorated for valour. The other, born two years later, was Eduardo — Farfariello.

And Ernesto himself — the son of a Salerno knight — did what a million landless southerners were doing in those years. Around 1890 he emigrated to the United States, settling first in the coal town of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, where, of all things, he took a clerk’s place in a bank. By 1900 he was in Manhattan; he died at Philadelphia in 1909 and was buried in New York. His widow Almerinda followed him across the ocean and lived on in Brooklyn, where she died in 1934, at eighty-three.

The boy who followed his father

Eduardo stayed in Italy long enough to study design and the plastic arts at the Istituto di Belle Arti in Naples, and to watch, at the Teatro Nuovo, the great Neapolitan macchiettista Nicola Maldacea, master of the comic character-sketch. Then, in 1897, at seventeen, he crossed the Atlantic to join his father — first in the coal country around Hazleton, then in New York.

He took the work an educated immigrant boy could find, including a spell as a letter-writer and interpreter for illiterate countrymen who needed their thoughts put onto paper. Bent over other people’s words and worries, he served an apprenticeship he could not have designed better: it taught him, line by line, exactly how the immigrant spoke, hoped, and was cheated.

Farfariello

The stage found him in the Italian caffè-concerto of downtown Manhattan — above all the café of Antonietta Pisanelli, impresaria of early Italian-American variety. There he built the macchietta coloniale: the character-sketch not of the old country but of the colonia, the immigrant colony outside the door. He invented its whole cast — the greenhorn fresh off the boat, the cafone in a stiff collar, the padrone, the iceman, the prizefighter, the Italian-Irish cop, the homesick girl, the opera tenor reduced to singing for pennies.

He wrote the songs and monologues himself and built each character with a trained designer’s eye — his own wigs, false noses, padding and costumes, changed in minutes — until he had created several hundred of them. Audiences crowned him Farfariello, usually rendered ‘little butterfly’. By 1917 the Italian-American press hailed him as the King of the Impressionists; he took his own company on the road to Chicago and California, and cut dozens of recordings that carried his voice into immigrant parlours across the country. In an age before radio or film could do it, Farfariello was the colony explaining itself to itself. The grandson of the family that had printed Kant and Padula now printed nothing at all, and yet published an entire people — in the air of a crowded room, night after night.

Two knighthoods, and the last character

There is a quiet symmetry at the end. In 1884, King Umberto I made the grandfather, Raffaello, a Knight of the Crown of Italy for his presses and his public service. In 1940, the same Crown made the grandson, Eduardo, a Knight of the Crown of Italy for his art — a Salerno publisher and a Mulberry Street mimic honoured by the very same order, two generations and an ocean apart.

In America, Eduardo married Bettina Savarese in New York in 1899, and together they raised a family of eight, making their home in Brooklyn. A widower in his last years, he performed nearly to the end, and died in Manhattan on 27 March 1946, at sixty-five; he was buried at St. John’s Cemetery. His working papers are now held by the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota and the Center for Migration Studies of New York, and are tended by his own descendants at farfariello.com. In Cava de’ Tirreni, the town that recorded his birth, he is remembered still.

What the records say

The line set out here is documented act by act, six generations deep. Behind it stands a Naples book-house older still, on the Strada di San Biagio dei Librai. The documented line begins with Gaetano Migliaccio, the book-merchant who founded the public press of Cosenza under the Napoleonic reform; runs through his son Francesco (1783–1854), the printer who made that press a dynasty, and Francesco’s wife Maria Carolina Vitale, daughter of a Naples vice-chancellor; to their son Raffaello (1817–1889), the Salerno publisher and Knight of the Crown of Italy; to his son Ernesto (1843–1909); to Eduardo Farfariello (1880–1946). That Eduardo’s brother was General Teodorico Migliaccio fixes Eduardo, beyond doubt, as the grandson of Cavaliere Raffaello.

Curious what one of these records actually looks like? You can read Eduardo’s own 1880 birth act, line by line, in our interactive lesson — Read a Real Italian Record — and learn the method behind it in How to Read an Italian Birth Record.

The documents behind the story

Every generation above rests on an original civil or parish act, located in the archives of Naples, Cosenza, Cava de’ Tirreni and beyond. Here they are, in order.

Documented genealogical research by Clemente Suardi. To trace and document your own Italian family, act by act, request a free preliminary evaluation.