Episode Details

In this episode of Italics, we explore two distinct yet interconnected stories from American history.

The first segment takes us back to March 25, 1911, when a fire broke out at the
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Greenwich Village, New York City. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers, most of them recent Italian or Jewish immigrant women and girls. Their stories are remembered and shared in Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Fire, a powerful collection of essays edited by Mary Anne Trasciatti and Edvige Giunta.

In the second part of the episode, we visit St. Charles Cemetery on Long Island to commemorate the dedication of a tombstone on the grave of labor activist Pietro “Pete” Panto. For more than eighty years, Panto’s body lay in an unmarked grave. In 2022, Dr. Joseph Sciorra, from the John D. Calandra Institute led an online fundraising campaign to create a marker for the gravesite.

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